"It is the Alethiometer. It tells the truth. As for how to read it, you'll have to learn by yourself."

Ever since The Lord of the Rings, it's as if Hollywood is determined to launch the next fantasy franchise during the holidays. First The Chronicles of Narnia, and now comes the adaptation of the Carnegie Medal-winning novel by Philip Pullman, the first volume in the His Dark Materials trilogy, The Golden Compass.

I might be completely misinterpreting the previews for this movie (or this may simply be where my head is at), but I look forward to a movie whose theme seems to be challenging the paradigms within which we find ourselves.

We live in a modern, rationalistic age; that is the model, the worldview, through which we view reality. However, every model is bounded by the limitations of the human mind in the context of the age that he's living in. Models come and go as our frames of reference change, yet all models eventually reach a point of no room for new development. Where the act of adapting the model, the contortions of logic that we do to maintain that model, is more cumbersome than chucking that model and developing a new one.

Paradigm shifts are hard. We're talking about letting go of that which we know, that which makes us comfortable. This becomes doubly difficult since we're also talking about the loss of security in what we believed. Our faith. In terms of religion, we construct these theological boxes, easily understood models of interpretation, then force God and the Bible into them. But it doesn't have to be religion. It could be science when faced with the mysteries of creation or the intrusion of the spiritual. Of fantasy, magic, and wonder.

There is room to be both spiritual and a free-thinking scientific intellectual. Both rational and open to the magic around us. Which is why I look forward to seeing The Golden Compass.