Tried showing (much of) the long documentary about Lynn Margulis in "Religion and the Anthropocene" today. I often show a film when students are handing in work, since they're unlikely to have time for the assignment and a class reading. But for this particular class at this point in our meandering trajectory it also makes an interesting sort of sense.
Last week we finished Shock of the Anthropocene and learned about the range of monotheistic understanding of providence - and read selections from the Dao De Jing for something completely different.
"Symbiotic Earth" doesn't broach religion, but that doesn't mean religion doesn't come up. As in Shock of the Anthropocene, it comes up first as an epithet of criticism. We learn that Margulis' ideas of symbiosis were criticized by Neo-Darwinians as "feeding the creationists." But she gave as good as she got, dismissing Neo-Darwinism as "a minor twentieth century religious sect" which would soon disappear.
That's early in the film. By the time something like religion returns, we've been taken through many layers of emergent wonder. An account which began with the simplest one-celled life forms ends with the apparently self-regulating atmosphere of the Earth, what led James Lovelock to speak of Gaia. Margulis, a friend of Lovelock's, dismisses the idea of the earth as a goddess - what's going on is still bacteria doing their thing in nested consortia of consortia or consortia. But she's comfortable with the term, referring to a carpet of bacteria off the east coast of the US as the "tissue of Gaia."
Perhaps the name of a goddess is fitting after all. We'll see what the class thinks when we turn to a religious naturalism of emergence.
Last week we finished Shock of the Anthropocene and learned about the range of monotheistic understanding of providence - and read selections from the Dao De Jing for something completely different.
"Symbiotic Earth" doesn't broach religion, but that doesn't mean religion doesn't come up. As in Shock of the Anthropocene, it comes up first as an epithet of criticism. We learn that Margulis' ideas of symbiosis were criticized by Neo-Darwinians as "feeding the creationists." But she gave as good as she got, dismissing Neo-Darwinism as "a minor twentieth century religious sect" which would soon disappear.
That's early in the film. By the time something like religion returns, we've been taken through many layers of emergent wonder. An account which began with the simplest one-celled life forms ends with the apparently self-regulating atmosphere of the Earth, what led James Lovelock to speak of Gaia. Margulis, a friend of Lovelock's, dismisses the idea of the earth as a goddess - what's going on is still bacteria doing their thing in nested consortia of consortia or consortia. But she's comfortable with the term, referring to a carpet of bacteria off the east coast of the US as the "tissue of Gaia."
Perhaps the name of a goddess is fitting after all. We'll see what the class thinks when we turn to a religious naturalism of emergence.
