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Many moons ago, a budding understanding of science led me to turf the ideas of an omnipotent and omniscient deity. I would likely have had a different, and perhaps more pleasant life, had I turfed science, but there’s an elegance, an immediacy, and a rationale to the sciences that have always suited my temperament, and so here I am, godless.

Age, however, erodes everything, and that has included my belief in my own faithlessness. I’ve had a number of opportunities to discover just how full of faith I am. Particularly, I’ve found it necessary to try to describe that feeling of connectedness and purpose that, from time to time, arises apparently from nowhere, perhaps that place some call “soul.”

A life of scientific study has led me to believe that although I can’t write you a system of equations to describe it, this feeling of connectedness is an emergent property of the interactions of various actors and forces in the highly complex, dynamical system we belong to, and which science seeks to describe. Simultaneously, my activities in industry, academia, and politics have all led me to understand that one cannot have blind faith in science, regardless of what it purports, since it’s produced by people. Not only are people subject to a number of corrosive influences which taint our products, “to err is human,” and those errors appear everywhere.

Read More »I believe in connections