In Religion & Ecology circles one often comes across references to the thought of Thomas Berry, and to a project inspired by his ideas, Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker's "Journey of the Universe." A cluster of courses, a book and a documentary film, "Journey of the Universe" tries to use recent scientific discoveries to fashion a new story, a myth comparable to those of world religions. It seeks to provide answers to the great questions like: Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? - and of death? and How are we to live?
The "epic story" offered is a sort of immanent Intelligent Design. The 14 billion year story which we see through the lens of life and awareness, in some sense was bound to produce life and awareness, since it is "intrinsic to matter" to generate patterns, to self-organize into more complex assemblages. There's no suggestion (as in ID) that the universe was set up this way for this purpose, though there's some ID-ish amazement that had the Big Bang been just a smidge faster or slower none of this would have arisen. There's no designer but wonder at the cosmic fact of self-organizing design. The documentary is filmed on the Greek island of Samos because Samos was the home of Pythagoras, who thought the principle of matter lay in numbers and patterns.
Stars, we learn, are our ancestors, our planet alive, and all life our kin... but we may be the only ones in this whole vast history to be able to bring "insight" into it all. Inspiring, humbling, galvanizing? Not for me. Like "Big History" it seemed like some kind of sleight of hand to go from the scale of the cosmos, in time and space, to human history, not to mention a familiar anthropocentrism to suppose we play some cosmic role. Might not every mote in this vastness look the wrong way down its telescope and tell a similar story - similar at least in slowing down and zooming in as it approaches its brief moment of existence?
I suppose "Journey of the Universe" doesn't disallow such other stories, just suggests that this one might work for us. Work, that is, anchor us in our world with truthful understanding of what's going on, and anchor an ethics in our membership of the reality of the "earth community." (I can dig that.) Should the constellation of materials and events which made us possible have made all manner of other things possible, too, inaccessible to our little Pythagorean minds, the more the merrier!
Stars, we learn, are our ancestors, our planet alive, and all life our kin... but we may be the only ones in this whole vast history to be able to bring "insight" into it all. Inspiring, humbling, galvanizing? Not for me. Like "Big History" it seemed like some kind of sleight of hand to go from the scale of the cosmos, in time and space, to human history, not to mention a familiar anthropocentrism to suppose we play some cosmic role. Might not every mote in this vastness look the wrong way down its telescope and tell a similar story - similar at least in slowing down and zooming in as it approaches its brief moment of existence?
I suppose "Journey of the Universe" doesn't disallow such other stories, just suggests that this one might work for us. Work, that is, anchor us in our world with truthful understanding of what's going on, and anchor an ethics in our membership of the reality of the "earth community." (I can dig that.) Should the constellation of materials and events which made us possible have made all manner of other things possible, too, inaccessible to our little Pythagorean minds, the more the merrier!
