On New Year’s Eve my wife and I went to something called the “Cosmic Walk” at our local Unitarian Universalist congregation in Santa Fe. This was the first I had heard of this ceremony, which apparently is fairly common in the UU world and elsewhere. It’s frequently held at the Solstice or at New Year’s. We gathered inside where a large spiral had been laid out with evergreen branches. At the center was a bowl with a flame, and smaller bowls with colored LED bulbs. As our minister read from a prepared script, we took turns walking into the spiral, taking a bulb, turning it on, and as we retraced our steps placing it in small bowls scattered at intervals along the spiral. Each bulb was meant to represent a milestone in cosmic history.
The script (here is an example, not the exact one we heard, but similar: https://deeptimejourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CosmicWalk.pdf.). It starts with the Big Bang and goes through the major developments from then until today: the formation of galaxies, stars, and planets; the coming to be of water, oxygen, and other elements on earth; the beginning of life; the evolution of animals and plants; the origins of mammals, apes, and man; and highlights of human history such as the development of speech, fire, agriculture, religion, and science. It ends today with our awareness of this complex history as revealed in modern science.
The ritual cultivates a twofold sense of wonder: first at the mystery of it all, that there is something rather than nothing and that all this ‘something’ comes from an unknown and possibly unknowable ‘seed’ existing before there was space or time. And second, that somehow all this development and history makes ‘us’ possible. The universe improbably brings forth a being that can be aware of and at least partially know the universe.
I think cultivating wonder is a good thing—philosophy/science begins with wonder, as Socrates and Aristotle told us, and it is spiritually beneficial to be reminded of the small place that we as individuals and as a species play in this large story. In the 150 feet or so of the spiral, human beings are present in only the last inch. So I enjoyed the ritual and its message.
Still, some things about it started me, well, wondering. First, the attempt to use science to invoke wonder and awe is interesting. The ceremony emphasizes the Mystery of the beginning and the further Mystery of the unfolding. A common criticism of science, however, is that it undermines our sense of wonder. Modern science doesn’t see the universe as a reflection of God’s design, or as filled with perfect circular motions, or as influencing us via the movement of the stars and planets. Instead, science tells us the universe is nothing but matter and energy, devoid of purpose or direction, cold and overwhelmingly lifeless.
When Socrates and Aristotle tell us that philosophy, which for them was indistinguishable from science, begins in wonder, it’s not clear whether ‘wonder’ is a good thing. As they describe it, wonder is a kind of perplexity that drives us to think and learn and ultimately replace wonder with knowledge. We begin by wondering at what seem to be the regular motions of the stars and the irregular ones of the planets, but now that we have precisely mapped these motions and sent probes to the planets, revealing they are made of the same stuff we are familiar with here on earth, isn’t it slightly ridiculous to keep wondering? There are plenty of interesting details we still aren’t sure of, but we seem to be in the mopping up stage—hardly cause for wonder.
Parts of the Cosmic Walk narrative seem tailored to teach us that the development of the universe has a direction, namely to create human beings. There is a set of arguments put forth mostly by theologians that the natural laws governing the universe show intelligent design or purpose; if various physical constants were different in only small ways, for instance, the conditions for life would supposedly be impossible. Can it be accidental that the great forces of attraction and repulsion in the universe are so well balanced that it is possible for any kind of stability at all? Is it accidental that exploding suns broadcast heavy elements that turn into planets with the exact chemical properties needed to create life? The “Cosmic Walk” narrative alludes to such arguments.
This is a thesis that, if true, would indeed be wonderful but is, to put it mildly, not one that most physicists or biologists would endorse. The standard scientific view is that the universe changes in accord with laws of nature that are the same everywhere, and that the evolution of galaxies and stars and life is no more designed to create human beings than it is to create bacteria or thunderstorms or supernovae or any other natural phenomenon.
As I listened I was reminded of a line of thought in Catholicism that tries to reconcile science and especially evolutionary theory with Christianity. And when I went home and started investigating, it turns out that is in fact the source: according to one account, the Cosmic Walk “was created in the mid 1980s by Sr. Miriam Therese MacGillis of Genesis Farm in New Jersey, who was inspired by the “New Story,” as then told by Thomas Berry.” 1 I hadn’t head of Berry, but a few searches revealed he was an American Catholic priest who died in 2009, and called himself a ‘cosmologist’ or ‘eco theologian.” Berry, according to Wikipedia, “studied and was influenced by the work of Teilhard de Chardin and was president of the American Teilhard Association (1975–1987).”
Teilhard de Chardin is someone I encountered with enthusiasm in my youth through a book called The Phenomenon of Man, written in the mid-50s. It’s a somewhat crazy combination of Catholicism (de Chardin was a Jesuit priest) and evolutionary theory (he was also a trained anthropologist who spent years doing original work in China and India on ancient man), arguing that the history of the universe tends to greater and greater complexity and consciousness. This culminates at some time, fairly soon, in the Omega Point where the universe as a whole becomes a coherent, self-aware whole. All this is directed by Christ.
De Chardin is not exactly an orthodox Catholic—the Jesuits banned him from teaching, and his books were officially disavowed—so I was surprised to see that he still has tremendous influence. Recent conservative popes including John Paul II and Benedict VI have praised him. Benedict wrote: “Against the background of the modern evolutionary world view, Teilhard de Chardin depicted the cosmos as a process of ascent, a series of unions. From very simple beginnings the path leads to ever greater and more complex unities, in which multiplicity is not abolished but merged into a growing synthesis, leading to the “Noosphere” in which spirit and its understanding embrace the whole and are blended into a kind of living organism. Invoking the epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians, Teilhard looks on Christ as the energy that strives toward the Noosphere and finally incorporates everything in its fullness.” The current Pope Francis mentions him positively in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si, which focuses on the environment and our relation to the planet. De Chardin is valued, it seems, for his ability to absorb modern science and in particular evolutionary theory, long a bete noir for believers, into Christianity.
The Cosmic Walk is not explicitly Christian or even religious, but the notion of the universe as a cosmos, an ordered whole designed to bring forth human beings, seems central to its message. Does the existence of human beings—or possibly other beings on other planets who are self-conscious and can know the cosmic order—‘prove’ that the universe was intended from the beginning to be hospitable to us? That, as the Cosmic Walk implies, there is a moral arc from a hot cloud of gas, to a sea of chemicals, to solitary single-celled animals, to cooperation between cells, to animals that care for their young and flowering plants that ‘cooperate’ with flying insects, and ultimately to social animals that create culture?
De Chardin’s vision seems very pagan. There is a Divine Force immanent in the world, and in us. Not outside it. Ross Douthat, a perceptive Catholic writer and New York Times columnist, recently wrote about the rise of paganism in America. 2 Douthat defines paganism as meaning “that divinity is fundamentally inside the world rather than outside it, that God or the gods or Being are ultimately part of nature rather than an external creator, and that meaning and morality and metaphysical experience are to be sought in a fuller communion with the immanent world rather than a leap toward the transcendent.” Douthat is critical of today’s paganism because he thinks it doesn’t offer believers much help in the face of disaster, sickness, and the other ills that flesh is heir to. It therefore appeals more to the privileged than the poor and weak. A transcendent God can intervene in the world on behalf of the helpless, and offer an afterlife beyond the reach of this world.
But Douthat respects, even if he does not endorse, the neo-pagan critique of traditional Christianity, that it sunders us from the world. It devalues nature, and especially many aspects of human nature, in favor of denial and asceticism; your essence is not of this world. Classical philosophy, taken up enthusiastically by certain Christian thinkers, reinforced this tendency to denigrate the natural world in favor of a ‘higher’ sphere of unchanging Being. (Nietzsche famously called Christianity “Platonism for the masses.”).
The Cosmic Walk is all about harmony between nature and man, and also about enlisting science in the service of this harmony. The question is, can science be reconciled with paganism? A pagan sensibility is about living closer to nature and respecting, indeed venerating, the world that man is part of. Modern science in contrast is motivated by the desire to somehow stand outside nature, and to subordinate and manipulate it. It was my conclusion, when long ago I studied Bacon and Descartes and the founders of modern science, that their project was in key ways an extension of a Christian worldview, where the natural world was derivative from and inferior to an external power. But instead of God, now Man would be the master. To do this, however, we needed to stop trying to understand the world; we only needed to be able to accurately describe it.
For most of us, today’s science is as opaque and mysterious as the doctrine of the Trinity or Aristotle’s metaphysics. We take its teachings about quantum paradoxes, and what happened in the first seconds after the Big Bang, on faith. It tells us about a natural world that is not just stranger than we imagine, but than we can imagine. Ultimately, there is no scientific reason to think that our little brains, designed to help us survive from day to day, are adequate to unravel the mysteries of the universe.
Given this, yes, a certain kind of wonder is appropriate, but less at how well we fit in the universe than at its ultimate impenetrability. Post-Aristotelian science teaches us to be skeptical of claims that we are outside of nature or different in kind from other animals and other beings. To that extent it reconciles us with the world. But it doesn’t promise an intelligible world, or a world where man feels at home.