Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World by Lisa H. Sideris

Author:Lisa H. Sideris [Sideris, Lisa H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Religion, Religion & Science
ISBN: 9780520294974
Google: gXkpDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B073QKZ715
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2017-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

SCIENCE AS ITS OWN CURE?

To be sure, universe stories sometimes lament that we are leaving behind the Holocene period and moving into “the Anthropocene, an era shaped primarily not by natural systems but by humans.”151 And yet, these narratives perpetuate faith that better knowledge conditions (especially as secured via the new scientific story) will safeguard our interventions—our will to participate in evolution—from intellectual or moral errors that tainted human intervention in a less enlightened time. Where previously we created accidental, unintentional harms—say, climate change—we now intervene in ways that produce only mutually beneficial outcomes for humans and nature. Unintended consequences will themselves be a thing of the past, the storyline suggests. Even Berry, despite obvious concerns about the allure of the Technozoic, occasionally lapses into rhetoric that praises science as a cure for its own ills and excesses. “If our science has gone through its difficulties, it has cured itself out of its own resources.”152 Journey is also quick to point out that any harms, large or small, perpetrated against nature through humanity’s exercise of science and technology were purely unintentional and accidental. Yes, ice caps are melting, species disappearing, and coral reefs dying, but “we thought we were making a better and more prosperous world . . . . The paradox of unintended consequences is now becoming evident.”153 “Though certainly unintended,” they repeat, “one of the consequences of the modern form of humanity is the termination of the Cenozoic era” signaled by “current mass extinction.”154 “From its inception,” they further assure us, “modern science was committed to discovering knowledge and using it to make a better world.”155

This unduly sanguine appraisal of the benign intentions of all of modern science and technology recalls Wilson’s portrait of humans as now “smart enough” to manage nature properly. It leads our storytellers to ponder how humanity’s uniformly good intentions went so badly awry. Interestingly, Journey diagnoses the problem as stemming from our previously “inadequate understanding of matter itself.”156 The narrative then proceeds with a simplified history in which the “deterministic” and “materialistic” science of Galileo, Newton, and Descartes, and the attendant assumption of “passive” matter, is now superseded by new scientific concepts of “creative emergence” and the “self-organizing dynamism” of the cosmos.157 This new understanding of matter—the cosmos not as a machine but as a vital, purpose-driven, life-giving entity—reveals a universe that “brings forth” its creations when the time is right. In language resonant of Ecclesiastes, Journey praises the wisdom manifest in cosmic unfolding: there was a time for hydrogen atoms and a time for galaxies; a time “when the Earth became ignited with life.” Armed with a new consciousness that will effectively reverse humans’ past unconscious and unintentional harms, and with guarantees of the universe’s inherent wisdom, humans can confidently remake the world. Now is the most exciting time of all, Journey tells us, for “we live in that time when Earth itself begins its adventure of conscious self-awareness.”158

In describing our present geological moment, Swimme elsewhere announces, in similarly excited tones, the end of the Cenozoic.

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