Same here. The more I learn the more I Believe. After accepting an electron is both a particle and a wave Catholic doctrines are easy.

-Blast

Speculation is fine. It's impossible to go through life without guessing. But what you shouldn't do is make the leap from speculation to conclusion without the evidence to support it.

A scientist will often say "I think" or "This could be." But he/she cannot say "I know" until it is proven.

This is a good site with photos of abandoned mental hospitals. Most interesting thing is that many of them were self-sustaining facilities at one time with things like a barbershop, morgue, dental office, etc. Some images are downright creepy.


http://www.darkpassage.com/hopscotch.htm

There are vast area of reality that are unexplored. There are even things we simply can't know. Anyone interested might profit from a review of "Heisenberg's uncertainty principle", "Schroedinger's Cat" and the limits of knowledge.

But, as you point out, just because there are wide swaths of area we know little about and some things we cannot know this doesn't justify or excuse a headlong leap into supernaturalism, wild speculation and superstition.

Best disclaimer ever.

My policy on UFOs as well.

I don't know what they are. I've got a pretty good idea of what they aren't. And I know what I REALLY don't want them to be.

We aren't ready for that, not yet.

My guess is that there is other life somewhere in the universe. There are billions of planets orbiting billions of stars in the galaxy. And there are billions of galaxies in the universe. Any Las Vegas odds maker worth his job would have to bet on this one planet not being the only place where life took hold.

Some say it's amazing that life exists here. I say it would be amazing if life only exists here.

But the enormous size of the universe means that we'll never be able to explore all of it, and if there is life elsewhere, they're probably having the same problem.

Not everybody has been so limited, I can assure you of that!

Faith and reason are not mutually exclusive. Many of the great scientists in the world were also men of faith. Making a "headlong leap" is a strawman.

Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote a great article on this subject for Natural History magazine. You can read it here:

http://research.amnh.org/~tyson/PerimeterOfIgnorance.php

The point he makes is that scientists such as Newton only invoked god when they had reached the limits of their own knowledge. Basically, they copped out.