I am guilty of not always having an open mind. I can’t understand the popularity of Natural Lite or Harley Davidson, and organized religion has me totally stumped.

In most things, I am open to suggestion, but not religion. My faith has always been based on science. I demand a logical explanation for things. While I support religious freedom, I am suspicious of it.

Organized religion just keeps the uneducated masses in line. Being a televangelist and owning a Cadillac has to be pretty sweet, though.

My parents tried to raise me a good little Lutheran, but I found the experience a waste of time. We covered the same material year after year in Sunday school, and my pastors were long-winded and boring. To top it off, the congregation was off-key.

While everyone was saving their souls I was watching “Rocky and Bullwinkle.” You may not find a moose and a squirrel funny, but Buck Rogers was on afterwards. Every guy has to admit Lieutenant Deering was a total hottie, and even my dad supported my decision to stay home. The choice was easy: Religion was a waste.

I didn’t need religion to be a good person, and the question of my existence was easily solved by science. Darwin answered the puzzle of our existence with the theories of struggle for survival and evolution of the species. Unlike religion, science was not a waste.

Gravity, the laws of thermodynamics and crooked politicians can all be explained with science.

Whatever mysteries still exist and have yet to be explained are solely because our understanding of the world is still flawed. Given time and intelligence, science will deliver the answer to every question we ask, though missing socks in the dryer will forever be a mystery.

Studying the history of science this past year provided me with an insight I had previously lacked. I knew that hypotheses existed to provide a base model for conceptualization. You guess at something and either prove or disprove it. The scientific method is based on learning from your mistakes. Yet I had never known how rampant our mistakes had been.

Before the discovery of oxygen and carbon dioxide, scientists believed an oily liquid called phlogiston was responsible for combustion. Phase changes in matter were thought to be caused by catalysts and not by adjustments of temperature. In each case the new (and correct) theory was met by the guards of the entrenched status quo and supporters were hard to find.

Open minds did win the day, and if not for them we would still think the sun revolved around the earth. By the sheer number of previously-debunked theories I have come to the conclusion that a great deal of what we believe is either wrong or ill-conceived. For every theory that may be right there are probably thousands that are wrong. Scientists get past that by being inquisitive and not relying on faith.

Unlike philosophy where if A is false, then B must be true, scientists like to reject everything. One wrong theory does not make another right. As cynics, we bet that both are wrong, and that we did leave the front door unlocked before going to work.

Darwin is my personal hero for the theories he gave us, but recently a friend of mine managed to shake my faith in him. Evolution is a sound theory for finches, but for humans, I find myself questioning the theories taken for granted by the scientific community. Mankind’s evolution has been a million years in the making, but other animals have existed for almost a billion. I doubt that chance alone can explain our advances while other creatures sat in trees. Even if our physical development took place unaided, who can explain our self-consciousness?

We are the only creature that defines its own existence and is aware of its mortality, and it is not because of brain size. If that were true, elephants and whales would be the predominant species. That they are on the endangered species list proves that brain size alone is not enough.

There must be something more, but I don’t know what it is.

Yet religion is not without its holes. We determine a day to be exactly twenty-four hours, which is one revolution of the earth around the sun.

But if God did not create the sun until the fourth day, then who can say how much time passed prior to that? It could have been one extra minute as easily as an extra billion years. Considering that, there may have been time for evolution.

Persistence has kept the march of science going forward, but it was the open mind that provided the first step. After that, our constant revision of old theories has shed light on the questions of the world.

While science has not explained socks in the dryer or my disappearing milk, this does not mean I believe that religion can. I have a sneaking suspicion that both theories may be wrong and the truth lies somewhere in between, but the important thing is that I have an open enough mind to consider both options.

Creation and evolution have their supporters, and right now I have enough unanswered questions to avoid taking either side. But at least now I am willing to consider religion as an option.

Who knows, perhaps my missing socks are the work of the Underpants Gnomes?

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Aaron Woell is a senior in political science from Bolingbrook, Ill. South Park kicked ass!