This is a part of the scientific paper that today is often appended after rest of the paper has been reached. It has to give details of the techniques used, the reason for their selection and exact details of the procedures.The need for proper controls is discussed. Sources of materials have to be identified, modifications and limitations are to be included. Confidence in the data that emerges means that statistical tests must be appropriate. How this quite tedious section of the paper can best be assembled is explained.

This chapter introduces the reader to some of the procedures and problems that arise once a paper moves on to the publishing process. Publishing houses have different ways of operating through different modalities. Issues with proofs (who deals with them – author or publisher?) are discussed. The steps that occur after proofing are described.

A scientific paper is part of an ongoing sequence of findings. The author has to put this in context, which is the act of writing an Introduction, effectively the state of the art in the particular research project at the time of preparing a new paper. It should include seminal works from the past, but should also focus on the issues that have come in the more recent past. It needs to explain how the author arrived at the hypothesis that must be clearly included in this Introduction.

Authors are informed about the many problems of unethical practices in scientific publishing, notably plagiarism, duplication, multiple submission, fabrications, conflicts of interest and others. They are also pointed to places where they can get help in dealing with these issues.

Authors are instructed that the Abstract is the most important part of their paper and that it needs very careful attention. It must attract the attention of potential readers, be succinct and clear. The structured Abstract is more verbose, which is required by some journals. It should contain in particular the hypothesis and, in the shortest way, the overall conclusion of the findings. Below it the author indicates what are the most appropriate keywords, sets out the abbreviations used.

Editorial matters can be complex. These include how editors reach their decision, appeals against non-acceptance, revision and its difficulties, problems in creating the final version and moving it on to the publication procedure.

The claim that there is a different universe, or lack of fundamental laws of physics, in the quantum or in the cosmological is false, popular and a misunderstanding of what most physicists and science understands the quantum as being. It is different place—outside of our perception of time and space—but it is not a mystery or random, as Einstein famously worried (or Feynmann joked). Mystery, rather, in terms of quantum mechanics needs to be understood under the rubric of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and remains scientifically agnostic. What theory predicts, and evidence suggests, is something different, and certainly hostile to the traditional understanding of God in the Abrahamic traditions. As Sean Carroll writes, the problem is not what we do not know in terms of the quantum but rather that we know enough justifiably to argue that the core theory itself seems unassailable. It is just not that it is “misused and abused by cranks and charlatans—and misunderstood by people struggling in good faith with difficult ideas” but that it is audaciously simple and powerful in its scientific and real value:

• (1) Everything we know says that quantum field theory is the correct framework for describing the physics underlying everyday life.

• (2) The rules of quantum field theory imply that there cannot be any new particles, forces or interactions [including God/souls] that could be relevant to our everyday lives. We have found them all.

It is the second point that is the most important: we have found them all at least in the local universe we live in. Is this a statement of incredible pride or is it true?

What then does this all mean?

It is clear by any account of quantum universe cosmology that the universe is much more complex than predicted by the standard account of physics and that it is likely that the laws of physics are varied not only in terms of other universes but perhaps even within “our” universe (assuming that we are a bubble in a much larger universe as some predict). While classical physics required constants—20 odd in the standard model—that are normative within any given region of space, the possibility is raised in quantum chromodynamics cosmology (or other core theories such as quantum field theory) is that these constants may be varied, depending on the presetting conditions of the creation of that universe.

As a graduate student at the University of Oxford, I often explored medieval churches. Entering these buildings, and the twelfth-and thirteenth-century founded Christ Church Cathedral, I was always struck by how different the minds of that ancient population were to mine. Not so much that I lived in a society that used smartphones and computers, but rather that the very fabric of their universe and self-understanding was vastly different than mine. How they understood themselves with reference to the Divine, the cosmos and each other in strict hierarchy literally manifested on the walls and ceilings of the buildings. One aspect always struck me, making a deep impression on my psyche (as being a little chilling) was the presence of angels and demons or the supernatural in general. The world conceived in the Western medieval mind was that of us (humans), God and then another group of supranatural nonhuman beings. I was, of course, well familiar with these, not merely from popular culture, but more from my studies and readings of ancient Christian and Jewish theologians, whether Augustine, Aquinas or Maimonides right through to Martin Luther (and later). Each in turn had sections of theological reflection that treated the very real to them world of the divine other, not just in terms of God but in terms of another kind of being in contradistinction to human being. As a colleague once related to me of one of his mentors, John McIntyre, the premodern world had “us, Him (God) and them (supernatural beings)” as points of reference for human self-understanding. Humans were not only unique in this anthropology but unique in terms of two divine references. Much of what would describe human uniqueness—even familiar to contemporary minds—such a freedom, finitude and relation to God would be in contradistinction to the angelic and fallen angelic beings that were not free, not finite and in a different kind of relationship to the Creator and creation. In the description of human identity, there was a triangulation of identity. As one sees the process of modernity, this triangulation becomes a binary. By the end of the nineteenth century, the triangulation is binary—there is only humans and the Divine. The Divine is “humanity-plus” as projection or humanity is “God inside.” And now, I maintain, there is only humans.

The question of this chapter is simple: what do we mean when we speak of ourselves? Is to have a mind, be a self and be conscious the same thing as to have a soul? And what of our bodies and particularly of our brains which seem to all moderns evidently the vessel of the soul/mind/self and consciousness? But before we look to this, we need to ask whether when we are doing theology and doing empirical (or even the human) science we are doing in fact the same thing? We start here because if what we are talking about is really two methods, then confusing them is patently unwise. But are we confusing two methods?

Origins, and Models of Science and Theology

While many theologians involved in the science– religion/theology debate work to distinguish and validate the processes of method between the two magisteria and argue for appropriate discourse for each claim on the nature of reality or offer criticism on scientism's overuse of its own heuristic method, most fail to engage in a critical analysis of what is really at stake. What is at stake is the tacit driver of all questions, reactions, rejections, détentes and combinations for the simple and historically obvious reason that the development of science and by extension our modern minds as an offshoot, and its subsequent philosophical assumptions, is only possible in a Judeo-Christian milieu and that its development is symbiotic, or worse, parasitic and supplants the very worldview that permitted its birth. This is, of course, the logoscentrism of the Judeo-Christian world or more succinctly the belief that an ordered, lawful universe exists outside the experiences or minds of human observers and that, in part, our imago dei, is attuned to this greater reality. This logoscentric perspective is the concentration of the four theological bedrock ideas in Chapter 1. But there are two glaring facts that any such consideration on the value of this idea must face.

The first is the historical fact that the modern scientific worldview that permeates our lives from smart phones to combustion engines to pharmaceuticals has indeed altered our self-understanding.

Of the writing of many books in the last decades on the “fate of reason,” “modernity” and theology's insipient contributions to their demise seem to have no end. Equally the bell tolls for the university humanities and there is likewise a surplus of academic work on the transitory and contingent nature of what was once thought of as modernity's invariant principles of rational inquiry, now nakedly exposed as custom, hegemony and other pestilences and therefore openly hostile to any apposite “Other” in terms of economics, politics, race or gender.

The landscape is well-mapped. This is the entire postmodern/postcolonial world in which Western academics, religion and life now live within. Interestingly, both religion and science are problematized but for different reasons.

The standard story is as follows. A nexus of complex interactions—in thought, geo and local politics, economics and religion—contributed to the rise of a way of thinking variously called the Enlightenment or modernity that assumed it possible to have an objective (and therefore impartial) point of critique that, if followed, promised, and has indeed given much, in terms of, human freedom, knowledge and even peaceable lives. This eristic promise ultimately placed the contingent individual self as singular, as a common anthropological reference to the nature of human and non– human beingness. From this new “self as ontological incarnation” of human ideality (and my choice of Louis Dumont's problematic term is intentional), the human person, or a community of knowing selves (primarily as scientists but also as Wissenschaft in general), able to summon, judge and therefore discover the true nature of reality. Finally, we break the old world of the medieval and ancient to rebuild and find authority only in the products of our own hands.

In 1927, at an axial time of European history, Sigmund Freud published his The Future of an Illusion as a completion on his work on the origins of religion, started in 1913 with Totem and Taboo. In the work, Freud argues that religion is a necessary fiction whose illusionary power allowed humankind to become civilized while balancing primal/animal instinct of the self with the needs of living in a collective. In the work, Freud claims to bring psychoanalysis, psychodevelopment, and other disciplines such as archeology and anthropology to understand the origins and prevalence of religion especially that associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition. The themes in the work would persist throughout his later life, including his 1939 Moses and Monotheism. While it may be accurate, as scholars repeatedly argue, that Freud's work is dismissive of uniqueness of monotheism (and perhaps gives too much credit to the simple reduction of psychosexual development as the reason for it), it is also true that his claim that religion is a fiction whose illusion allows human society to make ontological claims on the nature of moral and natural reality rings true with most contemporary sociological theories on religion. Religion, particularly in light of the many historical and present religious candidates of human experience, at its root has a sociofunctional role and that this sociofunctional role can be the reason it is accepted, dismissed or vulnerable to usurpation by another religious identity over time. In short, most sociological analyses of religion find that the wide variety of ontotheological claims—whether Islam or Zoroastrianism—are best understood by the role of social stability that the worldviews grant. This position, on the surface, makes nothing of the underlying “truth” of the divine reality/ities but only that they “work” in granting social utility, both communal and personal. This means, using Freud's language, that they are “fictions” granted power by their utility and as such make no claim on ontology itself. In words, they are made up by humans as they understand themselves, not necessarily a true investigation or understanding of the Real. They are “illusions” that grant social stability (and by extension, social abuse), given ontological power by their usefulness and therefore entirely human—perhaps local but certainly not divine in origin.

Strange days. I sit in my home office, using Zoom to lecture and to communicate, while a global pandemic brings about a second lockdown in most European countries (and some of my province in Canada) while I listen to the national radio broadcast a “science” reporter whose expertise a short 10 months ago was provincial governmental affairs. In the period of the pandemic, he went from being an expert on politics to the public radio voice of the science of the pandemic on the national radio broadcast in my heavily populated region. His position on the national broadcaster, its centrality in terms of Ontario population, means that he really is shaping how many educated or interested Ontario residents think about the pandemic. He is, in the parlance I will repeatedly use in this work, “educating us to reality”—in this case not only on the science of COVID-19 but also the human ethics and social aspects of it as well. Our intrepid reporter cites health experts and various studies, interviews talking heads from various universities with impressive expertise and works tirelessly but gets so much of it wrong (at least, for me)—I checked his biography and as far as I can see, he has no training in science. The talking heads struggle to speak “science” into a void that wants easy reduction and whenever they qualify or modulate what can be said, end up being pressed to an absolute kind of statement on numbers, virulence or infection rates as if they have absolute secret knowledge that is fated to come. And importantly, each morning the political reporter qua science expert tells the audience how that understanding should impact or alter human behavior, social interactions and even economics or politics based on his curious interactions with above experts. But, and this is the point, he confuses the two places on what science is saying and what it means. That is an intractable point of confusion, a place of dialogue between the scientists and the general public for whom public agencies are working.

A widely considered master narrative of the past century is of a steady disenchantment of the Judeo-Christian Platonic world and the rise of a soulless scientism of Aristotelian causality. The story is as follows. When the sacred canopy—the place of God and morals—is eroded by naturalist, positivistic scientism (see Becker on this with respect to quantum mechanics) then what grinds out supranature is extrinsically hostile to humanity and indeed creation. All the villains of social Darwinism, technocratic Prometheanism and scientific reductionism manifest as philosophical naturalism to deny morality, connectivity and certainly conatus or drive for moral reform, let alone connection with one another and the wider planet. Humanity is left to drone mentality, over and above nature and aimless in a cold distant nothingness. Into this story, the enchanted or mystical is preferred, whether Real or not, because it pulls out of mere representation toward imagination, and in doing so, provides ethical will and energy. This repeated and terrible story ends with the “human being [alone],” and our more recent postmodern, postfoundationist, postracial and so forth, history as the humane desiring to hope and a return to the native or naïve, and a re-enchantment of human purpose, connection and destiny. Imagination of a better, unconnected to our historical foibles, future is the remit and there is almost always an appeal to a better nature in humankind. This is, of course, a prehistorical, presocial and completely natural human being uncorrupted by the positivistic history of the Western world and its most beloved child in science. But little attention is paid to this presocial natural human for whom education (both formal and cultural as a kind of ontology) can resurrect for a better future without inequalities of every stripe. For our purposes, this narrative is important. In particular, the thinking on “natural” and “nature” is imperative as both those terms seem to be Edenic or preferential to the context of culture we find ourselves in. While we may be the product of cultures—personal (family and immediate context) and social that corrupt our moral and self-orientations through traumas—there is also the presupposition of a natural self or person untainted by those winds of context. The trick is to live in that nature endorsing connected self to the planet, to life and to each other.