The Penultimate Curiosity

Abstract

Abstract This book sets out to answer one of the most important, vexed, and profound questions about the development of human thought: What lies at the root of the long entanglement between science and religion? Why throughout our journey from cave painting to quantum physics have attempts to describe the physical world that we can see been so closely enmeshed with the aspiration to see beyond the rim of the visible world? The university cities of Oxford and Cambridge each contain a remarkable invocation with a fascinating history. Both are set in the seminal scientific buildings of the university, and both articulate a connection between science and faith. How did they come to be there, and what connects them? The curiosity that leads to the search for religious understanding and the curiosity that leads to the search for scientific understanding have common origins in aspects of the human mind that go back as far as the earliest records of human intellectual endeavour. Their relationship developed as the categories of religion and science became distinct and new information was discovered. The struggle to make sense of the world as a whole seems to be an urgent and fundamental requirement in all human societies—an ultimate curiosity that creates a slipstream of interest in which penultimate curiosities about particular aspects of the physical world have (to a greater or lesser extent) been able to swim.

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