ABSTRACT
According to George Bernard Shaw, there are only three subjects intelligent people talk about: sex, politics, and religion. So let us embark on a conversation about religion. In polite society these subjects are taboo, of course, since they lead, when discussed intelligently, to passionate controversy and occasionally bitter disagreement. It's my hope that you and I constitute a humane community but not a polite one. It has been my experience that a truly intelligent mind can hold two or more conflicting ideas at the same time without losing consciousness or succumbing to shock. Actually, when I speak of religious thought I don't refer only to theology, or for that matter the question of the existence or non-existence of a deity. I refer to the general philosophical notion of the largest, most inclusive possible context; a context that includes all possible contexts. From that standpoint Einstein's relativity theory in transcending Newton's mechanistic theory was a more religious approach because it is clearly more inclusive. When Wittgenstein, who was no slouch as a logician, declared that it was a wondrous miracle that anything existed at all he was making a religious statement. When Chesterton insisted that there was no lack of wonders in the universe, but only a lack of wonder he was making a religious statement. Schrodinger, a founder of quantum physics, said, “Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown. There is only one thing, and that which seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception … as in a gallery of mirrors.” To my mind, this is a profoundly religious statement.
