Does the analytic mind destroy a sense of wonder?

[Seaborgium]

This is something that I have been wondering for a while. I believe that most can’t accept Catholic sexual morality because humanity’s view of what makes one human has changed. For example instead of seeing a human as having organs, biology may give of the idea that a bunch of organs happen to work together to make a human. The whole becomes nothing more than the sum of the parts.

For example, some people believe that life can start by just mixing a few chemical compounds and striking it with energy. But when people die, can we measure the animation energy of a living creature leave? What is a heart transplant if humans are nothing more than organs? Are there two humans living inside one body?

I have a different take, Love as in romantic love, and lust are just chemicals. They are tricks of evolution, or original sin, whichever it belongs to, it’s a trick!. Then somehow I use this scientific knowledge of neuro-chemistry to justify not believing that romantic love is important, therefore I CAN be celibate. Not the other way round.

 

[Auntie_A]

No.
from my perspective A properly educated mind should be able to bring an analytic approach to a sense of wonder and vice-versa.
some people have the attitude that the two are mutually exclusive. I find that mind-set hard to comprehend.

In Aunty-A’s example I think the case is typified. Of course Aunty-A has recieved a modern western education, and knows how the sun moon and planets revolve… but that does not stop her wondering at the beauty of the percieved experience of a beautiful sunset or moon-rise.

her 9-year-old nephew has the mind of a child where everything is Black or White. grey areas are not comprehensible to the pre-pubescent mind.
There is a push in the move to secularism and relitivism to divorce Wonder from the analytic mind - but that will never produce people with the passion to explore. The passion to explore comes from a deep seated wonder combined with an analytic mind.

Google “Professor Brian Cox”. He’s a program maker for BBC science (and a University professor).
He is an excellent example of someone who can simultaneously portray both the scientific understanding in Lay-mans terms while retaining and communicating the sence of wonder at the beauty and complexity of creation.

(just don’t expect him to be teaching the Truth about Faith - that’s not his area of expertise… However I’ve not heard him openly join in with the Dawkins / Hawkins version of “Atheism” that denys God’s existence with a faith like certainty and makes a religion out of science)

Thanks Anuari. My nephew was raised in relativism, and narrow secularism. He is now all grown up with a wife and child now. We talk and debate regularly on the meaning of life, ethics, and God. He now struggles with other kinds of wonder and expresses to me: I wonder why all of those God-loving people like my aunt are just so narrow and repressed in their thinking? I wonder why it would be so bad if I had an extramarital affair-- I don’t believe in God! To which I wonder out loud how his world would change and how he would wonder what happened to his life, his family, and his soul if he took the wrong steps. To which he wonders “What is right and wrong?” and we go on…

My nephew was raised without an “inhibiting sense of right and wrong” (his father’s words), yet he has struggled with inhibitions anyway as well as the painful consequences of his amoral actions. He is very stressed from learning by painful experience. Being raised with moral guidelines would have spared his nervous system. But God is still in his court, guiding him and rewarding him with blessings anyway. Keep praying, folks. My nephew needs to wake up to the greater truth in order to be filled with a safe and sane sense of wonder around him.

My original post was too simplistic. Analytic minds can hold a sense of wonder IF they are guided in a faith and belief that reaches high and wide, along with a solid sense of ethics that create a sane and humane moral framework.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

I think total immersion in the analytic mind can oppress our sense of wonder without entirely destroying it. This I think could be the case with someone like evolutionist Richard Dawkins who might never listen to Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus without retching.

But I have heard many mathematicians speak of the wonders of mathematics, the beauty of mathematics, etc. So I’m not sure the analytic mind can destroy our sense of wonder. The case of Thomas Aquinas has already been mentioned earlier in this thread. There is hardly anyone more analytical and at the same time capable of truly inspired poetry.