The Horror and Wonder of Outer Space Travel

Usually we live in the world of the given. Our world can be known by the immediacy of our senses or that which is known and accessible to us in our immediate experience. We also have insights. These are theories or thoughts that we want to believe are true about the universe. Our beliefs come from a particular point of view and operate within the limits of presuppositions that we have about how the world operates. When we are confronted with wonder or horror, however, the world changes. We are forced to make judgments based outside what is normally known to us. Our thoughts are forming and "in the making" and are driven toward meaning because they are animated by awe, not by what we normally see and practice in everydayness.

Jerome Miller tells us in his book "In the Throe of Wonder" that for the philosopher Heidegger, the possibility of losing one's world in horror reawakens the world of being. Lonergan in his philosophy of God on the other hand believed that if one were caught in the throes of wonder, it would beckon one toward understanding being, perhaps in a whole new way. Rather than remain in the comfort of a universe of our own meaning, we may face horror and wonder, which help us love our ordinary way of understanding everything, so that true being beyond that which is normally known can become accessible to our minds. Miller believed that for "old men," it would mean being "as childlike as explorers." They would lose their ordinary world and move toward the awesome. By moving toward the wonder, they would find real being in their existence.