I said I would post my own thoughts about this, once, and this is that post. If anything in it is not clear enough to suit, please PM.

My interest in this topic was piqued by a "Cosmos" episode I saw a few months ago. When that US TV series was new, I only saw a tiny fraction of it. It is seldom re-run, but with the new DVR I thought I'd catch one when I saw it come along.

To paraphrase and summarize quite a bit, in that episode the host Carl Sagan vividly described his NYC growing-up experiences and how, as a boy one day in school, he found himself wondering about some things. That wondering sparked a lifelong interest in science.

The episode goes on to present his sense of the history of the development of the discipline we know, today, as "science," and how it is based upon wondering about things.

As he described it, though, it wasn't "wondering" in a cultural vacuum. He said that the beginning of scientific thought was totally a response to the corrupt, state-mandated spirituality of the time.

Then he traced scientific development through time. Pioneer by pioneer, he described the religious milieu of their times, and how their science rigorously set a direction-- in the opposite direction to any kind of spirituality.

And I thought, as I listened to a series of moving and evocative descriptions from an articulate and intensely curiosity-driven man, how sad it was that science had been born not of wonder alone, but out of wonder wounded.

I reflected for a long time how different our world's cultures might be if, instead of being anti-Anything, science had simply arisen without that need to first discard something else. I thought about how the development of science had, at its birth, discarded a whole LOT of areas to wonder about and investigate-- including its own prejudices and biases. I thought about how that is true of any discipline, because we are, after all, human beans.

I thought about how this particular set of biases had pepetuated themselves, as biases do.

I thought about the loneliness of the statistically few who reject the limits of biases and whose curiosity pushes them past the biases and the loneliness and the nay-sayers whose rigidity gives their own, innate curiosity a narrower field within to work.

Science.... Religion.... I thought about how, to many thinking people, there is no need to discard one for the other, and how much more interesting it can be to pursue one's curiosity without closing one door in order to open another. Doglike, I reveled in how great it is to stand in the crossbreeze, sniff the air, explore the clues to the source of the scent.... roll around in a good scent sometimes.

In that series of reflections as I washed dishes, ministered to many people in the normal course of daily clergy-family life, studied and welcomed an unfolding sense of faith-driven vocation, and continued learning about other things of intense interest-- somewhere, I lost any defensiveness about religion.

I regained a tremendous amount of curiosity and, as this thread reflects, one of the first things I was curious about was how a bunch of miscellaneous people might or might not still see science and religion as mutually-exclusive, rigidly-defined concepts.


This thread has satisfied that curiosity, pretty much.

It presents a wide variety of view and feeling. It demonstrates what happens when the question is asked. It offers a glimpse of the amount of competition such questions appear to provoke. I really had hoped for just a long, LONG series of answers to questions 1 & 2, but I knew, I think, how the thread would go, and it has gone pretty much as expected.

I thank you all for your posts. I plan to print it out and use a highlighter to grab the points that jump out at me for further reflection.


Abrazos,

~Susan