Wonderment.

I'm watching the X-Files, and it's got me thinking about church. As you may know, I'm not exactly a regular church-going man, but I've got nothing against any church that has nothing against me. I'm not really an atheist, either; I have no more proof against the existence of some divine being(s) than I have against the existence of parallel universes, a possibility some theoretical physicists believe is, well, possible. So why is it that there are scientists out there who are devoted atheists, but still hold beliefs like parallel worlds?

One obvious point is that, while religious people believe there is a god, scientists believe there might be other universes out there. Certainty vs. possibility. But that's not the whole story for me. For me, there is a common thread here, that of wonder. I'm using "wonder" here to describe the emotional reaction we have to the unknown, the feeling you get from thinking about what might be. And it is a damn important emotion, or at least, it seems to be; in the movie "Contact", a character cites a statistic of 95% of the world's population being religiously inclined. For many of the prominent atheists out there, science seems to provide them with wonder. They don't know what kinds of weird things will turn up when you study the world carefully and systematically, any more than religious folks know how their god(s) will do, well, whatever the hell it is gods do.

I tried talking to my dad about this the other day, but he mentioned the book "The Christian Nation", and we got off on a tangent. (By the by, America is not a Christian nation, and no one on either side thinks that it is. On the left, they think that policy should reflect the multitude of faiths that are practiced here, and on the right, um, forced deportation of non-Christians?)

At any rate, I think that atheists should keep arguing their case, but not because I think they're right. Mostly, I like anything that annoys Pat Robertson and his ilk, and as long as they're attacking atheists, they're leaving the gays alone. But they should bear in mind that not everyone wants to turn to science to get their weekly dose of wonder about the world, and church can be a good substitute for folks who just don't want to know what makes the universe tick. Sometimes.