One of the really cool things about living near Boulder, Colorado, is all of the science that happens there.  Boulder is a COLLEGE TOWN.  I put this in capital letters because the effect of the campus on the area has been substantial; in fact it has in many ways defined the area. The campus and the “Boulder Lifestyle” along the Front Range has attracted many institutions and companies to the Boulder area. Boulder is sort of the Berkeley of Colorado.

Boulder was hit hard by the hippy movement in the 1960’s and has never fully recovered. Today you can still spot old hippies wearing tie-dye and grey pony tails, gimping out of their BMW’s and into their expensive condo’s.  I’ll never forget when the Danskin craze hit Boulder in the late 1970’s.  My god …. I was nearly blinded.

Boulder has a NIST (National Institue of Standards and Technology) facility, formerly the National Bureau of Standards, which broadcasts time signals from the atomic clock on radio station WWV.

Within spitting distance of NIST is NCAR– National Center for Atmospheric Research. A small bit of the Woody Allen movie “Sleeper” was filmed on the Mesa Laboratory site.  In addition to watching the earth’s atmosphere, they also monitor the sun.

NOAA also has a facility in Boulder.  I’m not sure exactly what the mission of NOAA is relative to NCAR, but I do know that they are concerned with the interaction of the oceans with the climate.

The University of Colorado at Boulder hosts JILA, the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, as well as LASP, the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.  The upshot is that a lot of folks go to CU Boulder to study space science. I went to a few colloquia where Carl Sagan gave talks about various space probes. It was sublime.

Well, I really didn’t mean to write a valentine to Boulder, but there is a lot of cool stuff happening there.  Anyway, I recall as a part time student at CU in the late 1970’s going into some departmental office in Duane Physics and plopping down at a table to look at print copies of the Palomar Sky Survey.

These prints were negative prints of the sky, where the stars and galaxies were black against a white background. And what an amazing thing they record!  My gawd.  Galaxies and clusters of galaxies of all descriptions. Spirals and barred spirals and irregulars. These weren’t just “things”, they were “places”!  When you take the time to examine a deep sky survey, the thing that hits you is the large number of galaxies that are out there.  In fact, it is mind boggling.

It is impossible to view these images and not give it some metaphysical processing.  The notion that this big universe was fabricated by some cranky, jealous diety to host a nudist garden of eden on planet earth so that a pair of hairless bipeds can spend their time heaping praise upon him is simply what it appears to be. It is just absurd.  

The biblical story of creation is what you might expect from a people whose known universe was geographically limited to a circle of a few hundred miles radius.  The human brain is well adapted to note contrasts and dichotomy.  Light and dark. Warm and cold. Pain and pleasure. Left and right. North and south. Up and down.  We are enchanted by extrema and boundary conditions.  It seems to me that the archetypes of good and evil are a default dichotomy that human consciousness (or neurology)  spontaneously organizes when looking at the external world. 

The conclusion that the world must have been “created” is the result of a self imposed limitation in scope. The notion of cosmic creation by an anthropomorphic diety as opposed to an evolutionary process of nature is what you might expect of a culture that does not embrace the process of rational analysis and falsifiable conclusions.  Religion relies on the sacred, which is to say claims that are transcendent and beyond worldly analysis.  Religion has already made it’s conclusions and religious scholarship seems to consist of justifications of the conclusions.

Science is built on clay feet. A new tide of data arrives and the foundations are washed away to allow for new structures of understanding. Part of the great intellectual adventure of life is to decide where you stand. On the ready-made pillar of religion or barefoot on the beach of science.

Note: This is a distillation of my thoughts on religious matters. I’m sure that not a single concept or even blank space between the words above is an original thought, given the long and tired history of the topic.