Abstract
“It’s all a question of story,” wrote the Catholic priest, and self-professed “geologian,” Thomas Berry. “We are in trouble now because we do not have a good story” (120). Berry and others found a “good story” indeed in the work of modern science. This book, by University of Indiana religious studies professor Lisa Sideris, offers a highly critical overview of the development and uses of this story, variously named the Epic of Evolution, the Universe Story, the New Story, Our Story, The Great Story, or Big History. Common to all is the conviction that science (and the science of evolution in particular) gives us the materials to tell a unified, omni-competent story of everything, from the Big Bang to the present (including the origins of religion). This story, its proponents contend, can do a much better job than narratives from the world’s religions in uniting us to act in a time of environmental crisis. S. is doubtful, and in seven carefully researched chapters raises serious questions both on its claim to tell us the way things “really are,” and on its usefulness for those moved by our planet’s plight, secular or religious.
S.’s focus is the Universe Story’s appeal to “wonder” as a stance toward our world that will lead to a greater appreciation and humility before the non-human natural world. For S. the type of wonder invoked in the Universe Story falls disastrously short of its proponents’ claims for it. In chapters on Richard Dawkins and E. O. Wilson, she argues that there often is a deeply ambiguous feeling toward the wonder being advocated. Wonder for Dawkins and Wilson is only an impetus to the scientific explanation that dissolves it (S. calls this “serial wonder” or “self-eradicating” wonder). The only enduring wonder, in fact, is the human mind (paradigmatically active in science) that can “unweave the rainbow.” In other words, the true object of wonder is us—hardly a promising beginning to an environmental ethics. And this wonder has more than a little touch of elitism in it, since only scientists, and those to whom they choose to share their wisdom, can experience authentic wonder. Other approaches to and expressions of wonder (including from the world’s religions) can continue only if they allow themselves to be regulated by the scientifically funded epic. Thus is science “consecrated.”
After a chapter on former Luther College religious studies professor Loyal Rue, and “religious naturalist” Ursula Goodenough, S. turns to religiously committed advocates of the Universe Story such as Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and John Grim (of Yale’s Forum on Religion and Ecology), almost all of whom claim to continue the heritage of Teilhard de Chardin. S. finds a similar, hubristic celebration of the human as the culminating point in the universe’s development. In her telling, Teilhard’s christocentrism has been totally absorbed into a thoroughgoing anthropocentrism. Unpersuaded by their attempts to temper Teilhard’s unfettered enthusiasm for technology, she is critical of their celebration of our purported entry into the “Anthropocene Era,” even when garbed as the “Ecozoic Age.” Whatever its name, it is still dangerously anthropocentric and charged with a millenarian confidence in the fulfillment of our “destiny” to bring the cosmos to its culmination. On her judgment, this volatile mixture of humility at the scope of cosmos we inhabit and hubris at the role we play in it almost always slides into the kind of hubris that has gotten us into this mess to begin with.
S. argues that what we need is a kind of wonder that does not make human reason the measure of all things, and that is comfortable with nescience and ambiguity. She names this “virtuous ignorance,” which might remind some of the mystical virtue of docta ignorantia. Moreover, the priority should always be on wonder at the sensuously encountered experience of nature, and not our scientific rendering of nature. This kind of wonder (as fascinans and tremendum), a respect for the enduring mystery of our cosmos that does not get explained away by science, will, on her reading, inculcate the humility we need. S. educes Annie Dillard, Rachel Carson, and Loren Eisely (none of whom constructed “epics”) as models for this kind of wonder. Her intent is primarily negative and critical, and she offers little explicit argument on how this kind of wonder will cash out into the kinds of ethical dispositions she thinks essential. Yet for those who share her worries about this particular meeting ground of religion and science, and even for those who want to continue to develop a “universe story,” this book provides an important, critical look at its pitfalls.