Sometimes I absolutely don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. And, ultimately, it doesn’t matter which I do because people continue to be “anyway”.

My “this morning’s amazement” comes from this New York Time’s article by Ian Fisher and Cornelia Dean, In ‘Design’ vs. Darwinism, Darwin Wins Point in Rome. A particularly striking quote…

“To Dr. Kenneth R. Miller, a biology professor at Brown University and a Catholic, <…> ‘As long as science does not pretend it can answer spiritual questions, it’s O.K.,’ he said.”

Ummm…

As someone who spends much of her time asking “What are we thinking?”, remarks such as this scare me. They baffle me. They amaze me. They sometimes make me no longer want to know what the fabric of our collective intelligence is really made of.

And as someone who finds the theory of “intelligent design” absolutely fascinating (as I do the theory of evolution and as I do the theory of creation), as someone who finds history fascinating (not necessarily the “facts” but the concept, the perceptions, the teachings, the definition of what history “is”, “was” and “will be”), I still can’t get over the fact (maybe the only unchanging “fact” across the entire “history” of our collective intelligence) that “we” — any “we” — still believe that “we” finally have accessed, quantified, qualified, defined, divulged, are acting in capital “o”, capital “t”, Objective Truth.

And, if all of this were only left in the realm of “believing” maybe I wouldn’t be so amazed and disturbed and fascinated by it all. But of course we act on these beliefs. Many of us work hard to act more and more in, exactly, our beliefs. And — obviously — we bring them to our sciences. And we teach them in our schools. And sometimes — most often, almost always — we teach them as something distinct from our spirituality. And, well, our created collective intelligence is evolving rather slowly. And the minimally complex system that is “our collective intelligence” sometimes makes me want to laugh and sometimes makes me want to cry but absolutely continues to amaze me.

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