Abstract
This chapter focuses on Universe Story/Epic of Evolution/Big History movements, forms of science-based ecospirituality that have emerged in recent decades. One of my central claims is that these narratives tend to encourage awe and wonder at scientific information and expert knowledge as that which is most ‘real’, over and above direct encounters with the natural world. As such, I question whether these new myths are likely to engender the environmental values they seek to cultivate. Everyday experiences and encounters with the natural world—encounters not filtered through scientific analysis and explanation—are likely to be devalued in this worldview. This tendency is particularly pronounced in iterations that are inspired by the work of E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins, both of whom promote a mythopoeic rendering of scientific information as a robust and superior rival to religion. Espousing a religion based on scientific reality, some proponents of these narratives express attitudes of intolerance toward religious and cultural traditions that do not derive meaning and value directly from science, even though these traditions may embrace green values on their own terms. As a whole these movements discourage sensory, experience-infused forms of engagement with nature that are less dependent upon and mediated by expert knowledge.
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Notes
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I think “New Genesis” appropriate for various reasons but primarily because all of these movements proffer a new, common creation story based upon our understanding of cosmogenesis. All are engaged in a process of religiopoeisis, of crafting a new religion, grounded in a myth that explains our origins and destiny. I thank J. Baird Callicott for suggesting this phrase.
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Those most influenced by biology tend to use the phrase “Epic of Evolution”—notably Rue and Goodenough; however, Swimme and Tucker also deploy this phrase, and Dowd and Barlow use a variety of terms interchangeably. In 1996, Goodenough and Rue co-chaired a conference sponsored by the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science on The Epic of Evolution, which featured Swimme, Tucker, and Grim as speakers. In 1997, Barlow published Green Space, Green Time, a book that charts the genesis and development of the Epic of Evolution and features formal interviews and spontaneous conversations with E.O. Wilson, Loyal Rue, Ursula Goodenough, Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grim, and Brian Swimme. Barlow later met and married Michael Dowd. Goodenough credits Rue as the inspiration for her book The Sacred Depths of Nature. Tucker, Grim, and Swimme have recently collaborated on Journey of the Universe, a documentary film devoted to the universe story and its potential to spark a new environmental sensibility. Goodenough served as science advisor to the book and film.
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The online seminar educates participants about their biological and social instincts and explores “the science of how to decode human behavior, eliminate self-judgment, and create a big-hearted life of purpose and joyful meaning.” See Dowd and Barlow (n.d.).
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Taylor (2010) develops a typology of dark green religions that casts Goodenough’s worldview as a form of Gaian Naturalism “whose proponents express awe and wonder when facing the complexity and mysteries of life and the universe, relying on religious language and metaphors of the sacred (sometimes only implicitly and not self-consciously) when confessing their feelings of belonging and connection to the energy and life systems that they inhabit and study” (16).
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It is not always clear whether this diagnosis extends only or primarily to Western cultures or to global industrial society generally, irrespective of particular religious or cultural commitments. Thomas Berry, who first called for a “New Story” in an issue of Teilhard Studies (1978) often diagnosed storylessness as a Eurowestern problem.
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Stephen Bede Scharper is a rare exception, though his critique is now somewhat dated and takes the form of a series of astute questions rather than assertions (Scharper 1997).
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“Although I have become a charter member of the board of directors of the newly formed Epic of Evolution Society, let me hasten to add that this is not exactly my project,” Callicott writes. His project is indeed more modest, more terrestrially-focused and narrowly drawn than the grander project of Berry, Swimme, Chaisson, Tucker, Grim, Rue and others; however, while Callicott tempers the truth claims of post-modern science, his project, and the comparisons between different myths that the project entails, still suggests that science and religion are oriented to the same end, that they occupy a similar explanatory slot, or that literalist/creationist views stand in for religion generally (to wit, “a grand narrative that is contradicted by the fossil record or evidence of an expanding universe” is not sufficiently “credible,” says Callicott [2002: 167]). The impulse to present science as a worldview that can function much like religion would seem itself to be a holdover of positivistic modern science. The “remediation” concept figures in a more recent essay (Callicott 2011) in which, aside from a brief reference to Berry, Callicott claims no connection to the New Genesis movement, though he makes an even more forceful argument for replacing the Abrahamic with the evolutionary-ecological worldview (while acknowledging that no worldview is, strictly speaking, true).
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See Wilson’s chapter in Consilience titled “The Enlightenment.” Wilson’s defense of Enlightenment positivism leads him to an extended critique of post-modernism’s claim that there is no “real” reality (44). Wilson’s and Dawkins’ works both contain diatribes against postmodern and deconstructive responses to science (as well as Romanticism generally). Wilson also expresses profound admiration for the logical positivists (67–71).
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The phrase is from Mary Midgley (1985, 2002: 131).
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Callicott recognizes this point as well, noting that the stories science tells may be “accessible only to initiates” or “intellectual elites,” though he appears confident that science can be mediated in ways that transform it into a popular mythology (2002: 171). The story-telling talents of New Genesis advocates vary considerably. Rue’s flat-footed and reductionist narrative is particularly, and consistently, uninspiring.
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Berry too laments the lack of a “unifying paradigm” in American universities and argues that while traditional or local stories are “also needed” in the education of youth, “none of them can provide the encompassing context for education such as is available in this new story” (1988: 98–99).
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Wilson offers this observation in an interview conducted by Barlow (1997: 27). Oddly, his assumption appears to be that the humanities are currently getting their material from “traditional theology”—an indication, perhaps, of Wilson’s inadequate knowledge of how either the humanities or theology do their thing.
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Goodenough co-teaches such a course at Washington University, alongside a physicist and geoscientist; no humanities faculty are required, despite the claim that the course explores the “implications of the epic for philosophy, religion, global polity, and environmental ethics.” Detailed course information is available at http://epsc.wustl.edu/courses/epsc210a/
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The entire New Genesis project appears at times to rest on an assumption that our present environmental crisis is actually being caused by the traditional faiths; sometimes this claim is made explicit, as in some of Rue’s work, and sometimes the charge of guilt is restricted to the Abrahamic faiths, as Callicott seems to indicate. But this assignation of guilt is far from obvious.
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Tucker and Swimme have recently stressed that the New Story and the Universe Story are simply “a” story of the universe, not “the” story, and they deny that the story must be universally adopted. Such disclaimers keep certain criticisms at bay but also distance them from their project’s animating rationale. Berry underscored the singular nature of the story and the imperative for all to embrace it: “Only through this story are we able in any integral manner to overcome our alienation from the natural world,” Berry argues (1999: 83). “Both education and religion need to ground themselves within the story of the universe as we now know it through our empirical ways of knowing” (ibid.: 71). Of course, much hinges on what it means to “ground” one thing in another, but insofar as Berry and his followers offer their story as a sacred cosmology, the legacy religions appear as competing (and less functional) cosmologies.
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Sideris, L.H. (2013). Science as Sacred Myth? Ecospirituality in the Anthropocene Age. In: Rozzi, R., Pickett, S., Palmer, C., Armesto, J., Callicott, J. (eds) Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World. Ecology and Ethics, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7470-4_12
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