So much of recent human history has been a process of taking individual phenomena out of the magic or religious column and putting it in the scientific column: disease—especially mental illness—droughts, floods, earthquakes, weather, the layout of the solar system, the abundance of flora and fauna. Somewhere in that process we lost the awe. I suspect this was partly a matter of delivery. We don’t teach children science (or math, for that matter) with the passionate enthusiasm of the best preachers. And we ought to.
