From Authorizing to Authoring – Simon Appolloni

Have you noticed that throughout the last two decades or so, a growing body of literature has emerged within Christian-environmental-spiritual circles where the authors are arriving at conclusions and articulating theological visions based, in large part, on new insights garnered from new findings from science?

Specifically, the authors of these works – some of them theologians, some ethicists and others simply environmentalists concerned with spirituality or religion – are drawing from the ‘new science’, which comprises contemporary concepts, insights and understandings of reality from physics – notably quantum physics – cosmology, incorporating transdisciplinary theories such as systems theory, and the Gaian theory with its inclusion of evolutionary biology and evolutionary geology. Drawing all these authors together, it’s important to note, is a profound concern for the deepening poverty and an ecological crisis of unprecedented magnitude facing our planet.

Notwithstanding this bleak outlook for our world, what the science is revealing to them is that not all’s lost.

The universe can be viewed as a friendly, hopeful place, where cold mechanistic determinism is eschewed in favour of an evolving self-determining universe; systems theory points to a world of dynamic relationships where mind seems to ‘midwife’ reality into being. Lessons from cosmology and quantum mechanics point to there being nothing ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable’ about our current world disorder. In short, we can see a definite liberationist agenda forming, one that is both empowering and hopeful.

Those of you with historical perspicuity might point out (and correctly) that this close embrace of science within Christian circles is not an entirely new singularity. You’d be correct to point to an historical metaphysical trajectory within North American spirituality, one that historian Catherine Albanese calls ‘metaphysical religion’. Albanese shows how some North Americans, in opposition to the dominant orthodox Christian doctrines and older cosmologies, with their mechanistic view of the universe, have been struggling from a much earlier period – most notably from the time of the Enlightenment – to generate and then convey their own particular visions of God, the world, and the human, which could also be characterized as empowering and hopeful.

With their belief of an integrated universe where the material world is linked to the spiritual, this sundry group of metaphysicists remained at the fringe of respectability and credibility within the broader Christian tradition. However, with the advent of the new science, whose theories were resonating remarkably closely with their beliefs about mind, correspondence and energy, these metaphysicists were able to tell their story from an eminently more respectable metaphorical base. With the new science effectively authorizing an evolving religious spirituality amongst these metaphysically-inclined people, Albanese tells us, they gained far greater authority to convey their own understandings of God, the world, and the human.

Seen in this light, we can definitely find continuity between the earlier and present manifestations of the metaphysically-inclined. For then, as now, there exists the belief that there is nothing inevitable about our current world (dis)order and that the human has a significant role to play in changing things for the betterment of the individual and – today particularly – the betterment of the planet as well.

What appears different today – and what I think is worthy of academic research (can you guess the subject of my dissertation?) – is the commanding role science plays in forming one’s beliefs or world vision, particularly within Christian-theological-ecological circles: whereas, for example, spiritualists in the late nineteenth century pointed to the latest science (such as Morse sending his wire across vast distances) as authorizing their belief that mediums can communicate with the dead, today it seems more like science is authoring beliefs.

Eco-theologian Heather Eaton offers an interesting term I’d like to borrow in order to explain this grounding of religion, theology and an ecological spirituality in a scientific evolutionary worldview: “theology as earth science.”

If I’m right about the form of this phenomenon, many questions emerge. For instance, the demonstrably hopeful and liberationist qualities of their visions are emerging within a particularly disturbing context of deepening global poverty and a planetary ecological crisis of unprecedented magnitude. Have the Christian thinkers been rigorous in their appropriation of scientific understandings? In the 70s and 80s, for example, liberation theologians borrowed upon the social sciences with a critical hermeneutic to help make sense of the destruction of the human around them. Can we find evidence of a particular hermeneutic that is being applied in the appropriation of the wisdom of quantum physics, cosmology or systems theory?

Looking at this phenomenon from a different angle, we cannot consider this as a case of unrequited love, as evidenced by a number of recent calls from scientists to religious followers. The 1991 “Open Letter to the American Religious Community,” written by prominent scientists and Nobel laureates, for instance, encouraged religious leaders to address the spiritual and moral dimensions of the ecological crisis and to incorporate environmental awareness into the various dimensions of religious life. The scientists underlined that “religious teaching, example and leadership are able to influence personal conduct and commitment powerfully.”

To this end, mathematician and cosmologist, Brian Swimme, believes we must integrate science’s understanding of the universe with more ancient intuitions concerning the meaning and destiny of the human. Is this, as professor of philosophy of religion David Ray Griffin points out, a ‘re-enchantment’ of science whereby scientists themselves are looking past a mechanistic science to a modern “organismic” science? Or is it a sign of desperation from scientists to get religions to ‘wake up and smell the holy coffee’ so that they can help them ‘save the world’?

Researching this phenomenon could prove significant to our understanding of the contemporary interface between science and religion. Such an enthusiastic appropriation of science could mark, for instance, a lasting change in the manner in which these two ways of knowing the world interact in the future.

At the same time, we cannot ignore the fact that such visions are not found compelling by all Christians. In fact, a large body of Christians remains indifferent or hostile (and certainly somewhere in between) to such a close encounter between these two ways of knowing the world. Might we be witnessing the development of a new form of doing theology or even a new form of Christianity, one that is decidedly grounded on evolutionary understandings of the world, yet, on scientific terms?

* Among the Christian thinkers mentioned above are Diarmud O’Murchu, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Thomas Berry, Leonardo Boff, Mark Hathaway, Michael Dowd, David Toolan, Heather Eaton and, to a lesser degree Michael S. Northcott and Anne Primavesi.

* See Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind & Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). See her introduction for a good synopsis.

* I’m afraid I can only be brief here on what I mean by authoring as opposed to authorizing. I use ‘authorize’ to mean that which sanctions, lends credibility, legitimacy or authority. For example, taking our spiritualists mentioned earlier, the science of the day that spurred Morse to send his wire across vast distances of the atmosphere lent much credibility to their beliefs that mediums can somehow communicate with the dead (see Albanese, 217-218, 262). I employ ‘author’ partly in the traditional fashion to mean the originator or creator of a work, theory or plan. But I also take the root of the word, autor or “father,” from old French (c.1300), to imply ‘source’. Literally, autor – taking its Latin root auctus, which is the past participle of augere “to increase” – means “one who causes to grow.” In this light, we can take author to mean a corporate body that is the source of some form of intellectual or creative work: in our case, an environmental-religious ethic or vision (see Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged Version, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1987) s.v.v. “authorize,” “author.” Also used was Dictionary.com, http://dictionary.reference.com/ (accessed March 20, 2010).

* Eaton actually coins this term in her review on the flap of Primavesi’s book: Sacred Gaia (New York, NY: Routledge, 2000). But details of what Eaton means by it become apparent reading her essay, “The Revolution of Evolution,” Worldviews 11. no. 1. (2007): 6-31.

* See “An Open Letter to the Religious Community,” in Ecology and Religion: Scientists Speak, (John E. Carroll and Keith Warner, OFM, eds.) (Quincy Il: Franciscan Press, 1998) ii-vi.

* See Brian Swimme, The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos: Humanity and the New Story (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Press, 1996), 77.

* See David Ray Griffin, introduction to The Reenchantment of Science: Postmodern Proposals, ed. David Ray Griffin (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988), 1-8.