Reply #25: I suspect that if mainstream religion goes "new age" they will re-join mainstream religion

[HamdenRice]

I find it interesting that the most vociferous critics of new age thinking were (1) the very traditionally religious and (2) a certain kind of materialist scientism and atheism.

(1) is fairly easy to understand. New Age thinking was accused by them of being everything from devil worship to secularism.

(2) is a little more difficult to understand, but I think of it this way: in the "trenches" of science, the world is pretty well explained. The engineers, the lab techs, the surgeons, etc., tend to be very skeptical of mysticism in science.

But at the fringes of knowledge things get so "spooky" that the scientists themselves become somewhat mystical -- from multi-universe physics, big bang, worm holes, organic molecules that "know what to do," inheritance of acquired characteristics, universe as hologram/brain as receptor, the scale of the universe, dark matter, and so on.

I can see that people who "mistrust science" would be drawn to a new New Age renaissance. I'm thinking of the kind of people who are not scientists but are fans of Professor Michiu Kaku (sp?) and his kind of popularizer of the strange in science.