Of course it's not an original thought, Frogprince. ;-) And that gives me great comfort. Indeed, any number of flexible thinkers have had that thought. It comes naturally to an imaginative mind, wouldn't you say?

Fergie, I do not for a moment buy your analogy that "the natural world and the supernatural world are mutually exclusive".

It depends on what you think is supernatural. And that varies wildly from one person to another. My opinion is...NOTHING is supernatural. It can't be. If it was, it wouldn't exist. But...there are many things that people may interpret as being supernatural, simply because they have no idea of how to explain them. That means they don't understand them yet, that's all.

I am not defending the Christian religion. I am saying that this particular debate always gets dumbed down to a pointless fight between 2 sets of straw men that 2 sets of pigheaded people set up to throws stones at because they have no respect for one another and no inclination to look beyond their knee-jerk assumptions about life. They are both armoured by their arrogance and their certainty that they are right, dead right, and the other is wrong, dead wrong. They take joy in knowing that. They resemble each other so closely in their attitude that they could be twins.

I am not in sympathy with either one of those camps. I'm not defending traditional religion. I'm not defending materialistic reductionism...a younger tradition, and an equally vain one. I find them both totally inadequate to deal with reality.

There is nothing supernatural. There can't be. There is much, however, that we have yet to explain. That doesn't mean we will not someday find the correct explanation...and when we do, science will support it.

And then, I suppose you will too. ;-) Won't you? It will have become part of the acceptable orthodoxy. It will no longer be a heresy that simply cannot be tolerated in the company of one's rational peers.