Mystery and Wonder

Comment by: David S

I find mystery and wonder in all the things you describe and more. I think all humans do. However how we react to the mystery perhaps differs. To some, mystery begs to be explored and answered rather than being “explained” with a simple “god did it” where all searching and thought end. Religion prays to mystery while science strives to explore and understand it.

If there is a god, science is the process of discovering him through his works. Ironically modern religion tends to ignore the obvious works of a god (if one exists) to focus on the study of man (and his writings and thoughts on god). As founding father Thomas Paine noted hundreds of years ago, religion has degenerated to the study of man and man’s ideas while science appears to have taken over where religion got lost and is a pure religion: the study of god through his works.

I’m an engineer and a scientist. The mystery and wonder of the world is what drives me while religion leaves me cold.

Comment by: Lisa Wellington

David,
I’m a follower of Jesus and I, like you, find that religion leaves me cold. And, as a poet, I love to rest in mystery most of the time rather than prod it. I enjoy science immensely but I don’t worship it. I don’t think anything ‘begs’ for answers. I think we often demand answers for our own satisfaction.

Comment by: Peter in Pennsylvania

David S. writes

If there is a god, science is the process of discovering him through his works.

Interesting that centuries ago, this discovery was what drove scientists, and then when what they discovered went against the prevailing theological supersitition of the day, they were persecuted. Sad, really.

Comment by: Julie Marie

I think my children are the most profound mystery

I agree. The combined traits of two, expressed as one, yet still unique.

I think they also help clarify for me my relationship to God. I think the relationship between parent and child is the closest analogy to God’s relationship to us.

I had fleeting glimpses of unconditional love before my son was born. Transcendant moments when I gave and received this. But once my son was born, I live in this state, both giving and receiving, on a day in day out basis. The realization that there is NOTHING Cody could do to cause me to stop loving him allowed me to really “get” how God loves me. To realize frustration, sadness, anger, disappointment have NOTHING to do with loss of love has been a fantastic byproduct of parenthood.

Comment by: David S

Lisa,
Nobody worships science. I’m suggesting science might be seen as a method of understanding god through the world we observe. However you don’t worship science any more than the Christian worships Christianity. Science is a useful tool for unraveling mystery but you don’t worship a hammer.

Also for me a mystery IS a question begging for an answer. I realize that some people are content to worship mystery rather than try to explain it. But for other people it doesn’t work that way.

Comment by: Siamang

I think my most important job in life will be to instill this same wonder in my child, and to feed her own curiosity about the world around her with as much knowlege as I can.

Science museums will be our Sunday service. The creatures of the deep ocean will feed her with an understanding of the mysteries of life. The stars will be her stained glass, and they will be illuminated by telescopes and computer models. She will feed her mind from the general revelation, and read what God, has written with His own hand.

If God exists, this is where He has written His laws. If there is Truth, it is out there for her to find.

I have not found this sense of wonder myself by scrying into ancient texts, covered with the dust of thousands of years of human politics, wars, persecution and obscurantism.

If God exists, His first work is untouched by man, unclouded, uncorrupted and crystal clear. I know for me, wonder lies there. So that is where I search.

Comment by: Esther

Good topic you picked, Peter.
I’ve been thinking about this these few days as well. It must be because it’s spring here in BC, Canada; yet on the other hand, I’ve been stimulated so much by reading the many thoughts expressed from my friendly atheist friends on this site.
Ir wrote:

I think our sense of mystery and wonder is an emotional thing and we all have emotions, whether we believe in God or not.

It seems like we are all agreeing on how it enhances life to have one

Again, it is this “looking at the same evidents but arrive at different conclusion”.
But, this one intrigues me the most. I’ve always wanted to ask all of you who decided not to believe in God exectly what is your “conclusion” with nature? So, how did all these “non-man-made” creature & nature came about if there’s no God (Higher power being, Creator)
I can understand if one says that this Creator might have left us alone and does not care for us;
Or that since man cannot fully understand what kind of a God it is, one choose not to relate to this God…etc.

But, to say that there is absolutely no God is sth I really cannot understand.

BTW, I disagree with what Ir said about that a child will never thank God or think of the creator when amazed by nature if they are not told to by adults.
I think even in a primitive, remote tribe living in the heart of the Amazon; or the poor village girl lives in the remote highland of Tibet; without anyone telling them that there’s a creator, they would generate some reverend feeling when they saw the wonders and beauty of this earth. (imo)
Again, how they relate to this creator is another thing.

I sincerely want to hear your thought.

Sorry, Peter, if I make it less fun. :-)

Comment by: Siamang

Esther asked:

But, this one intrigues me the most. I’ve always wanted to ask all of you who decided not to believe in God exectly what is your “conclusion” with nature? So, how did all these “non-man-made” creature & nature came about if there’s no God (Higher power being, Creator)
I can understand if one says that this Creator might have left us alone and does not care for us;
Or that since man cannot fully understand what kind of a God it is, one choose not to relate to this God…etc.

But, to say that there is absolutely no God is sth I really cannot understand.

Well, I call myself an atheist, but I don’t say there is no God. What I say is that I worship no God or gods because I cannot find any definition of God that doesn’t preclude other equally valid yet contradictiory definitions.

It’s like someone asked you “do you love freedom.” As an American, we’re kind of brought up to say “hell yes!” anytime someone asks us. But there are so many seperate ways to look at that, some more valid than others, that you have to define the term before you can answer it. If you say, “yes, absolutely” then the person might say, “well then, you support all convicted murderers to be set free?”

So then we get into defining what God is, so it can be something I can believe in, and not something I don’t believe in.

Well, anyway, I did that for about 30 years, and never came to a good definition that was internally consistant. I’m still searching, but I had to admit to myself at that point that I didn’t have any belief in any definition of God that included personal interaction.

I still live my life like He could be watching. But I don’t live my life believing that He’s steering it. I don’t pray, and I don’t beseech him for answers to my problems or questions.

As to the question of “how did this all come about”? Well, I ask that a lot. And science has some very good answers for a lot of it. Not all by any means. But I keep searching, rather than stopping the search with a “God did it.” If we answered all of our questions about nature with “God did it” we’d still be thinking the sun went around the earth.

Comment by: David S

So, how did all these “non-man-made” creature & nature came about if there’s no God (Higher power being, Creator)

I don’t know. That’s the truth. I’m comfortable admitting the reality of the situation.

However notice that nobody else knows either. Perhaps some people are uncomfortable not knowing. Perhaps they want answers to questions that don’t have answers yet. So maybe they end up imagining non-answers to so they can feel like they have an answer. To me all they’ve done is imagined an “answer” and given it a name and a human-like face. From what I can see they’ve essentially invented an even larger mystery under a new term “god” so they can think the original mystery is answered. It seems a sort of way to fool yourself to me.

Unfortunately once you’ve fooled yourself into thinking you have an answer you don’t need to look for real answers. Sometimes you might even fight against the real answers found from the efforts of science that conflict with your imagined ones.

Comment by: Stephan

I can see that religion and science have been at odds many times in the past, but I don’t think they need to be. I see science as answering “how?”, but religion as answering “why?” and “what does it mean?”. I like to explore both the “how?” and the “why?”.

Just because I believe God created the universe doesn’t mean I stop there. I still love to find out how it works. I see hints of “You have to believe in science or you have to believe in God” here and other places, and I believe that is a false choice.

I love knocking down false choices. You actually can have it both ways.

Comment by: Ir

I see what you’re saying Stephan, but I don’t want it both ways.

Comment by: Esther

Yes!! I knew I could count on you when I post a question!
Thank you all for answering.
Siamang, we crossed posted. But, I want to say that i love what you wrote in #10.
And I respect you very much when you said,

“I still live my life like He could be watching.”

And just to paraphrase David, did you meant that you’d like to have all these questions and wonders remain a mystery? In another words, can I say that you are more the less in the same position as Siamang? (Absolutely no intention to categorize you two, just want to understand)

David wrote,:
From what I can see they’ve essentially invented an even larger mystery under a new term “god” so they can think the original mystery is answered. It seems a sort of way to fool yourself to me.

Are you saying that you would leave the origin of nature as unknown / mystery, rather than believe that there’s a higher power who made them?
My question:
I can understand what you meant by “invented even a larger mystery” with the concept “God” in human religions. But, can we cast away all the human religions’ explaination of “Who” this God is by admitting that we do not know “who” this God is but there must be one period?
What do you think of this?
Lastly, I agree totally with Stephen that to me, believe in God doesn’t mean I stop there or I object science.

Ir wrote:
It’s hard to imagine a child like you described not being brought up to believe in God or gods. It would be interesting to know what an atheist child would do wtih his/her sense of awe and wonder. If I can have it and it doesn’t lead me to thinking God exists I expect that can be true of a child also.

Yes, it would work both ways. I just disagree that without an adult telling a child, he/she must not comes up with this understanding that there may be a creator…. (given that he/she has come to a logical thinking age)
And I respect your stand point just as I respect Siamang’s. :-)

Comment by: Esther

Thank you David for your detailed explaination.
Hmm…Renaming (Substituting) “God” with “mystery”?
Very interesting thought!
Are the two concepts really reciprical?
I’ll ponder on it more.
In the mean time, what do all of you think?

Comment by: Tom in Sacramento

For me, Stephan hits a bulls-eye in #18. For David, #19, you get half credit. ;-) “Why?” is harder to answer…or else much easier to answer.

For any phenomenon, “why?” can only be speculated at…unless you have an explanation from the perpetrator of the phenomenom. And then you merely have to take their word for it. You know where it goes from here, we disagree so its pointless to debate. But the point is, “why?” is not harder to know, it’s impossible to know, apart from the testimony of the to person in question.

Comment by: Eliza

Sorry for posting twice in a row, wanted to respond to Ir’s comment:

It would be interesting to know what an atheist child would do wtih his/her sense of awe and wonder. If I can have it and it doesn’t lead me to thinking God exists I expect that can be true of a child also.

N of 1 here, & he’s got a bunch of science/math genes ;) but my ~7.5 yr old son demonstrates a sense of awe and wonder when he talks about math & plays with math ideas. Math as in its definition: the science of patterns (including number patterns). It’s amazing to see & hear. He takes a concept and runs with it - like series (such as Fibonacci numbers, in which the sum of two numbers in the sequence is the next number - and that result plus the number before it is the next number, and so on, and so on) or triangle numbers or squares or primes. (We were looking at gorgeous fractal designs online a few days ago & then he was sitting in the back seat of the car later, using black and white puzzle pieces to come up with a design following similar construct, repeating and getting smaller and smaller into the center - not what the puzzle maker had in mind!). And he thinks it’s really cool, and fascinating, and it “clicks” and makes sense to him, and he wants to just keep going with it (but not the boring way it’s taught in school!) ;).

And math is a whole world in which no-one (to my knowledge) claims that any sort of supernatural force or God is responsible for the beauty of it, though someone might well believe that being good at it is a gift (or a curse, depending on your point of view!) from God. And then he sees math designs which mimic shapes in nature - a fractal spiral which looks for all the world like a snail shell, a drawing of Fibonacci branching which looks exactly like a tree - and I don’t think you could convince this kid there is a God. He’s already sure that the wonderful world is made of math - and it fills him with awe.

Comment by: Tom in Sacramento

Eliza, you must have the gift of prophecy. ;-) But seriously, lots of people here seem to put a lot of stock in what the highly intelligent folks who know science have to say. Well, here is just what you are talking about. And I think it is actually quite fascinating.

I have this friend on campus who is a Christian and a mathematician who has done some very interesting stuff with math. His name is Carlos Puente and it turns out he has a web site where you can browse all manner of stuff he’s done that you might find interesting. The particular stuff that has intrigued me (and I don’t even understand all of the math) is at the link to “peace” that is at the bottom of his home page text. The URL is And the “Peace” page includes a video of a presentation he did of one of his papers.

Your mention of the beauty of fractals is what reminded me of this. He is a computational hydrolic engineer who works with chaos in fluid systems.

Comment by: Esther

I’ve really pondered on the subject I posted earlier which was triggered by David’s thought.

What or is there any difference between “God” & “mystery”? (Assuming no religion has involved)

I was going to say: isn’t thinking every unsolved wonder with the conclusion - “mystery” is actually putting a stop to the thinking;
whereas thinking there must be a higher being “God” (but not in any religious sense), would trigger more searching and experiencing?

I don’t know if you can follow my line of thought?

Then, I read Siamang’s post. It seemed that in Siamang’s mind, looking at it as “mystery” does not make him stop. Siamang, you said you worship mystery, does it mean that you actually treat “mystery” as an entity but just prefer to call it ‘mystery”?

Comment by: Cully

To go ALL the way back to the beginning… (What? I was busy today…) LisaHG says:

So much of the world seems to be beautiful for beauty’s sake. Just to please us. To me that’s a gift from God.

I see this statement a lot… but I have to wonder… don’t we find it beautiful because we have always seen it as such? Out there somewhere is a planet that lacks our mountains or blue skies and is mostly swamp land covered in slime and mold. Don’t you think the inhabitants of that planet find beauty in the color that the mold spores turn in spring? Or in the reflections of the mustard yellow sky against the grey-green mud of the marshes? Or love their pet flat-worms? Life is beautiful because we are alive to see it, not because there are particularly nice mountains close by.

Comment by: Eliza

Siamang and Esther - when you are talking about mystery, do you mean simply “the unknown” or “the unknowable” or “wonder/awe in the face of a big unknown” or something else?

Comment by: Eliza

Good news for those worried about my son’s soul - looks like mathematics could be the way he finds God. I had never thought of math as being associated w/ God — it seems so cut and dry, explainable — & Bertrand Russell, a mathematician was a well-known and widely-published atheist/agnostic.

Turns out there have been a bunch of mathematicians who saw/see God in mathematics via their sense of awe/wonder with it. Here are some comments attributed to other mathematicians (from Wikipedia, Mathematics and Beauty and Mathematics and God):

Plato: “God ever geometrizes” and Pythagoras: “numbers rule the Universe”. In ancient Greece, study of mathematics was closely related to that of religion.

Henri Poincaré, “If God speaks to man, he undoubtedly uses the language of mathematics.”

Galileo Galilei: “Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe”

Paul Halmos: “What’s the best part of being a mathematician? I’m not a religious man, but it’s almost like being in touch with God when you’re thinking about mathematics.

Paul Erd?s, though not a believer, spoke of an imaginary book, in which God has written down all the most beautiful mathematical proofs. When Erd?s wanted to express particular appreciation of a proof, he would exclaim “This one’s from the Book!”. This viewpoint expresses the idea that mathematics, as the intrinsically true foundation on which the laws of our universe are built, is a natural candidate for what has been personified as God by different religious mystics.

Paul Erd?s expressed his views on the ineffability of mathematics when he said “Why are numbers beautiful? It’s like asking why is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don’t see why, someone can’t tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren’t beautiful, nothing is.”

Just imagine - wouldn’t things be different if math had become part of religious/spiritual practice? If Paul had been a mathematician?! ;)

Comment by: David S

Esther,

In my “god is only renaming the mystery comment”, I meant that a mystery is not explained or understood by attributing it to “god” because “god” is just another mystery. For example when science understands and explains a mystery, the mystery is explained–it is gone–humanity learns something and progresses. If you take a mystery, like where did the universe come from, and say “god did it”, you didn’t learn or understand anything as you’ve merely moved (or renamed) the mystery to another bigger mystery called “god”. I suppose some humans feel better about that because they give god a human-like face and can point to the god as the solution to unanswered questions (even though nothing was really answered).

These “fruitless answers” that religion gives is one reason it produces nothing and does not progress. Science solves mysteries, it enlightens the world and as a result humanity tends to produce and progress. Religion merely shuffles mysteries around to new terms–it gives the same “answers” today as 2000 years ago–and as a result tends to stagnate.

IMO of course.

Comment by: Esther

Thank you David, Jason, & Siamang,
I am pondering on all that you have said.
I am always reading….
As a deep-rooted conservative Christian but see the need to change now, every concept you guys mentioned are very new and foreign to me.
This is why I don’t reply.
But I’m thinking….with an open mind!