Excellent Beauty

Anyone who follows the debates between religion and science will be instantly baited by the subject of this book and by the seductive terms of its title. This is a book about a well-worn topic which proposes to enter it through a little-worn door, the notion of mystery, for which the title’s ‘excellent beauty’ turns out to be a more resplendent synonym. Setting out its stall at the heart of longstanding questions about the legitimacy of religious belief, its brief is to reclaim the notion of mystery in ways calculated to antagonize many of the interested parties. Pace a common religious conceit, mystery is not the exclusive preserve of religion. Pace a widespread scientific stance, mystery is not merely a shadowy station on the way to the neon light of full explanation, yesterday’s wonder always turning into today’s stolid ‘everything is understood’. Mystery is here to stay. The same science that naturalizes and debunks religion, revealing our religious longings to be a by-product of evolution, bares to view mysteries that will not and cannot be liquidated by explanation. And this is for the best; because it is this baring of mystery, Dietrich argues, that makes science the high priest of a new way of quenching the religious longings to which we are doomed by evolutionary decree. Far from the claustrophobic, mechanistic and flatly naturalistic this-is-all-there-is conception of the world it is often said to conduce to, science brings to view an ‘exciting, perplexing, mysterious world’ rife with unknowables (xv). By tuning into this enchantment and learning to dwell in the possibilities of wonder science offers, we may hope to find a more wholesome and legitimate outlet for our religious longings

Aesthetics · Art · Beauty · Epistemology · Literature · Pace · Sociology · Subject (documents · Wonder · Yesterday · Evolution and Science Education · Philosophy · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices