Walt-
I'm going to try to append this to the comments thread at CT that ended before I could reply to your last response - because it's important I think to get this idea out.
I'm linking in to your math site in hopes you'll find this.
Simplifying the elements that seem most urgently in need of clarifying, starting from the observer, the "us", the thing that receives the messages of science and the dogma of religion and the various communications that we call art.
Making that a single person, a man. He's standing at the edge of the unknown. For a long time in our history that was a relatively common experience. We moved from known familiar territory into the unknown in a geographical sense quite often. It was still happening regularly in the 19th century, though not as profoundly and frequently as 10,000 years ago.
What's important about that image is the things inside the man, his attitude not least among them, but also what was behind him as he looked out, what he knew or thought he knew about where he'd been born and lived so far, and especially what was back there as he began to move into or toward that unknown.
That's what we're doing right? Not just looking, with our instruments and theoretical formulae, we're going there. We're reaching into the web of genetic material that's held together for us all this time, inside which we came up from insignificance to our present dominance. And we're sending machines out into the territories beyond the solar system, with the hope that someday we'll send men and women out there too.
So here he is, that man, maybe back in the Pleistocene, looking out at the unknown, and beginning to move toward it, into it.
What I was trying to pin over at CT was the vital importance of attitude, how what happens next comes right out of that, whether it's reverence or fear or arrogance or gentle curiosity, or all combined.
I kept thinking I'd made that clear, but I guess not.
Cartesian science, for lack of a more accurate descriptor, proceeds from cogito ergo sum out toward the boundaries of the knowable. And one of the main benefits to us from that stripped-down perception is that our pictures of where we are and what we are have been freed of many illusionary and false attributes.
But the crucial aspect of that Cartesian movement is it begins in the self. So everything that's gained has to come directly from something previously gained. There's a close approximation of Xeno's paradox in that, when what we move toward and into is infinite.
What religion is charged with is communication with what's already out there. To a scientist that's dangerously presumptive. But then you keep saying science is just one discipline of the many in the human endeavor. Not "in charge", as it were.
We aren't all scientists all the time, so that shouldn't be a problem. But we're talking about a view of things that isn't intuitive anymore, so we need reliable tools.
The sun and the moon both occupy a visual arc of around .5 degrees in the sky, intuitively they're the same size, and both circle the earth. You can see this with the naked eye.
Science, and mathematics, have shown us that's is far from accurate. Still it's pretty understandable that for most of our history we were under the impression they had more in common than they do.
The intuitive picture is they're the same, the actual is they're not.
So we have to rely on something besides the intuitive for an accurate picture of where we are. What?
If you read what I was saying carefully you'd see a plea for science and religion, for something that's both; that we had that once and it served us well, though it's scorned now as riddled with superstition and fatal inaccuracy. We learned to make fire and boil grains, and to respect the things that fed us their lives - and those weren't separate ways of being in the world. Religion and science were part of something larger and whole.
Where did that respect go? It was thrown away as a direct result of a change in attitude that was a direct result of a still-partial but more accurate understanding of where we are and how things work.
The respect for life and all that comes from that respect was driven out, and a smug scorn for the primitive welcomed in.
The problem I have with that scorn is that it was coming from genocidal monsters. I'm sorry if that's inflammatory, but there it is. The same guys who taught me to laugh at the mumbo-jumbo animism of the primitive tribesmen had slaughtered them mercilessly and stolen their land almost everywhere they found them.
They had an attitude, just as we have an attitude, toward what they found when they entered the unknown. Just as the man in the paradigmatic example above has an attitude.
What shapes that attitude now?
Science separated from religion, religion separate from science. As research fields, as activities, even as individual beliefs there's no huge problem, it's actually a very positive human method, and biological advantageous really, to atomize and spread the load, so that the newer has a better chance of gaining ground against the old. Mutation and reproduction - that's elementary Darwinian evolution right there.
Maybe that's what makes this seem so crucial, because the cohesion of belief, the linking of minds and attitudes that make us as much one thing as a collection of many is just as important to what it is to be human as diversity is.
The balance between atomization and a unified collective presence.
At some point that early man when he's moving into the unknown territory has to gamble on whether or not there's something out there that he hasn't seen before. Too much caution and he won't make much progress, too little and he'll be exposed. To what?
Well that's kind of the riddle, and I'm advocating for that riddle.
But I'm also trying to keep the idea that there may be something out there already, much bigger than us in ways we can't match to the template of things we've already seen, that's alive - or what we would call alive. Present, existant, being.
What I see as a real danger in the absurd waste of better-spent time that the ID debate consumes is not the resolving of the polarity to the obviously more accurate Darwinian side, but that polarity bringing along with it a whole bunch of more subtle assumptions about things - and them getting confirmed as well.
Because Jerry Falwell has his head up his ass, because the Pope has to back and fill about almost everything that was once enforceable Church dogma - that doesn't mean we're alone in the void.
It doesn't say anything about that idea.
But to the public mind, and as you call it the hearts and minds of men, it says there isn't anything out there.
Decisions will follow from that attitude and they'll shape what we become, or even whether or not we're here at all.
Accurate science doesn't talk about whether or not there's something greater, a structure and organization in which whole universes fit, a place in the sub-muon realities where things get animate again, because it hasn't got there yet. That's the humility of science.
Fine okay, but we're like that guy in the Pleistocene, moving into the unknown. Our attitude's going to shape how we move, where we go, what we do.
And all I was really saying, if it could be reduced to a few words, is we should be very careful about throwing out the humility of religion along with its encrusted dogmatic nonsense, as we move further into the unknown.