Physically and emotionally, it has been a rough couple of days.

The physical part of it derives from four solid days of yard work. A chunk of the emotional difficulty comes from that same source. Jane and I always shared both the yard work and the housework. We sometimes worked on different tasks, weeding different beds or cleaning separate rooms, but at the end of the day, there was someone to share the newly planted regions — or the newly cleaned house — with.

But a piece of the emotional angst has nothing to do with Jane. It has to do with what is going on in the world beyond cancer–the world of politics and work and economics and, increasingly, intolerance. Suddenly, I am seeing a world that values ignorance more than it does knowledge, that wants to believe in myth rather than evidence-backed reality, and that seems to want to drag us back into an idealized past that never was.

What does all this have to do with cancer? I can hear that question dropping from the lips of many potential readers. And, at first glance, it is a valid question. Politics can seem very distant from the battles against these cells run amok that are at the base of all cancers.

In the Middle Ages, the most scientifically advanced cultures were not in Europe. While the Church was busily burning heretics at the stake for arguing the flat Earth was not the center of the universe, Muslim scientists were pushing the borders of human understanding into new realms. They invented the concept of zero and knew the Christian concepts about both the shape of the planet and its place in the cosmos were wrong–not as an article of faith but as the result of scientific evidence.

Today, we have the Taliban, a group so opposed to new knowledge–or even old knowledge–that they destroy all knowledge beyond memorization of the Koran indiscriminately. We have the Saudis, who delight in their oil wealth, but will not let their women drive–or even leave a burning building without their burqas.

Religious fundamentalism destroyed Arab scientific culture. Governments became obsessed with God rather than Man–and Man suffered as a result.

In the early 1970s, a friend told me we needed to be concerned about the growing fundamentalist groups around us. But I was the child of an engineer who had been a key player in putting a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth. I was surrounded by people who practiced the scientific method in their daily lives and lived by logic and evidence. Knowledge was on the march.

Not that those folks got everything right. They also followed a cost-benefit analysis when it came time to cut budgets–and the result was to end spending on an obscure cancer we know today as NET.

We had declared war on cancer. We had declared war on poverty–and how could the nation that survived the Great Depression and won World War II on the strength of science and technology not win those battles as well? We would, as a nation, never turn our back to the advancement of scientific knowledge. Our Bill of Rights promised religious liberty–and none of us would deny that to anyone. Religion would have its place in helping us develop the wisdom to go forward, but science and an evidence-based approach would be the touchstones of our future.

I apologized to that old friend last night after I read the basis for the latest assault on the Girl Scouts of America. The objection is to the tenant that young women should learn about their bodies and their sexuality. Self-knowledge is the center of my creed–and these folks want to deny young women knowledge that is key to their understanding of themselves.

This kind of thing has been going on for a long time. People routinely reject the evidence-based knowledge on global warming because they do not want to “believe” it. They reject the evidence-based knowledge of evolution because they do not want to “believe” it. Both run contrary to their faith.

Much of what has made our advances against cancer possible has grown out of our understanding of evolution. If evolution were not real, cancer would be far simpler to kill. Cancers evolve to resist certain drugs and treatments. Their evolution causes them to metastasize because that helps the cancer organism to survive. It would be beautiful were it not so deadly.

I am terrified by what I see going on around me. I see a world that increasingly rejects scientific advances in favor of myth and religious dogma. I see a government that is increasingly concerned with belief rather than scientific, evidence-based knowledge. And I see a collection of faiths whose central beliefs argue for love and tolerance being manipulated into instruments of hate and intolerance.

Jane and I were both deeply religious people. But we were also deeply rooted in the culture of science and the quest for knowledge. No particular church attracted us. A walk around the neighborhood or through the woods brought us into contact with the things we needed for our spiritual growth. We knew the Bible, but we also knew the Koran, the Vedic and Buddhist scriptures, and the Tao. And we knew science–and we saw how all of these things blended together at their core.

Religion is a quest for wisdom. Science is a quest for knowledge. True faith cannot exist without the knowledge true science provides. When religion rejects scientific knowledge, it ceases to be anything more than dogma used by those in power to maintain their position. It becomes a series of fairy stories to frighten children into compliance.

Knowledge untempered by wisdom can be equally dangerous. We know many ways to kill people, for example, but wisdom commands us to refrain from doing so.

We are closing in on cures for many cancers. We are years away from cures for others. My great fear is that the growing lunacy will thwart those efforts–that science will be returned to its position in Galileo’s time, when arguing for science led to torture, the name of heretic, and–at best–the putting out of eyes.