Telling Stories Sharon Scholl
The past hundred years has seen the development of three primal stories that orient us to the universe, give us a place in the order of things. It has also witnessed the failure of our oldest primal story that for two thousand years oriented us to worlds seen and unseen, gave our lives purpose and destiny. We are people without a story that appeals to our humanity rather than our chemistry. How did this happen?
The first story starts with Isaac Newton when we learned that gravity is a universal force cradling the tiniest insect and the farthest star. This cosmic physics had predictive power and a perfect relationship between theory and observation. Then we learned that light is the great constant, that space curves and time dilates relative to the observer. Then mass and energy appear interchangeable, describing the nuclear furnace of our sun. A study of the shift in the wave length of light indicates our universe is expanding and must have been a compact singularity some fifteen billion years back. We can’t yet account for the 85% of matter which is dark to us and farther pushes galaxies apart.
It is a powerful story, accounting for our origins as carbon-based creatures, a flicker in time, a peripheral accident doomed to disappear in the fireball of our dying sun. Not a warm fuzzy anywhere in that tale: humans as temporary accretions of a universal chemistry, without a designated mission around which to shape our lives. We look in vain for the love that framed the universe, that set the stars to singing in the great chorus of creation.
But there is another story of the unimaginably small beginning with the microscope and progressing to the atom smasher. It includes the discovered regularity of atomic properties which became the periodic table, then radioactivity as a property of unstable atoms. Then energy bundles (quantum) with their constant charge, and the curiosity of both particle-like and wave-like behavior of particles. There was the discovered uncertainty of our detection of both position and speed of properties. It was discovered that particles can be at two places at once, or so entangled that the state of one particle influences the state of another distant particle.
This story is about a few basic principles: electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces that together with gravitation determine the physical properties of the universe. It is also the story of a world essentially random, unpredictable, knowable only at the level of probability. The title of the story is the Standard Model, a formula of 18 adjustable perameters which encodes everything known about the sub-atomic world. This story changed our technological life, giving us transistors, semi-conductors, and all the products they power. No telling what current interest in string and membrane theory will produce.
It is a story for which we have only a mathematical model, not a world which is real to us in any way. It is the story of the universe as an organic whole with room for chance where creativity thrives. Also a world of great destructiveness and waste without perceivable beneficent purpose. This story misses by a long shot the warm fuzzies award. It gives us no insight about our purpose as life forms, our future, the import of our existence. Like the first story, it reveals the great chemical soup, of which we are only one ingredient, and a troublesome one at that.
There is a third story that has shaped our conceptual lives over the past 150 years: Evolution. It is composed of three smaller tales: the common ancestry of all species, our origin in random variations of inheritance via the mechanism of natural selection. This story is closer to home, taking place in a world we understand as familiar. But its principles are equally humbling to our assumed status, equally destructive of our moral pretensions.
According to this story, we arise from the same carnal pool as the poisonous mudfish; nothing breathed any soul into us. The variation that brought us forth needed no divine direction; it is at work everywhere in the universe. Our laws, our morality are human inventions as varied and changeable as bed linen. Our role in this world is simply to survive in a natural environment which, if it had consciousness, might wish us gone. Our death and destruction is as important to the whole biota as is our creation and flourishing. Indeed, waste and evolutionary blind alleys are basic to our story. It gives little support to our aspirations, no holiness to our relationships, slight justification as we approach our deaths.
There is an older story that does all these things. It tells of our creation by a divine being which breathed its own life into our souls. It is a story of love, of rescue from captivity, of radical forgiveness and restoration. It speaks of divine sacrifice to rescue us from sin, divine companionship to guide our lives. It promises that beyond this life a more fulfilling life in its presence awaits. This story has warm fuzzies in abundance. There is just one problem: it grows less and less believable as the impact of the other stories becomes apparent. Our lives ARE tenuous, futures uncertain, subject to the vagaries of fate. We live LIKE probabilities adrift in a world that shifts beneath our feet. So we are people caught between stories, three unbearable and one unbelievable. What are we to do?
Here are some proposals to date:
1. Scientism/materialism in the style of Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson.
Nature itself in its grandeur, agelessness and processes is worthy of worship. Create rituals to celebrate its seasons; gear our lives to its rhythms. Learn its grand mathematical patterns. It is the old paganism without the old gods, a veneration of the orb, the atom.
2. Anti-realism in the manner of Don Cupitt and Lloyd Geering.
Constructs such as God were never real in any sense other than as summary names for human aspirations. Religion should be a “unifying expression of activity by which we can formulate ourselves and build our common world.” Save the idealized vision of ourselves as a species, the teachings of disinterested brotherly love, and the contemplative traditions of the world. Start from there. All else is fantasy.
3. New Age thought in the style of Matthew Fox.
The universe is a spiritual grace – a gift of unconditional love, the divine spirit coursing through all creatures. We should connect our capacity for wonder with the universe, our sense of unity with all life. We have an unhealthy disconnection from our right brain and its response to ritual, quiet, darkness, chanting, the senses that unlock our spiritual propensities. “We are outposts of divine activity on the frontiers of life.”
4. Non-overlapping magesteria in the style of Jay Gould.
Live separate lives, a conventionally religions one and a conventionally scientific one. About 40% of American scientists (according to Pew Trust Surveys) make that choice, though only 7% of the members of the Academy of American Science do. It is an honest dec;laration that we can’t feed the brain and the spiritual/emotional side of us with the same food.
5. Process thought- Panentheism, in the style of A.N. Whitehead and Charles Hartshorn.
God is a spiritual presence that pervades all reality, is in every drop of experience, and is interdependent with us and all beings. God’s body is the universe; its main quality is creativity. The only acts of God we can identify are the laws of nature. God grows and changes by interaction with all actualities; there is chance and tragedy even for God. We are infinite in God’s memory, so we participate in our own immortality. God is the deeply felt companion of all existence.
So there we have it – three great stories which describe physical reality as scientists understand it and five responses to that reality as it confronts a more ancient story. The responses are small bridges between the discoveries of science and the deepest intuitions we have about the meaning of life. No grand story has emerged; theologians are strangely silent. But why do we need a story, an account of human life that is more than the physical details of our scientific knowledge?
First, because a significant portion of humanity have direct experiences or lifelong intimations of a level of reality unlike that presented by either the sciences or theology. The stories I’ve described pale in comparison. Somewhere in these experiences is a clue to the meaning of our existence, our purpose as individuals and as a species.
Secondly, according to Francis Collins, a National Institute of Health geneticist, the propensity for this kind of experience is “soft wired” in the brain, an inheritable characteristic. There is a whole biology of spiritual awareness developing based on a conviction that it is real and that its perceptions are as valid as those of a scientific theory. It appears religiosity/spirituality is an innate capacity in humans; its varieties and contents are increasingly well know.
What we need now is the connective tissue: a story that interprets in a broadly humanistic way this natural proclivity, gives it a reason, a purpose, a role in our destiny. We need a story as grand as the scientific epics, a story that insists on the validity of its separate reality. A story much larger than the quaint tribal tales of Christians and Jews – one that takes in Muslims, Buddhists, and intelligent life everywhere in the universe. I’d like to be around to hear that tale.