As I follow this thread (and take notes for books I’m adding to my own reading list), it occurs to me that, as a newcomer to science, particularly coming from a religious background, you might benefit from a philosophical approach, a point of view that will aid your entry to a new way of looking at the world.
See, the thing is, we’re all looking for meaning. We all want to make sense of the world, and understand our place in it. In my own personal opinion, religious people want an emotionally satisfying explanation, and post hoc convince themselves of its reality regardless of whether it’s intellectually supportable. By contrast, scientists seek explanations that can be factually and rationally supported, whether or not they’re emotionally satisfying (or perhaps derive emotional satisfaction from an elegant factual proof).
But because we are all human beings, as I discuss in my first message above, we are still susceptible to emotional arguments and irrational beliefs. The history of science is littered with incidents in which scientists fudged or fabricated their results in order to support a given hypothesis; sometimes this is due solely to careerism, but it seems to me that much of the fudging is done unconsciously or semi-consciously by the scientist because he or she really wants to believe the proposition at hand for reasons of emotional satisfaction. You can find some examples of this in The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould, first recommended above by Sublight and which I heartily second; some of the work cited by Gould clearly demonstrates how the “scientists” skew their work in order to “prove” the intellectual superiority of their European race over their African “inferiors.” Obviously, this is an emotional position; the racialists want to put themselves at the top of the human heap, and they succumb to base methods to support their belief. You can find further examples in the book Betrayers of the Truth (it’s out of print, but the library might have it), which in my opinion is somewhat hysterical and overblown, but is still worthwhile as a catalog of incidents in which scientific methodologies have been hijacked and misused in service to sadly understandable human aims.
Sorry, I’m getting a little sidetracked. The point is, as I said, that virtually every human endeavor centers on a search for meaning. From the time in the distant prehistoric past when we made the leap into sapience, and acquired the ability to ask “why,” thus giving us a huge advantage over nonsentient creatures in comprehending the patterns behind reproduction and weather and so on, to the present, when these exact same intellectual gifts are employed in everything from genetic engineering to architecture, we have extended our cause-and-effect inquiries into the philosophical realms. We aren’t just satisfied asking where lightning comes from; we want to know where we come from. We don’t just ask why this flammable carbon-based goo bubbles out of the ground; we ask why we’re here. Religion, in my view, is an early attempt at providing answers to these unanswerable questions, and the very fact of their unanswerability is, I believe, why religion continues to play such a major role in people’s lives even after two hundred years of increasingly staggering success by those using the scientific method.
With that in mind, then, I’m going to suggest a couple of additional titles. I know you’ve already gotten several dozen recommendations, and have enough reading material for the next couple of years, but I’m thinking that if you start feeling bogged down by all the facts and decide you need to mentally regroup, these might provide a philosophical underpinning you can use to put everything in context. Again, remember that all we’re doing is looking for meaning; the only difference between the religious and the scientific is how they go about it.
The first book I’ll suggest is Joel Achenbach’s *Captured by Aliens.* He’s an NPR commentator and frequent contributor to National Geographic, as well as a freelance writer. The book roughly breaks into three sections: First he talks to “reputable” space scientists, then he tours the various “UFO kook” groups, and then he tries to wrap everything up. It’s a very entertaining read, certainly intended for the lay audience, even though it gets a little foggy at the end because it seems like he isn’t quite able to synthesize his central message. But he makes some very perceptive observations in the middle section about how, for many people, UFOs and extraterrestrials are, because of people’s emotional needs, fulfilling the role that used to be the sole province of the angels. In many ways, the UFO cults are adopting the superficial devices of scientific discovery, in terms of space travel and exobiology and panspermia and so on, in order to formulate a brand new religious faith that addresses both the emotional requirements of the “old” religions while getting past the reality that so many of those religions’ ostensibly factual teachings (“windows in the sky,” for example) have gone wanting in the face of modern scientific inquiry. I don’t know if Achenbach didn’t quite know what he had, or if he thought it would be too controversial and deliberately skirted the notion, but it seems obvious to me, looking at the insistent growth of fringe groups like the Raelians and increasingly mainstream groups like the Scientologists, along with the defensiveness of the “old” religions, that we’re on the verge of a religious revolution, in which new faiths will spring up that fill people’s emotional needs but that discard the problematic elements of the “tribal” religions. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if, a hundred years from now, there’s a major Western faith called “Cosmicism” or something that tells us Jesus’s DNA is being stored by a benevolent group of ETs and will be brought to Earth on a flying saucer so he can be cloned when the time is right, or some similar mishmash of half-understood scientific jargon and feel-good religious parable.
Again, I’m getting a little off-point here, and I apologize. The important thing is, since you come from a religious background, you understand in your very bones the need to know your place in the universe and the rules by which everything operates. The scientist has exactly the same motivation as the religious person, but he or she comes at it from the opposite perspective: Don’t start with the explanation you hope is true and look for facts to support it; assemble your facts and formulate your explanation therefrom. And I offer Captured by Aliens as an entertaining look at these two very different approaches in the same general sphere of thought.
The second book is related: Michael Shermer’s How We Believe. Shermer is best-known as the director of the Skeptic Institute (and the publisher of its magazine), and his book Why People Believe Weird Things is an excellent companion volume to Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World. (Another recommended title along the same lines: Voodoo Science.) However, Shermer does not, as I do not, have contempt for the religious. I may have no religion myself, and I may think the faithful are incorrect to believe in the existence of an all-powerful deity, but (as you can probably tell from my long digression above) I think I know why the need for this belief is so powerful, and why it’s such a common element of the human experience. Shermer comes at the question not by attacking the faithful but by carefully considering the human commonalities in religiosity throughout history, and formulating an epistemology of religious belief. It’s not strict science as with many of the other titles already recommended, but like I said it may be helpful in establishing a philosophical understanding of just why scientific rationalism is so different from religious thinking, and that may help you put everything you’re learning into an overall context. And the final reason why I think Shermer’s book will be of interest to you: He also comes from a background of fundamentalist Christianity, having arrived at his current agnosticism through long and arduous intellectual self-examination. So his angle of inquiry into the subject may speak to you on deeper levels than the obvious.
I hope that you continue enjoying your reading, and that the books people have suggested spark your curiosity. That’s what it’s all about, really: continued and unflagging curiosity about the world. And as I said, if you start to feel like you’re drowning in factual disciplines, I hope the two books I’ve suggested above provide a useful philosophical anchor for you.