Ahum is a blend of Ah, Om and Um

I think Joseph Campbell had the most interesting things to say on what would replace religion. Individual patchwork quilts of significant moments and numinosity- art and great narratives.

One thing which crude religion and crude scientism do not do is face us round and point us towards the mystery and wonder of what we do not know.

Sophisticated religion and science is a-hum with curiosity and wonder. Ah, Om and Um. Blend together.

Now prayer is a form of addressing what passes understanding, but science in schools is full of platitudes and certainties which latter unravel in the curriculum. Instead students of science from a young age should be asked to face up to what science does not really know. Holes should be poked in all the theories - open for the students to see them and marvel at.

If you could give young people an idea of the mystery and depth of the phenomena they face from the start, instead of the teacher putting on an omniscient mask, then that would spark us all to wonder and scientific endeavour.

The story of Andrew Wiles search for the solution to Fermat's theorem is a case in point.

Is Andrew Wiles a genius. Who knows. But one thing is for sure, he set off in dogged pursuit of a solution to Fermat's Last Theorem at the age of 10. This is because he was exposed to the depth and mystery of the seemingly obvious.

From Simon Singh's book:

"It [the mathematical problem] looked simple and yet all the great mathematicians in history couldn't solve it. Here was a problem that I, a ten year old, could understand and I knew from that moment that I would never let it go, I had to solve it."

And haven't we all had our epiphanies when we were very young, where faced with the awful knowledge of our mortality for the first time at about 6 or 7, our brains start revving frighteningly, and thus we develop our first hypothesis about the nature of reality. It happens to all of us. If Piaget or Vygotsky haven't written about this as a stage of human development then they should have.

I remember my son at the age of 8 developing complex theories about what "time" was and how it worked. Bryan Magee's young brain jammed itself into the suffocating little niche of knowing that we were locked into our bodies not knowing ever if what we thought or perceived was real.

Neil Turok has set up a foundation for gifted African children to draw them into the funded study of physics. The prerequisite is that they demonstrate curiosity towards natural phenomena. He gave the example of a boy measuring one brick and then counting off the bricks and then multiplying the two numbers together to estimate a building's height. That qualified the boy, in Neil's mind - the boy deserved a good science education.

It's the attitude of attention, curiosity and wonder in both religion and science that is of value and I would say that at the deepest level the qualities of this form of attention are the same for religion and science.