Born to Wonder by Alister McGrath

Author:Alister McGrath
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: RELIGION / Religion & Science, RELIGION / Christian Living / Spiritual Growth
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2020-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

WONDERING ABOUT NATURE:

THE IMAGINATIVE ROOTS OF SCIENCE

I seem to have been only like a small boy playing on the sea-shore, diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

ISAAC NEWTON

The human experience of wonder is a gateway to understanding our strange world. In a highly perceptive essay entitled “The Illusion of the Two Cultures,” the American evolutionary anthropologist Loren Eiseley argued that our artistic, humanistic, and scientific endeavors and achievements are all driven by the irresistible power of the human imagination.[1] Science and art—and, I would add, religion—are born of the same mind and are therefore inseparable. Eiseley expressed concern that the contemporary academy, through a relentless enforcement of disciplinary boundaries and its cult of “professionalism,” was draining a life-giving imaginative power from the sciences. Such bureaucratic minds, he suggested,

exhibit an almost instinctive hostility toward the mere attempt to wonder, or to ask what lies below that microcosmic world out of which emerge the particles that compose our bodies, and that now take on this wraithlike quality. Is there something here we fear to face, except when clothed in safely sterilized professional speech? Have we grown reluctant in the age of power to admit mystery and beauty into our thoughts?[2]

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