Gospel & Universe 🔬 Science & Mystery

Overview

There are a million ways of approaching the relation between science and religion. I explore at least a dozen of these later in my large section, Currents of Religion. There I do at least three things: 1) I examine some of the diverse origins & histories of religion (🌎 Many Tribes, ♒️ The Currents of Sumer, ✝️ The Cross, and ⏯ Programs & Platforms), 2) I create fictional scenarios dramatizing Ancient and Modern views of the struggle between the practical and the religious worlds (🍎 The Apple-Merchant of Babylon and 🇫🇷 The Priest’s Dilemma), and 3) I explore contemporary and literary explorations of i) agnosticism and ii) the theistic and atheistic philosophies which straddle it (✝︎ St. Francis, 💫 Believing in the Mystery, and 🇮🇳 The Fiction of Doubt).

In this chapter I do three things: 1) I intimate some of the arguments I explore in the later section Currents of Religion, 2) I lay more of the groundwork for how agnostics see the relation between science and religion, and 3) I suggest how agnosticism fits within the general chronology that I follow in this section, Philosophy, Science, & Literature. This section starts with skepticism & stoicism in Greece & Rome (🏛 Skeptics & Stoics) and with the role astronomy pays in upsetting a Medieval view of the universe (🔭 The Sum of All Space). I then look in this chapter, 🔬 Science & Mystery, at where agnosticism stands in the general historical movement from a religious Medieval world and a Modern scientific one. This chapter is pivotal, since it lies between i) early skepticism and scientific discoveries that question certainty and ii) later humanist, empirical, liberal, and scientific currents that flow from skepticism & science to agnosticism & existentialism (♒️ A River Journey, ❤️ Three Little Words, ⛱ Señor Locke, 🦖 At the Wild & Fog, 🎲 Almost Existential, and 🧜🏽‍♀️ The Mermaid: Existential & Then Some).

On this page, I focus on the way agnostics see science and religion in a similar light: both are full of infinite possibilities, even though one is more concrete and rational and the other is more abstract and emotional.

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Next: 🔬 Possible Explanations

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