"The shortest distance between two points is science."
-Warrick Brown, the original CSI.
The science geeks on the show are routinely awed by creation: the science, the body, even insects. And they have the modern age's typical need to catalog it all and put it in categories or neat frameworks. This is all part and parcel of our modern age, modern faith, and our modern way of doing things.
"The key to being a lucid crime scene investigator was to reserve judgment until the evidence vindicates or eliminates assumption."
- original CSI investigator, Holly Griggs.
This mindset has infected the way that we practice spirituality. The Western mindset with its values of science, democracy, and emphasis on individualism--none of which are bad things in and of them selves--have the cumulative effect of reducing God and faith into easily understood preconceptions. God is a puzzle to be worked out. The Bible, or any religious book, is something that needs to be put into a framework of doctrines. We pigeonhole faith and drive out the mystery.
Concentrate on what cannot lie: the evidence. Go where the evidence takes you. These are typical of Grissom's Zen-like pronouncements. Integral to crime scene investigator's methodology is that you don't want to force your pre-made ideas on the evidence, not forcing it to fit your theory. At the end of the day, you have a nice, tidy package, even if it isn't always the truth you want. Life isn't a matter of faith vs. scientific investigation because faith isn't an anti-intellectual endeavor. The most unsettling cases are the times that their faith (in their evidence and
method) is tested because something happens, some evil, that doesn't fit into their orderly beliefs.
"No more speculation ... facts from here on out."
- a CSI: New York coroner
CSI ultimately is about the quest for truth. The desire to search for truth is fueled by faith. Their faith is in the evidence. Too often we have a systematized faith, a modern way of looking at life. We like order. We like to make sense of the universe. This is fine, but we forget that we often learn more from the search for answers, without necessarily finding them, than we do by having answers given to us. Partly this is because we have made an idol of answers and partly this is because, frankly, being in a place without answers is a scary place to be and live.
We've gone from being faithful to being detectives, trying to prove something (God) by looking for evidence or simply putting our energies into proving that we're right. Our modern faith ends up treating our "holy books" as history texts, encyclopedias, legal codes or philosophical/anthropological articles, missing the whole purpose of those books are about. We become married to terms like inerrancy and infallibility, even if those texts don't use those words to describe themselves. We look for factual accuracy, corroborating evidence, try to maintain a stance of dispassionate objectivity, when the reality is 1) no one is ever truly objective and 2) truth is more than that.
In short, CSI is a graphically visceral show, with its close up of wound tracks, and has its share of macabre thrills, titillating adult themes, and crime recreations. They bring out the pulp "true crime" buffs in all of us.
