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I've read this conversation w/ some interest.

Several years ago, a colleague in chemistry, Sharon Burgmayer, and I (both of whom see  our religious lives as entirely congruent with our intellectual work as college professors and researchers), created a web site called Science & Spirit. We used it to invite others into the exploratory seeking that Quakers call "continuing revelation": a process of constantly "testing" in a social context, against what others know, what one knows oneself, against new experience and new information--activities that, ideally, can be practiced in both the religious and the intellectual realms.

This past month I've been reading the writings of William James, who actually anticipated your idea of unconscious thinking as a place that joins these different realms. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) he looks @ individual religious experience; he has no interest whatsoever in institutional forms of practice. He says,

The subconscious self is nowadays a well-accredited psychological entity....there is actually and literally more life in our total soul than we are at any time aware of….’Each of us is in reality an abiding psychical entity far more extensive than he knows—an individuality which can never express itself completely through any corporeal manifestation…there is always some party of the Self unmanifested; and always…some power of organic expression in abeyance or reserve’…we have seen how striking a part invasions from this region play in the religious life.

Let me propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its farther side, the ‘more’ with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its hither side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life (511-512).

In his 1907 lectures on Pragmatism, James adds,

“pragmatism…’unstiffens’ our theories…She is completely genial. She will entertain any hypothesis, she will consider any evidence…In short, she widens the field of search for God. Rationalism sticks to logic and the empyrean. Empiricism sticks to the external senses. Pragmatism is willing to take anything, to follow either logic or the senses and to count the humblest and most personal experiences…Her only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us….” (39-40).

I've suggested elsewhere that we should add these writings by James on Pragmatism to our readings for the Evolving systems group; I find his repeated use of "usefulness" as a definition of "reality" really visionary...and useful.