It irks me to no end when the scientist’s sense of awe and wonder at the universe is confused with the wide-eyed credulity of the woo-believer — especially since reality is so much more complex and subtle than the stories humans make up about it. Take the interconnectedness you mentioned before, for example. The uncritical mystic might say “all life is connected” and leave it at that, comfortable with a mystery vague enough that it might mean anything (or nothing). Or “god did it”, and then go on to describe a god that looks remarkably like we do, because it’s too frightening to deal with a universe that doesn’t wear a human face.

Now compare with an evolutionary view, spanning eons: everything that lives now, at least on Earth, came from something else living, which came from something else, so on back to the earliest forms of life. In a sense, every organism on the planet is part of a single living being, four billion years long — a great tree growing upwards in time, with its roots in the deep past and each of us one of its leaves. Its branches fork and twine about in a fractal mesh more intricate than anything a merely human craftsman could devise. I’ll never understand the sort of mind that can’t appreciate a thing like that.