Quoting from the When God is gone, everything is holy post at Science Musings:
Once we reject the absolute truth of one thing, whatever it might be — God, a holy book, a law of nature — then everything, even the smallest element of reality — an insect, a leaf, a grain of sand — becomes infinitely interesting. The physicist Heinz Pagels put it this way: “The capacity to tolerate complexity and welcome contradiction, not the need for simplicity and certainty, is the attribute of an explorer. Centuries ago, when some people suspended their search for absolute truth and began instead to ask how things worked, modern science was born. Curiously, it was by abandoning the search for absolute truth that science began to make progress, opening the material universe to human exploration.”
Go read the whole thing.
That concluding paragraph is killer.
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