Adam Frank reflects on the importance of terminology and explains why he chooses to use “the sacred” to express the common aspirations of science and “spiritual endeavor”:

According to the Encyclopedia of Religions, the Latin origins of “sacred” relate to “sacrum”—”what belonged to the gods or what was in their power.” Its early usage related to Roman temples and their rites. In that context, the words sacrum and profanum have been frequently paired together.
The profanum was the space in front of the temple. It was the “outside” where you could sell your Grateful Dead T-shirts, sunglasses, and hot dogs. The sacrum was the inside, and it was a very different kind of place: “A spot referred to as sacer, was either walled off or otherwise set apart.” That definition makes for a compelling resonance.
The Sacred relates back to a specific location, a space and a time, set apart from the ordinary day-to-day happenings of life. The commerce, contest, and competition of the ordinary world occur outside in the profane. Inside, within the sacer, humans entered a realm of a different order. For the Romans, it was a realm of their divinities. For us it can be an experience that calls us out to see the world on its own terms. It is the moment when experience becomes luminous, lit up on its own. That is the space where science begins. We notice the world as it is on its own terms and we are moved to draw closer and ask more. That is also the moment when spiritual endeavor can begin, when an attempt to draw closer to the root of the personal experience is initiated.

Chris Faraone of the Boston Phoenix observes:

At the time of this writing, six of the top 20 most popular paid e-books in the Apple App Store are Bibles. Likewise, the Washington State–based company Olive Tree’s Bible Reader is consistently one of the most downloaded free books. Users have left thousands of comments praising e-Bible serviceability; one version with a social-networking component even allows believers to search for other folks who want to chat about specific chapters. More so, it can tap a smart phone’s GPS to locate local prayer groups with similar affinities.
And it is e-Bibles that have helped push technology forward, by allowing users to seamlessly flip between scanning on an iPhone and reading on a laptop (without losing their page). Ditto the ability to switch, mid-stream, between Standard English and dozens of translations, or jump to an audio-book version, while keeping place to the sentence. Learned readers can even teleport from one particular chapter/verse in the King James Version to the same place in the New International Version. The future is now.

Adam Frank suggests that we can gain a new, more fruitful perspective on science and religion by looking back at how our early ancestors responded to their experiences:

The beautiful paintings of bull, bison, and bear in the caves of Lascaux and Altamira give silent testimony to the simple fact that we have been awake and watching what the world evokes in us for a long, long time. It is impossible to know if these cave paintings had explicit religious orientations, but it is difficult to view them and not sense their engagement with a sacredness, a deeply felt interior response to the world. These cave paintings and other early art speak to the role of Mythos—the internalized, symbolic reaction to the world which we still carry with us today.
At the same time, the finely crafted harpoons, needles, and hand axes found at paleolithic sites around the world speak to the other domain of human being, the external observation and manipulation of the world. In these tools and in bone fragments engraved with the cycles of lunar phases or carved with elemental counting schemes there is ample evidence that Logos—analytic, technical thinking—had already been awakened in our ancestors.
The remarkable findings of modern archeology afford us a perspective on our own origins that we would be foolish to ignore in thinking about science and religion. Rather than simply arguing over which specific form of modern religion best fits (or doesn’t fit at all) the latest scientific results, can we step back and ask broader questions that reach the common roots of our humanity?

As Adam Frank sees it, the time has come for America to move beyond “the exhausted and fruitless debate over evolution and creationism”:

It’s time to put a definitive end to the futile, misguided school board curriculum battles. Evolution happened. We must fight to ensure that the forces of restriction never restrict that truth.
At the same time, however, we have to find the creative will to speak to the many ways humans encounter the True and the Real, including the sense of sacred. In a century sure to be haunted by climate change, resource depletion, and a variety of terrorisms, we will need all the tools of wisdom we can get. Science and Religion, at their best, can both be sources of wisdom. At their worst, well, we all know what that looks like.

He adds:

We have an extraordinary line of enlightened and enlivened thinking about religion in this country. From Thomas Merton to Martin Luther King to Philip Kapleau, we have had our share of great innovators in the domains of religion. Most importantly, there has been ferocious American creativity in developing new sensitivities between Science and the domains of spiritual endeavor. It stretches from Thoreau, Emerson, the great William James and on to our time. That is powerful mojo to draw on as we try to imagine what’s been missed as Creationist polarities have sucked all the air out of the room.