It's actually simple, as basic things tend to be. The most foundationally honest and stable way to look at anything is in God's light. No matter the subject, this is the case. If it is the science of chemistry, astrophysics, quantum physics, meteorology, or the study of G.W. Carver's peanut, the question should be, "God, how is it that Your (peanut) is the way it is and functions as you have made it?" Quarks and consciousnesses too.
It gets said over and over that science is science and to consider God, it ceases to be science and becomes tainted with something people call "theology." Nothing is further from the truth. There is no such thing as proper science that does not include God, just as there is no such thing as the study of anything else that does not include God. (Remember the false dichotomy of dualism?)
Is there any truth, any fact anywhere, that is not God's truth and God's fact? We are told the answer to this question -- by God.
Trading materialism in for ideas of collective consciousness doesn't bring about the proper understanding for how things are and how they function. It may provide more conceptual gem stones for us, but it does not make jewelry. To understand even the most mundane technology aptly, it must be seen in its setting.
Whatever field is being studied, it is God's field and it is for His pleasure and He is there and involved with utter intentness and purpose, utter power and utter subtlety, sowing and reaping in that field. I'll let you finish the quote, "...for from Him and through Him and to Him are ___ ______."
There is no such thing as the divorce of the whats and the hows from the Utterly Personal whys. Attempts to make this separation are fundamentally and effectively insane.
Scientific speculation is laudatory, but like all our observations and conceptualizations, it is dark and our job is to shed light upon it, not to call it light.
Hello Brother A! On the one hand, I can grant the truth of what you say here; on the other, I would suggest that putting religious consciousness in the forefront of scientific investigation will probably get you "science" that isn't science. Religion is not science, and vice versa. They are two separate domains -- complementaries -- both of which are necessary. And because they are necessary, they must be kept separate in order to preserve the integrity of their unique functions in human life. At the end of the day, a believer such as myself doesn't feel "threatened" by science; for science can only make its discoveries based on what is; and what is is what God made.
IMHO, Neils Bohr's quantum epistemology is a work of both astonishing grandeur and human humility. Effectively he is saying that science must not be in the religion business (presumably because if it were so engaged, it would "screw up," not only science, but religion, too). And the reverse is true: religion souldn't be in the science business, for the same reason.
I agree with Profs. Kafatos and Nadeau that there needs to be a dialogue between the two knowledge domains -- science and metaphysics. The two are integrated at a much higher level than either of them on their own level. And ultimately, that will be at the level of the religious consciousness, of whatever description. FWIW.