1. a sub-branch of sociology, the science of studying why we ask the question “Why?” and “What if?” 2. The study of the emotions of awe and wonderment within society (discovery/enlightenment/education) towards motivation for constructive and peaceful changes. 3. the intersecting studies of science, religions, and social constructs (cultures) to discover better civilization methodologies towards an eco-centric, a nature first minded approach instead of an ego-centric perspective.
A story as old as man
Anthropology has shown humans to be religious beings. It tells our stories and our morals, even as far back as the Neanderthals performing religious ceremonies on their buried dead 100,000 years ago.
Science
But humans are also adaptive and our religions, our stories, our civilizations have evolved. We have learned so much through our sciences that added to our stories and our religious understandings. Along the way, we created new sciences and sociology, as a science, grew out of the religious positivist’s movements of the 19th century. Much has been added to the field as techniques were developed to study human societies, their patterns, their cultures, their religions, their grounding morals.
Understanding
Throughout the 18th through the early 20th century, the general view of science shifted its perspective of the universe from the basis of the Abrahamic myth of a ceramic model, to what could be described as a fully automatic model but automatic in terms much like a machine would be an automatic process. Thus began the general shift in consciousness of a view of logical reductionism, the whole process from beginning to end could be broken down into bits of logic and digested piece meal to understand more of the natural world than we ever could have before.
Understanding
Science had become a series of logical statements of observation of processes and their interactions, and less a study of the natural phenomena of the universe. With the demystification of science truly at a full swing, it would be right to say that the universe lost some of its mystery. Religious studies and even philosophy studies continued to evolve alongside sociology studies.
Revelation
For the religious students, understanding the interactions between God and mankind was still important, even as worship was and still is central to those experiences, a sense of awe in the presence of God, a desire to continue to press for answers to questions that may be unanswerable, and daring to imagine a better outcome. Imagine, then, what happens when scientists also experience awe and finding themselves asking the same kinds of questions….
Our views
Science and religion have never been fully separated from each other, but they have learned to co-exist, even dance together as they both evolved. It has led to a new subcategory of sociology — wondermentology, where they study and document the process of daring to ask the hard questions. For the theologians, this may feel like, “What took you scientists so long to get here?” For the wondermentologists (the study of wonder and the emotion of awe), they are still hesitant to use shared wonderment words in their analysis and published papers. However, both groups realize that they are part of the same shared experience.
For the majority of human history the religions and the sciences were one and the same, and as understanding of the laws of the natural world became wider spread the processes of the universe became less of an act of God but an act of nature. It is for this reason that someone rooted in a generally atheistic viewpoint sees this as a very key distinction, whereas one rooted in a religious faith of a sort may see this distinction as a minor distinction, for the one rooted in faith sees both as the same underlying process.
our direction
Daring to ask the questions of “What if?” and “Why ask why?”, seeking answers, is part of the adaptive evolution of being human. But in the last 70 years particularly, the human experience has grown pessimistic enough that the scientists want to name this part of Earth’s history the “Anthropocene,” defined by the Oxford Dictionary website (1) as ‘the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment’ and too often equated to the end of life on Earth as we know it. If we are to believe that definition, then we will follow that prediction. But daring to ask the “What if?” question becomes a way to prepare for a different outcome and understanding wonderment and awe as a tool of exploration, growth and better adaptation also gives us humans a reason for hope, for envisioning and building a better future for ALL life on Earth. That process needs more study.
This dawning of a new Epoch in the Earth’s history can be a time of great celebration, or a time of great misery and despair. It’s become quite clear to an outside observer, or one who has only recently come to see things as they are, that it isn’t a matter of if we are asking the wrong questions. But we are asking the wrong way, the questions that we pose to others we should be posing to ourselves internally to have a dialogue with our baser selves to understand the crux of the problem. To change the world we had to change consciousness and the dawning of the 21st century has shown us that we must change consciousness again to change the world for the better. For do we not owe it to the rest of the living beings on this planet as well as those who are yet to come to try?
There has been some work done before us, often found in research in the category of the “Study of Wonder,” the “Study of Awe,” the “Overview Effect,” and listed in psychology papers, sociology papers, and religious publications. However, this is the first attempt to formalize this area of study into its own scientific category.
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