Today’s Post
Last week we saw how Teilhard’s model of the ‘spiral of evolution’ offers insight into how the wellsprings of cosmic evolution not only rise through the strata of existence, but can be seen as active in both our lives and in society.
This week we will take a look at how our two traditional ‘cosmic stories’ can become more comprehensive, and act as an agency for human happiness, by seeing them in the context of ‘The Terrain of Synergy’.
Telling The Cosmic Story
We have seen in many segments of this blog how our collective understanding of the cosmos, what we understand of it and how our understanding of it affects both the living of our lives and our participation in the larger society. We have also noted the many dualisms that face us as we attempt to integrate principles of wholeness into our lives. Science and religion obviously represent a rich source of concepts which we can use, but at the same time, both within themselves and between themselves, can be found many contradictions and concepts neither helpful nor relevant to our life.
John Haught, Research Professor at Georgetown University, offers a way to look at this situation from the center of what we have been referring to as the ‘Terrain of Synergy’. In his perspective, outlined in his book, “The New Cosmic Story”, science and religion offer our two traditional ways of telling the ‘Cosmic Story’.
In this book, he critiques the stories traditionally told by science and religion, and argues for a third story which offers an integrated perspective on what is clearly an integrated cosmos.
He stands well back from the traditional stories, and understands them as two categories of lore which address the same thing: the cosmos.
- The first category he labels as “archaeonomy” which is the traditional, empirically-based story told by science.
- The second category is the story told by traditional, intuition-based religion, which he labels, “analogy”
- The third story is the one slowly emerging today as we learn more about the universe, which he labels, “anticipation”
These three categories of stories serve not only as a taxonomy of stories of the cosmos, but also as a guide to understanding our place within it. In this he echoes Teilhard, Paul Davies, Jonathan Sacks and Richard Rohr, all of whom we have met in previous posts.
The Archaenomic Story
We have looked with some detail at the story which mainstream science tells, particularly at how science seems to be marking time at the phenomenon of the human person. In Haught’s telling, and in implicit agreement with Davies,
“The obvious fact of emergence- the arrival of unpredictable new organizational principles and patterns in nature- continues to elude human inquiry as long as it follows archaeonomic naturalism in reducing what is later-and-more in the cosmic process to what is earlier-and-simpler. A materialist reading of nature leads our minds back down the corridor of cosmic time to a state of original subatomic dispersal- that is to a condition of physical de-coherence.”
And, recognizing this ‘corridor’ as Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’, he goes on to say
“Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ (eg consciousness aware of itself) has been part of the universe from the start. So hidden is this interior side of the cosmos from public examination that scientists and philosophers with materialist leanings usually claim it has no real existence.” (Parentheses mine)
He notes “…how little illumination materialistic readings of nature have shed not only on religion but also on life, mind, morality and other emergent phenomena.”
And, I would add, how little illumination on human happiness.
The Analogic Story
He is neither sparing of the traditional religious telling of the ‘Cosmic Story’
“Analogy has appealed to religious people for centuries, but it remains intellectually plausible only so long as the universe is taken to be immobile. Once we realize that nature is a gradually unfolding narrative, we cannot help noticing that more is indeed coming into the story out of less over the course of time, and that it does so without miraculous interruptions and without disturbing invariant physical and chemical principles. It is intellectually plausible only as long as the universe is taken to be immobile.”
The Inadequacy of the Two Stories
He notes how neither of the two legacy ‘Cosmic Stories’ are satisfactory today.
“If the analogical reading is unbelievable- since it has to bring in supernatural causes to explain how more-being gets into the natural world- the archaeonomic reading is even less believable since it cannot show how the mere passage of time accounts for the fuller-being that gradually emerges.
If analogy cannot make the emergence of life and mind intelligible without bringing in a non-natural mode of causation that lifts the whole mass up from above, archaeonomy is even less intellectually helpful in assuming that all true causes are ultimately mindless physical events, hence that life and mind are not really anything more than their inanimate constituents.”
But closer to the focus of our search for a story which is more relevant to our lives
“Both archaeonomic cosmic pessimism and analogical otherworldly optimism, by comparison, are expressions of impatience.”
Impatience- indignant dissatisfaction with our state and that of the environment which surrounds us- is one element of our ‘existential anxiety’. Haught’s insight into this condition explains why neither the comfort provided by religion in the past or the intellectual satisfaction promised by technology for the future are working to ease such a condition.
The Anticipation Story
In the third category of ‘Cosmic Story’, Haught is suggesting a confluence between science and religion that builds on their strengths and ‘filters’ out their shortcomings.
“Anticipation offers a coherent alternative to both analogy and archaeonomy. It reads nature, life, mind and religion as ways in which a whole universe is awakening to the coming of more-being on the horizon. It accepts both the new scientific narrative of gradual emergence and the sense that something ontologically richer and fuller is coming into the universe in the process.”
He proposes that such an approach to the nature of the cosmos also can bring about a profound sense of ‘belonging’ once we begin to trust the upwelling of wholeness warranted by fourteen or so billion years of ‘complexification’.
“An anticipatory reading of the cosmic story therefore requires a patient forbearance akin to the disposition we must have when reading any intriguing story. Reading the cosmic story calls for a similar kind of waiting, a policy of vigilance inseparable from what some religious traditions call faith. Indeed, there is a sense in which faith, as I use the term…, is patience”.
Thus the anticipatory approach to the cosmic story requires a certain patience with the process of complexification, certain in the belief that the future is better than the past. Placing the universe in the context of becoming requires us to understand that
“Not-yet, however, is not the same as non-being. It exists as a reservoir of possibilities that have yet to be actualized. It is a realm of being that has future as its very essence.”
Patricia Allerbee, whom we have met previously, echoes this perspective
“..the long history of rising universal complexity suggests that we have only to allow ourselves to be “lifted by the evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”. To do this, “we only have to begin to pay attention”.
And, as John Haught advises, “to anticipate with patience”.
The Next Post
This week we have returned to the idea of a ‘Terrain of Synergy’ in our search for the ground of happiness, this time from the perspective of John Haught, who contrasts the legacy religious and scientific ‘Cosmic Stories’, but suggests areas of overlap. In his perspective, what is warranted as we participate in the flow of human evolution, is a spirit of ‘anticipation’: less a hand-wringing, indignant demand for faster progress than a realization of the progress that is being made and a recognition that Allerbee’s ‘optimization’ is in fact underway in our lives as well as our societies.
Next week we will look into the traditional Western religious lore, referred to by Haught as ‘analogy’ to sift its ore for the jewels of insight that it offers this exploration.