Curtis, I haven't read this (I may order it), but it looked like something that might interest you:
God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion by Guy Consolmagno Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/2n8oss Consolmagno is "Brother Guy," an astronomer for the Vatican. >From a review on Boing Boing: "I'm a second-generation atheist. I think that our experience of the numinous is both undeniable and entirely biological: the state of spiritual peace is the result of tickling some evolved center of our brain, a bit of neurology that conferred a survival advantage on our ancestors whose numinous hallucinations of a higher order in the universe drove them to catch more antelopes, eat better, and have more babies. I have no need of, nor interest in a supernatural god or a supernatural universe. "But I'm not so blinkered that I believe all religionists to be deluded fools. There's clearly some serious value that smart, ethical people derive from participation in spiritualism and even organized religion. Brother Guy's exegesis on faith as a systematic way of organizing and exploring the human experience of the numinous was fascinating to me. It is is a thoroughgoing, charming, quick-paced trip through a wide variety of personal experiences of spirituality and religion." http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/19/gods-mechanics-vatic.html http://tinyurl.com/3depce You might enjoy reading the comments to the post as well.
