The Lens Through Which We See
The New Cosmology and the Integrity of Creation
by Joseph Mitchell, CP
In 1543, all across Europe people were shocked and disoriented when Copernicus suggested that the Earth was neither stationary nor the center of the universe. “What! We’re living on a spherical object revolving around the sun and spinning through space?” They were incredulous because this view of reality challenged their cosmology.
A cosmology is the concept a group of people have about the way things are – how the universe came into being, how the cosmos operates. It is their assumption about the nature of the world and the place of humans within it.
The stunning announcement by Copernicus upended the Medieval cosmology, a picture of the universe which had been unquestionably accepted for over a thousand years. Shortly thereafter, new data accumulated by scientists such as Galileo and Newton effectively dismantled the medieval world and its cultural institutions.
Most of us were raised within a Newtonian worldview. Isaac Newton, whose views dominated science for almost 300 years, portrayed our world as a “clockwork universe.” His model of 1687 depicted a clock wound up at the beginning of time by God and now ticking along, like a perfect machine, according to the laws of physics. It was a simple yet powerfully persuasive cosmology. To those captivated by the triumphs of the industrial revolution, it seemed sensible that the universe itself could be made of tiny atomic parts that, when properly put together, run like a gigantic machine.
Europeans gradually recovered from Copernicus’ disruption of their worldview as they became enchanted with Newton’s mechanistic metaphor. The rational mind and physical matter are fundamentally separate, they were told by Rene Descartes, the leading philosopher of the era. And ever since, humans have been charmed by the illusion of their dominance over the Earth which they increasingly learned to measure, quantify and control.
As rational beings, humans understood themselves to be essentially separate and superior to the natural world. It was merely the stage on which they lived their lives. They were convinced that the Earth was as lifeless and inert as any piece of equipment.
Understandably, the wondrous spirit of the creation evaporated. There is no mystery, after all, to a machine; if a part breaks down, it can be removed, repaired and replaced. There is no spiritual dimension to a mechanism; the numinous qualities reside elsewhere with its divine maker. In a snapshot, that represents the modern view of the world. That is our current prevailing western cosmology.
In his mind-blowing book Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on the Earth as a Sacred Community, Thomas Berry, a Passionist priest and cultural historian, suggests we are suffering today from a crisis of cosmology. It would be simplistic, according to Fr. Berry, to conclude that the devastation of the Earth is due to no more than selfishness or lack of goodwill. We face ecological uncertainty and psychic confusion not because human beings are inherently greedy or evil. Rather, the environmental crisis has been precipitated because humans are living out of inaccurate perceptions of reality shaped by their worldview. Our culture desperately needs a new cosmology if we are to survive.
Nothing is more foundational to a culture than its cosmology. Assumptions about the nature of time and space are preliminary to everything else created by a society. Consequently, a cosmology becomes the blueprint for the way we orient ourselves toward life and inhabit the Earth. The way we educate our young, farm our lands, build our cities, govern our communities, organize our economies, articulate our theologies, and understand what it means to be a human being. Every institution that a society envisions and constructs is based upon the worldview conveyed within its cosmology.
We are in trouble now because the Newtonian cosmology underpinning our culture is plainly flawed. It is an outdated worldview which no longer holds up under scientific scrutiny. We are living through a radical cultural earthquake similar to the repercussions caused by Copernicus that set the Medieval world tumbling.
Over the past few decades we have been receiving information from the empirical sciences which not only disputes our previous assumptions about the nature of reality, but challenges the modern cosmology upon which our cultural institutions have been designed and within which our sense of human identity has been formulated. Through new perceptions made possible by enhancements in the telescope and microscope, a momentous change in human consciousness is taking place during our lifetime.
We are discovering a universe which could never have been detected with the unaided human eye. Investigations of the small-scale structure of atomic and subatomic realms have brought us into contact with strange new information about the characteristics of matter. At the other extreme of size, explorations of large-scale structures in the cosmos have brought us into contact with the edge of the visible universe, going back close to the moment of creation some 13.7 billion years ago.
The material world, according to what we are now able to comprehend through the observational sciences, is not a mechanical system composed of separate parts. Rather, it is a complex web of relationships. The human family is beginning to realize that we live in a dynamic universe in which everything is fundamentally interrelated and interdependent. We are awakening to the remarkable and magnificent creativity of our planet as a living system out of which we evolved.
This, of course, is not our usual way of thinking – it does not fit our conventional beliefs. We learned to understand ourselves in a different cosmology. We developed our modern culture and institutions without ever questioning the theory of a static universe. We assumed the Earth was inert, never anticipating it to be a living system. We unquestioningly accepted that humans were superior and separate from the natural world. At the present moment we are in deep personal and social confusion because these old assumptions are no longer working. We find ourselves stranded within political, religious, educational, and economic systems which operate out of a worldview that cannot be substantiated anymore. The human community is desperately struggling to grasp the implications of what is currently being discovered about the nature of reality.
The present devastation of the Earth is the consequence of the Newtonian cosmology. It conditioned us to think of humans as separate from animals, trees, rivers, and rocks. Likewise, it conditioned us to believe that non-human entities such as fish, cows, vegetation, air, water, mountains, and the Earth itself are there for our exploitation.
These convictions, however erroneous, gave rise to our current economic institutions and personal habits. We can ravage the planet that brought us into being and exhaust its capacity to carry life with our ravenous habits of consumption. We can contaminate the air, the water, and the soil with vast amounts of toxic chemicals. We can destroy mountains, forests, and animal habitats to extract resources for fuel. We can deplete the oceans by over-fishing and foul the rivers with our garbage because our cosmology has made us autistic in our ability to relate with the Earth. It alienates us from the natural world which brought us into being.
Until quite recently it had been assumed that humans were creatures inserted into creation as an addendum. That perspective is now being shattered by recent well-substantiated discoveries that humans emerged and evolved within the 4.5 billion year story of the Earth. We do not live on the Earth, as if it were nothing more than the backdrop for our personal dramas. We came out of the Earth itself – akin to the way a terracotta vase is formed out of a mound of clay. The piece of pottery has a distinctive structure and a unique form, but it is nevertheless always clay. This did not go unnoticed by ancient sages as recorded in the Hebrew scriptures: “the Lord God formed man out of the clay of the ground” (Genesis 2:7).
Humans are made of the same recycled cosmic materials as the land, the plants, the clouds and the sea.
The entire human physical structure is a combination of non-human materials. For example, approximately 60% of the total weight of an adult human is water, a non-human substance. The brain is composed of 70% water, muscle tissue contains up to 75% water, blood is 83% water, and the lungs are nearly 90% water. Consequently, drinking water from a contaminated environment can result in our blood stream and other organs becoming polluted. Whenever we consume fiber from plants sprayed with toxic pesticides or eat the tissue from meat of factory-farmed animals which have been inoculated with noxious chemicals, our cells are at risk of becoming tainted and damaged. This can cause disruption to the basic biological processes of our bodies.
It is simple ecological logic – you cannot separate the health of humans from the health of the environment. When the Earth becomes toxic, we become toxic. No matter how much we regulate our diet or intensify our exercise, it is impossible to be a healthy human on a sick planet.
In recent decades, the magnitude of disturbance to the planetary chemical balance has been staggering. A case in point is the expanded development and use of industrial chemicals, especially since World War II. According to the Norton History of Chemistry, in the 1940s the United States alone was annually producing 500,000 tons of industrial chemicals. By the 1990s, each year we were turning out 200,000,000 tons of industrial chemicals into the environment. Today we can hardly imagine life without them. The introduction of new chemicals has shaped our modes of transportation, our food systems, and our medical enterprise. But the excessive increase over such a short period of time is altering the chemical functioning and biological processes of the planet.
The mechanistic concept of reality allowed us to foster cultural attitudes which, in light of new information, must be reevaluated. Many of the Earth’s living systems are now under attack because of negligent human technologies developed withn the Newtonian cosmology. As a planet, we teeter on the edge of an ecological catastrophe due, in large part, to over-consumption of natural resources and careless pollution of the environment caused by human behavior. Numerous other species are going extinct as their habitats are polluted or destroyed. The food chain is being disrupted by manipulation and manufactured substances. Carbon stored within fossil fuels is briskly being released into the atmosphere resulting in significant climate changes. The finely tuned balance that sustained the planet for billions of years is being disrupted within a few decades due to the blundering of one species – the human.
If the root of our problem is a crisis of cosmology which enshrines a worldview of human separation from the natural world, then the solution begins with a change in perspective. As long as we operate out of old assumptions that alienate us from the Earth, blind us to its spiritual dimensions, and prompt us to pursue economic development in fatally immature ways, the destruction of the Earth is likely to continue with grave consequences.
Our hope lies in recovering an intimacy with the universe out of which we emerged – its history is our history; its fate is our fate. This integral view of reality is something new for both scientists and people of faith. It is a remarkable 13.7 billion year story which brought forth solar systems, red giant stars, hydrogen atoms, rose bushes, cumulus clouds, majestic elephants and human beings. Only when we conceptually abide within this new cosmology will we attain sufficient energy to change our damaging behavior toward the Earth and find the vision to build a hopeful future based upon the integrity of all creation.
Joseph Mitchell is a Passionist priest and director of the Passionist Earth & Spirit Center, an interfaith spirituality institute established in the conviction that the Earth and all of its inhabitants are sacred. The organization is dedicated to helping religious institutions and people of faith assume an active role in assuring a healthy, beautiful, just and sustainable world for present and future generations. It is located in the barn and on the land behind the Passionist Monastery in Louisville, KY. For more information, go to www.earthandspriticenter.org
