(Notes for a Science and Religion Study Group.)

1. The Universe is not a machine; matter is not inert; determinism is not absolute.
2. Mere tolerance or peaceful coexistence of science and religion in parallel is no longer sufficient. That is intellectual apartheid, usually with science in the privileged position.
3. Just as patriarchy must be replaced by gender partnership, so the modes of scientific and religious thinking must become complementary and cooperative on an equal basis.
4. The creation story told by science is every bit as grand and inspiring as that in Genesis and other creation myths around the world.
5. The body and its functions are not base and evil, but beautiful and holy. The underlying chemistry is in many ways comparable to music: there are melodies, rhythms, and harmonies, as well as counterpoint.
6. Matter is only seemingly solid and impenetrable. On a small enough scale, it is mostly empty space, but short-range forces are acting, making it seem solid. In another aspect, matter is a condensed form of energy, i.e. anything but inert.
7. Commonsense views of space, time and motion are only approximations. Getting beyond common sense is like another step beyond Piaget’s sequence of “pre-operational, concrete operations, and formal operations” stages. Every child is an embryo scientist, but we then try to go to higher stages in maturing.
8. The very small (sub-atomic) realm is governed by quantum (wave) mechanics; the very large (e.g. galaxies) or very dense (e.g. black holes) or very fast (close to the speed of light) is governed by relativistic mechanics; the very numerous (e.g. gas molecules) is governed by statistical mechanics (or on the macro-scale thermodynamics); the very complex (i.e. living systems) are governed by Prigoginian fluctuation or chaos mechanics. But classical mechanics (the first stage beyond commonsense) is still a good approximation at moderate sizes, densities, speeds, numbers, or degrees of complexity. Nobody has yet figured out how to combine quantum theory, relativity, statistical mechanics, and chaos into one “theory of everything” .
9. Mind is both an emergent property of the brain (Sperry) and a primal entity co-eval with matter-energy. It is the Teilhardian Alpha and Omega coming around in a Uroborus (snake eating its own tail) super-cycle.
10. God or Spirit is a step beyond Mind in this sense, undergoing the same Alpha-Omega super- cycle. Both creator and created by creatures, both transcendent and immanent. This is not contradictory; an analogy is DNA and proteins, both necessary to each other’s function – so which came first? This “strange wrap-around” is resolved by recognizing that time is not linear, it is only a dimension in Eternity.
11. Some patterns are basic: the rise-and-run staircase, the Mandala, the cascade, the cusp, the swallowtail, the butterfly, the lazy-S growth curve.
12. Reason and emotion do not exclude each other; in particular the need for empirical evidence to support a truth-claim, and a sense of the Sacred in what is discovered, can very well coexist. We are able to recognize Beauty in the Order of Nature.