The Rise of the Nuns

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I'm pretty sure yeah I mean the agnostic is just kind of a wishy-washy thing to get anywhere Stephen Colbert called it the atheist without balls. If if there were a hypothesis where you could test whether it was a god or not duh talk about how you get famous uh in tested it's just that nobody has any idea how you would frame that frame those experiments well so maybe like Victor Stanger explored this idea god that testable hypothesis that he's failed the test mmm right although since your book was published in 1997 there's been a quite a striking growth of the nuns so-called no religious affiliation the nuns.

For many of us, the great scientific discoveries of the modern age — the Big Bang, evolution, quantum physics, relativity — point to an existence that is bleak, devoid of meaning, pointless. But in The Sacred Depths of Nature, eminent biologist Ursula Goodenough shows us that the scientific world view need not be a source of despair. Indeed, it can be a wellspring of solace and hope.

Shermer and Goodenough discuss: origins of her personal beliefs • origins life, RNA, DNA, consciousness, language, morality • myths and religions • what it means to be “religious” • religious naturalism • where the laws of physics came from • why the universe seems so strange • chance and evolution • fine tuning of the cosmos • autocatalysis and emergence • purpose of religion • ethics and morality without religion.

Ursula Goodenough is Professor Emerita of Biology at Washington University. One of America's leading cell biologists, she is the author of a bestselling textbook on genetics, is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has served as President of the American Society of Cell Biology and of the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science. She lives in Chilmark, Massachusetts, on Martha's Vineyard. Her book, The Sacred Depths of Nature: How Life Has Emerged and Evolved, is now in a second edition. She currently serves as president of the Religious Naturalist Association.