Lecture and Discussant Text

Jeffrey Russell
Constructing Cosmos: Science, Religion, History, and Reality

Friday April 27 2001, Hatlen Theater UCSB
Discussant: Helen Couclelis, Department of Geography
Discussant: Maria Herrera-Sobek, Luis Leal Chair, Department of Chicano Studies

All text below is in unrevised form exactly as presented. Do not cite without permission of author.

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Lecture Text (©Jeffrey B. Russell)

"Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing." That very good advice is from Thomas Huxley. We need it at this difficult stage in the life of civilization.

When I sit and look at cosmos today I see it deeply wounded, not only split between science and religion but torn into a thousand different concerns. We need healing, which brings health, which brings wholeness, which brings holiness, which brings well, cosmos.

The word cosmos means order and purpose. Without order and purpose, there is only chaos in the sense of gaping void. Order and purpose imply intelligence. With all due respect to the late Carl Sagan, no purpose, no cosmos.

By cosmos I mean two different things.

By k-cosmos I mean the whole cosmos, physical, mental, and spiritual, as it actually is. The k-cosmos IS with absolute isness.

Extraordinary work is being done at UCSB bv our previous lecturer Walter Kohn and his colleagues at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, work that has the potential of constructing a coherent explanation of part of k-cosmos: its physical nature. That is stunningly promising. But since k-cosmos is more than its physical nature, k-cosmos as a whole cannot be known. That is, there is no m-cosmos that can exhaust or plumb the depths of k-cosmos. But k-cosmos can be figured by metaphor in m-cosmos. More on metaphor in a while.

We do not have the power to construct k-cosmos, but we can construct m-cosmos. M-cosmos is our mental construct of the whole k-cosmos, physical and spiritual, including our own thoughts and feelings. Mental constructs are made out of concepts. Concepts have always been diverse and difficult to fit together, but in the past century so much so that m-cosmos was virtually torn apart. It is m-cosmos that I mourn for.

People in many fields have been hoping to construct a new m-cosmos. What I am doing today is suggesting some approaches through history and metaphor. "Some approaches" is an important phrase, not just because we haven't got a complete m-cosmos yet, but because a true m-cosmos is never closed. It is always opening up, becoming more beautiful, more expansive and elegant, more fascinating and intriguing. It is both/and thinking more than either/or thinking.

Both/and thinking does not exclude either/or thinking. Either/or is a form of argument proper to problems that have been closely defined and that seek a definitive answer such as the mass of strange quarks. I am not arguing anything today. As soon as we pass beyond such well-defined problems to the nature of the k-cosmos as a whole, either/or is often obstructive. Much of the alleged warfare between science and religion today is based on pointless either/or oppositions. The motto of the discussion today is both/and and more and still more.

The history of concepts is a peculiarly effective way of describing religion and science. History works differently from either science or religion. History explains events by recounting (as in a traditional story) how we got from point A to point C by going through process B. For example, we got to today's Russia by going from the Russia of the tsars, through the Bolsheviks and Yeltsin, to Putin.

History assumes the reality of persons in the past, including their thoughts and their feelings: their whole personalities. No one is a DWM or a dead anybody. . To think so is to misunderstand the nature of time. When is now? As we reflect on our lives back to say, our tenth birthday, did we think at age ten that we were really in the past and that the real now is being in this room on 27 April 2001? Will we think on 28 April that we are at last in the future? When you were ten is now; when this talk is going on is now. "Now" is an almost infinitesimal point moving across time, so that all moments are "now." It follows that Bach, or Sappho, or Confucius, or Ninian Smart, or Gandhi are no less alive than we are today. Everyone is alive, everyone's personality is real, everyone is now. History is never concerned with the dead past, always with the living encounter with persons living now.

The history of concepts takes ideas seriously as having real consequences. Anyone who thinks that ideas do not have real consequences might talk with a Holocaust survivor about the reality of Hitler's ideas. What are concepts? They are what people have believed them to be. Religion and science are not rigid, eternal, Platonic ideas. They are concepts that continue to change through time. History explains how science and religion came to be what they are today. Or rather in any given person's mind today, because any given person's personal cosmos is explained through their own personal history as well as through the history of their society.

Since my personal cosmos is a deep part of my m-cosmos, I need to mince no words: I am a Christian. That I am a Christian does not mean that I submit to authority. My children say that I taught them to question authority even before it became a bumper sticker. I question the authority of the bishops, the president, the doctor, and the New York Times. I do not believe this and that because I am a Christian. (In fact, I was raised an atheist.) Just the other way around: I am a Christian because I believe this and that.

A great deal of learning consists of unlearning the caricatures and cliches about other people's beliefs that we are taught as children by our parents, teachers, and peers. One example is the myth that people used to believe the earth was flat. We all have a lot of unlearning to do, especially about the all-time Big Problem in bringing science and religion together: namely, God. Many people who draw near to a deep view of cosmos recoil at the brink. Because they cannot help thinking of the Guy in the Sky, they reject any idea of God. It may help to replace the word "God" with an old Greek usage, "the God," instead: oddly, the addition of the definite article makes the term more indefinite.

Religious experience and religious expression are almost universal among humans. Experience ought not to be denied without powerful evidence against it, and it would be rash to assume that religious experience is false or illusory. If the brain is "wired" for it, as some have recently argued, why should it be? How can an illusion be adaptive? Religion has the strong advantage of admitting the mystery that the k-cosmos is much deeper and more complex than we can understand. It has the strong disadvantage of appearing to be self-contradictory, with religions canceling one another out. Actually, when properly understood through metaphor they do not cancel one another out. Religion is at its best not a zero-sum game where "We are right and deserve to win" and "They are wrong and deserve to lose." Religion can open us up to the astounding richness of reality. Both/and.

Science now: science is an effort to understand physical reality through theory, mathematics, and especially rigorous experimentation. The first citation of the English word "science" occurs in 1340, at which time it meant learning or knowledge in general. Not before 1725 did "science" mean an orderly, systematic system based on observation and mathematics. The history of the language is not just a curiosity; it is a strong clue to concepts--the way we look at things. The human mind is constructed in such a way that once we have a concept, a word follows for it very quickly. The lack of a word may mean that there is as yet no concept for it to express. The concept of science apart from other knowledge could not have much predated the appearance of the word "science." But were Galileo and Newton not scientists? In an important way they were not. The word scientist does not occur before 1834. Although there were people doing things that look like what we today call science, no one thought of himself in the category of a scientist. They thought of their subject as "natural philosophy" instead.

The distinction is important, because they thought of "natural philosophy" as an integral part of philosophy, a system of understanding the whole, in other words, an m-cosmos. The title of Newton's key work is The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1686-1687). When the term "physics" first appears in 1589, it meant all knowledge of nature; not before 1715 did it mean knowledge specifically of matter and energy. No one called himself a "physicist" before 1840. In some senses there were physicists before anyone thought he was one, but in some senses not. What if someone in 2501 should classify you in some term you have never heard of?

The origins of modern science lie in the unparalleled innovations made in the sixth to fourth centuries BCE by Greek philosophers, who were the first to ask what simple material principle underlies the variety of natural phenomena we observe. The search for the one principle which explains everything characterizes Western natural philosophy from the sixth century BCE to physical cosmology today.

The Greeks also created an enduring dichotomy in philosophy. Some Greek philosophers before Plato were materialists and monists, the precursors of modern material reductionists. Leucippus and Democritus argued that all phenomena were made of infinitesimal, indivisible particles called atoms (Greek atomos, "indivisible"). To the contrary, Plato argued that reality is purely mathematical and ideal and only secondarily physical. The physical appearances of objects could be assigned causes by hypothesis, but these hypotheses were not to be confused with actual reality, which was incorporeal form, pure idea. This dichotomy between materialism and idealism would underlie the condemnation of Galileo two millennia later.

Aristotle tried to bridge the gap. All material substances are composed of two elements, matter and form. Both matter and form are real but are not found independent of one another. Aristotle's view of astronomy needs mention here because we will return to it in Dante. The world is constructed in concentric circles centered on the sphere of the earth. A geometrically perfect Platonic idea, but Aristotle was well aware that he had to explain the apparently irregular motion of the planets, a phenomenon that he did not believe was merely appearance but physically real.

The great Christian bishop Augustine (354-451) did more to construct an m-cosmos including religion and science than anyone before Dante, and he was the most important person before Einstein in developing the conception of time. Time is real. It has a beginning. Before Creation, there was no time. Time and space began at the moment of Creation. The God created the cosmos perfect, but it was disrupted by our free-will choice to do our own will rather than the God's. The God chooses to save the world from the consequences of our wrong use of free will, but he does not do so immediately. Rather, He does so by using time, in a series of salvation events: the revelation to Moses, the saving revelation through Christ, and finally the return of the Messiah at the end of the world. Time is thus not only real but directional, and morally purposive. Here is the origin of the modern notion of progress. Something like history looks in at the door. We get from A through B to C, and C will be better than A.

Augustine strongly encouraged natural philosophy. The God creates the cosmos; in Greek, he "makes" it. Greek poieo, "to make," means to create not only in a physical sense but also in a metaphorical sense. A "poet" is a "maker" as much as an engineer is. Since the God made everything, everything has meaning and purpose. We have access to two great Books of Revelation: one is the Bible, and the other is the Book of Nature. The two, far from being incompatible, are both given us for our understanding. To understand the God, we do three basic things: we look within ourselves; we look to the God as revealed in the Bible; we look at the Book of Nature revealed in the physical world around us. Augustine would have thought what we call "science" a holy activity.

Medieval philosophers used natural philosophy to help construct an m-cosmos pointing toward the ultimate truth that is the God. The emphasis of medieval theology (Jewish and Muslim as well as Christian) was on the moral and spiritual aspects of the cosmos rather than on the physical. Natural philosophy was less important in itself than as a means to understanding ultimate reality. Medieval thinkers thus had a global community of purpose leading them to construct a complete m-cosmos.

By the beginning of the twelfth century Western Christian thinkers began to question authority and to criticize tradition. The first great shocking thought came from Saint Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109), who argued that reason alone, unaided by revelation, could demonstrate the existence of the God. The next great intellectual shock was Abelard's (d. 1142) implicit criticism of tradition in his book Yes and No. He chose a number of philosophical and theological questions and cited Church Fathers on both sides of every issue. The implications were frightening. Perhaps past authorities could be wrong. Perhaps natural reason could be used to criticize the authorities. Perhaps such methods might one day be applied to the Bible.

By the middle of the twelfth century, Abelard's queries had led to a new method known as dialectic. A thesis was stated; then its antithesis; and then, through the use of reason, its synthesis. This dialectic, without which much of modern philosophy would have been impossible, was the core of the "scholastic method." No longer could a question be answered by simply citing a traditional view from the Church Fathers or Aristotle. The difference is enormous.

On the other hand, a number of bishops feared that such critical thinking would undermine their own authority. That was perhaps a base motive. But they had a good one as well: they understood that a principle vital to the whole life of the Christian church was at stake: Apostolic Succession. The truth of Christianity was based on the authority that the bishops held as successors to the Apostles. The bishops feared that University professors often preferred (amazingly!) their own rational expositions to apostolic authority. There was also an honest theological worry. When academics argued that academic formulas were true in the real sense, that they encapsulated absolute reality, they were skirting a blasphemous equation of m-cosmos with k-cosmos. This problem underlay the Galileo affair later.

Yet just a bit later appeared the most perfect m-cosmos to date, incorporating current ideas of philosophy, theology, and natural theology. This was Dante's Paradiso, the least appreciated but most intellectually and esthetically satisfying, book of his Divine Comedy. Uniting the Bible with Christian tradition and natural philosophy, Dante's work shows how both theology and science permeated the thought of highly educated people in the fourteenth century. His geographical and astronomical accuracy is astounding. For example, it was no mean feat in his day to calculate the exact position of the sun at the same moment in latitudes and even longitudes as different as Italy and Jerusalem. For Dante, the truest picture and deepest meaning of the k-cosmos was ethical, not physical. Dante's physical universe is a metaphor for the ethical cosmos rather than the other way around.

Dante's universe was arranged in an Aristotelian series of concentric spheres, the earth being the sphere at the center. Above and around the earth was the sphere of the moon and then in order those of Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the fixed stars, and the primum mobile. Beyond the primum mobile natural philosophy could not go. The primum mobile moves all the spheres below it down to the tiny earth at the center, but it has no depth itself: it is the dimensionless skin of the entire cosmos.

Dante and his readers progress upward from the center of the universe (the Earth) through a series of concentric spheres, to the outermost and highest sphere, the primum mobile. Dante now "stands" at a point on the primum mobile, looking down at the tiny earth far below. Beyond the primum mobile is nothing nothing at all yet beyond it is the God. And Dante, thrillingly, metaphorically turns his head away from all those spheres and the tiny earth at their center. Thrillingly, he turns and looks through the primum mobile to the other side. (I squash the beauty with a homely metaphor: it's a bit like turning a ball inside out.) As soon as he puts his head through the skin of the primum mobile to look at the God's heaven, a great inversion occurs. Now he can, by looking "in the other direction," see "down" through the spheres that circle the blazing Point that is the God. This direction is down, up, out, and in, all at once. Where is the Blazing Point? Nowhere: that is, nowhere in spacetime. Everywhere. It is beyond the cosmos, yet it is the source and ground of being of the whole cosmos. Dante is looking into a "place" where there is no dimension, time, or space. Physically it is not the universe at all, yet morally it is the center of the universe. It both contains and exceeds all time and space: it is everywhere and everywhen.

Back to history. In the sixteenth century, cracks in this magnificent m-cosmos appeared. The Protestant Reformation broke the consensus on the authority of the bishops, removing one obstacle to m-cosmos, but the Reformation created new ones. Protestants emphasized the overt literal reading of the Bible, which oversimplified the Bible and narrowed it down instead of opening it out to the rich multiplicity of understanding. For overt literalists, "a narrative is either a historical record, or a symbolical representation. It cannot be both." But it is: both/and. Insistence on the overt meaning of Scripture led eventually to the unnecessary conflict over evolution.

With Galileo, differences between religion and science emerged. He confirmed Copernicus' heliocentric theory by experiment, using a new device, the telescope. In 1609-1610 he observed the phases of Venus and discovered the moons of Jupiter, phenomena that could be explained by the old systems of Aristotle or Ptolemy only by complex contortions.

Galileo seems not to have had any intention of denying that the Bible was revealed or of rejecting Christian tradition. Pope Urban VIII (1623-1644) initially respected his views and granted him significant public honors. But in 1632 Galileo made a brave but politically inept move in his book Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems. Galileo, who would have found the medieval scholastics congenial, had no use for their pedantic and ossified successors, so he created the character of "Simplicio" to represent dusty old Aristotelian scholasticism against empirical natural philosophy. The Dialogue received an imprimatur from the pope, and it was well received generally, but it also created for Galileo a host of enemies. Even most of those supporting him wished to keep the traditional distinction between hypothesis on the one hand and underlying absolute truth on the other. A wonderful idea, this heliocentric system with its planets and moons, so long as we understand that it is a theoretical hypothesis and not an effort at describing absolute reality. But Galileo insisted that "if a hypothesis saves all the appearances it is identical with truth." A struggle commenced between those clergy supporting Galileo and those furious with him. The furious prevailed, and in 1633 the papal inquisition suppressed the Dialogue.

The condemnation was political, but it also had important intellectual bases. It did not condemn the idea that the sun is the center of the solar system. What it did condemn was Galileo's view that natural reason applied through mathematics to observation of phenomena could provide a truth independent of that of theology. Though Galileo did not intend it, he was implicitly proposing a divorce between science and religion and the creation of a natural philosophy independent of theological philosophy. The Book of Nature was separate from the Book of Revelation. Galileo cracked the medieval cosmos.

It was all in pieces, all coherence gone. The implications of Galileo and his contemporaries were becoming manifest, especially the shift from looking at natural phenomena as an overlay on actual reality to seeing the phenomena as actual reality itself. Taken together, the scientific revolution amounted to the replacement of a coherent, organic world by "a mechanical world of lifeless matter, incessant local motion, and random collision."

Whatever the intent of Galileo or his opponents, the affair had almost unbounded effect upon subsequent thought. In the nineteenth century a curious idea became fixed. Most educated people today would in a true or false quiz answer "true" to the following statement: "A great war between science and religion has been raging for centuries beginning with Galileo if not before." The small amount of truth contained in that caricature is outweighed by what is false. Religion usually has supported rather than resisted science, and the very idea of a warfare between science and religion was invented in the mid-nineteenth century. The opening barrage of the war came from John W. Draper (1811-1882), who wrote a History of the Conflict between Religion and Science. Draper wrote:

The antagonism we thus witness between Religion and Science is the continuation of the struggle that commenced when Christianity began to attain political power. A divine revelation must necessarily be intolerant of contradiction; it must repudiate all improvement in itself, and view with disdain that arising from the progressive intellectual development of man . . . . The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary [sic] faith and human interests on the other. . . . [The fall of Rome] left religious affairs to take their place, and accordingly those affairs fell into the hands of ignorant and infuriated ecclesiastics, parasites, eunuchs, and slaves.

The myth of the flat earth, appearing in the 18th century, is an example of the preposterous caricatures used by Draper and his followers. One of the platitudes that "everybody knows" about the Middle Ages is that medieval people thought the earth was flat. But no educated person in the Middle Ages thought so. The myth would have faded if the Drapers had not used it to bludgeon their opponents by claiming that they were just as stupid as the alleged medieval people who allegedly thought the earth was flat.

Biological evolution became the battleground on which the standards of warfare were raised and are still brandished. No story in science, even the Galileo affair, is more fixed in the public consciousness at least in America than the Scopes trial.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century the idea that the geological and biological features of Earth today are the products of change through time had gained strength. This geological and biological succession of life through time is entirely compatible with theology. The meaningfulness of time had been established by Saint Augustine. As soon as the old idea that the age of the earth was about 10,000 years old was replaced by millions or billions of years, there was time galore for such succession. Some scientists objected, but by the 1870s it had become the clearly dominant scientific view. Other objections arose from unnecessary, exclusivist religious either/or views, and some Christians became part of the problem If one assumes first that the Bible is without error and second that it must be read in an overt, literal way whenever possible, one may conclude that the account of creation in Genesis was supposed to be a literal, scientific, physical account of the beginning of the world over a short period of time. One then ends up rejecting slow biological and geological succession through time.

This position provokes not only scientists and historians but also most theologians, who know that there is no such thing as reading the Bible or any other text with an absolutely blank mind and without preformed conceptions. But such a position is not necessary for most religious people, including Christians. Most theologians over time have read the Bible as metaphorical, at least in large part. That organisms develop over vast eons of time through natural processes and with spectacular diversity is a proposition that need not provoke division. It says nothing about the God. Thus the war over evolution was unnecessary.

When, however, a number of evolutionists argued that the successive development through time was without purpose or intelligent direction, then they set it in opposition to most religions by definition. When religion is defined in a literalist fashion and evolution in a reductionist fashion, the two exclude one another almost by definition. But there is no need for such either/or positions. One of the greatest obstacles to the formation of a new cosmos in the 21st century is materialist reductionism. The ultimate origins of the idea are as old as the Greek atomists, but the first English instance of the word "materialism" meaning the belief that all actions, thoughts, and feelings can be reduced to material explanation first appeared in 1748. The term "reductionism" is recent. It means that every phenomenon in the k-cosmos can be reduced to matter; that there is no meaning other than the m-cosmos produced by science. Now it is OK to say that the study of natural phenomena may be reduced to the construction of universal physical regularities. It is not OK to assume that all truth can be reduced to physical regularities.

Reductionism is either/or thinking identifiable by certain key words and phrases such as "just," "merely," "only," and "nothing but." Your reaction to your favorite music is nothing but chemicals in your brain. Your mathematical ideas are merely chemicals in your brain.

These are not caricatures. Reductionists mean what they say. From E. O. Wilson's Consilience:

Everything can be reduced to simple universal laws of physics. Ideas and feelings are merely linkage among the neural networks. It can all eventually be explained as brain circuitry" Everything that is knowable but not yet known to science is open to being explained by science. Are you suffering in pain and despair? Never mind, it's just your neural networks.

Richard Lewontin:

We take the side of science. . . because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to materialist causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

This is a creedal statement analogous to "Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is One." There are no scientific means by which reductionists can possibly know that there is no direction or plan. Such reductionists violate a fundamental principle of science itself. Science is based upon testable hypotheses: a good hypothesis is one that can be disproved or proved. Atheist dogmas are not only not scientific; they do not even qualify as arguments, because they are purely statements of faith. The faith statement that there is no God lacks evidence at least as much as the statement that there is a God. But this faith goes well beyond denying the Ground of Being. It denies You. Your sense of your irreducible self, your own "youness" is an illusion, since "people. . . are just extremely complicated machines." But "materialism itself is an idea, just as immaterial as any other." If no idea is better than any other idea because they all proceed from purposeless neural interactions, then the idea of reductionism itself is no better than crystal-gazing.

Have you ever grieved for someone you loved very much? Not to worry, it's all just chemicals in your brain. Do you want to study biology or medicine rather than watch TV all day? It's just your memes. Is it any wonder that people live lives of noisy desperation, seeking loudness, coarseness, and drugs as protective anodynes against the pointlessness of their lives? Ah, say the reductionists, but we can construct meaning for ourselves. But on what basis?

For a logically inevitable consequence of reductionism is relativism, and the logically inevitable consequence of relativism is cynicism. If everything is equal, nothing "can be precious." If no idea is better than another, then there is no basis for discourse, for reason is vacated; only power remains; and in place of discourse, shrill, accusatory political struggles on every level and on every side.

A healthy skepticism would produce humility as to our own views, sympathy with those of others, a desire to open up more and more, and above all an unwillingness to coerce or manipulate other persons whose feelings are just as real as ours. True discourse would then be possible.

In the meanwhile, the ethical results of relativism are drowning us. Reduction of all ideas to neural impulses mean that no moral or ethical concept is better than any other. Efforts to construct ethical systems without regard to moral absolutes are without ground to stand on. If no behavior is better than another, why bother about the whales and the rainforests? What is wrong with child molesting or genocide? What is wrong with faking scientific evidence? Appeals to "good sense" and "common decency" and "surely you must agree" are simply evasions of the basic principles of reductionist thought. According to E. O. Wilson, we need the "illusion of free will" as biologically adaptive; we need the "self-deception" of altruism. But what possible good moral, intellectual, or evolutionary can come from belief in free will and cosmos if they are illusions and lies?

Stephen Jay Gould has suggested that we all need to "take a cold shower" and realize that our lives are meaningless and directionless. But though we all know people who solemnly proclaim that life is pointless and without meaning, we know few who live their lives that way.

I admire the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) for his refusal to flinch from the implications of relativism. He recognized that flinching was either political evasion or an indication that relativists did not believe their own proclamations. In an intrinsically relative, valueless world, Sade argued, the only sensible thing is to seek personal pleasure. If you enjoy torture, fine. If others do not enjoy it, fine, but they have no business imposing their views on you. Why should a child molester not be free to rape and torture his victims? The response that one person should not impose his desires on an unwilling victim, Sade pointed out, is an assumption without any basis in relativism.

Sade defined the dilemma. Either there is real evil, or not. Either there is a ground of being by which to judge actions, or there is not. Sade's arguments are the legitimate outcome of honest relativism. Once a relativist allows any principle to get its nose under the flap of his tent, he is no longer an authentic relativist.

But someone went beyond Sade's nihilism: America's lovable creator of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (1835-1910). Mark Twain's manifesto of nihilism is in his book No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger.

The mysterious stranger enters a happy village and encounters a young man whom, after many experiences, he finally persuades of the validity of his beliefs.

Nothing exists; all is a dream. God man the world the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars; a dream, all a dream, they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space and you! . . . And you are not you you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. I myself have no existence, I am but a dream your dream. . . . Strange! That you should not have suspected, years ago, centuries, ages, aeons ago! for you have existed, companionless through all the eternities. . . . It is true, that which I have revealed to you: there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream.

No one who shrinks from Twain's conclusion can be an authentic relativist. Yet everyone must shrink from it to be sane. I know that personally from a period of clinical depression, when for me there was no meaning to anything at all. That is the real alternative to cosmos. That is Chaos; it is what we have when we deny absolute moral values.

Today even "right and wrong" are fading away as well as "good and evil." What is left are "healthy and sick," "well-adjusted or poorly-adjusted," and above all "appropriate and inappropriate." The Holocaust was "inappropriate"?! Stalin was "poorly adjusted"?!

Only two options are available to us: one is Cosmos: the universe has purpose and meaning; two is Chaos: the universe has no purpose or meaning. Well-intentioned people believe that they can create purpose and meaning for themselves, but they have no basis on which to stand. Efforts at explaining away evil and turning it into inappropriate behavior and therefore socially controllable behavior have no basis, but they have dangerous effects.

Suppose for the sake of argument that in the 21st century geneticists will be able to engineer us away from inappropriate behavior. It will be marvelous to engineer people without the ability to rape. Or rob. Or cheat on their taxes. Or disobey the government. Or speak ill of our leaders. Stalin would love it. Or let us suppose that the answer lies in the environment. Let us eliminate drugs, poverty, bad housing. Let us also eliminate bad parents and absentee fathers. Why, we can perfectly destroy the environment of crime by liquidating the places and people who breed it.

Materialist reductionism and relativism are ethically, well, inappropriate. Equally inappropriate is religious absolutism. The Taliban are not destroying the world's cultural heritage because they are scientific reductionists but because they are religious absolutists.

Science has a cleaner moral slate than religion. Scientists can be arrogant, envious, narrow, and even hostile. But they do not torture, kill, and war against one another, as adherents of religion have done from the beginning of humanity into the 21st century. But science may not be so noble as its more uncritical admirers believe. Science has always needed patrons, and patrons exact their due. The man who takes the king's shilling becomes the king's man. What about the nuclear weapons laboratories in our own university? What about Robert Oppenheimer, who moaned and boasted that he had become "Vishnu, Destroyer of Worlds"? What about biochemical warfare labs? What about the problems now escaping from Pandora's biological box?

The ethical consequences of reductionism on the one hand and exclusivism on the other are warnings against either/or thinking. But what if both/and thinking constructs a new m-cosmos in the course of this century. One mode of helping is "metaphorical ontology," and it needs explanation right away. "Ontology" means the study of being in itself: the real, ultimate nature of the k-cosmos opening out without limitations. Metaphor is the transfer of meaning from one statement or image to another. Metaphors can be used to represent features of experience that elude our ordinary literal vocabulary. [Denham 230] Metaphors have cognitive significance subject to demonstrations of truth or falsehood (a fish is a coke-machine), and sometimes metaphors are "conceptually autonomous because their truths can be expressed only in metaphor."

During the past century, people who are not poets, linguists, or otherwise particularly sensitive to language, tended to think of metaphor as "nothing but metaphor." I am turning the table over. By metaphorical ontology I mean the construction of an m-cosmos that accurately reflects the k-cosmos.

Metaphorical ontology is the use of words denoting one kind of object, action, or idea in place of another in order to suggest a deeper meaning beneath both. When the Psalmist says that the Lord will cover you with his feathers and that you shall trust under his wings" (Ps. 91.4), you know that he was not suggesting that you will be a sparrow in a nest. When Jesus called himself a shepherd he did not mean that he planned sermons for ovine creatures. Metaphorical ontology is the use of figures of speech to go beyond science, and history, to indicate the divine reality deep down things. Metaphorical ontology, with its sense of contemplation and wonder, can heal either/or wounds. And restore us to wholeness and cosmos.

No one ever used metaphorical ontology better than Dante. Dante's "up and down" m-cosmos was perfect for him, but we may prefer the image of centering. Centering in a special way: not centering as closing down like Dante's inferno, but centering in the sense of penetrating the core of reality and then opening up through it into the vast multiplicity of reality. Some metaphors point toward the center of reality, others point away; some are serious, others trivial. Some become so worn over time as to become virtually dead. Metaphors can be sorted out. Compare these metaphors about the heavens: (1) "Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold; there's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st but in his motion sings still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims" (2)"the stars are dandruff on a blue serge suit." And right on the point of the current discussion: a human being is a machine; a human being is a living word. Every metaphor is a metaphor, but every metaphor does not point to truth.

The proper language of religion is metaphor, and the Bible is usually best opened out metaphorically. Take the passage where King David brings the Ark into Jerusalem. What is Jerusalem? It is a city having geographical coordinates and political boundaries. It has a history; before David made it his capital, it was a small Jebusite fort; afterwards it was part of a succession of kingdoms and empires; today it is a source of animosity between Jews and Muslims. But it is also Zion, the land promised eternally to the Jews. And it is the place of resurrection for the Jews. And the place where Jesus died and rose from the dead. And where Muhammad ascended into heaven. It is the moral center of the earth. It represents heaven, the soul, the end of the world, and an untellable number of other things. The meaning of Jerusalem is best not narrowed down to any one thing but rather opened up and expanded. Both/and and more. Traditional scholars believed that the Bible was the word of the God and took great care and consideration with their metaphorical interpretations in the most sincere effort to understand what the God really meant in the Bible. If we were to say that Jerusalem is God's throne on earth, that is one thing; if we were to say that Jerusalem is really a sweater, something would be going haywire.

Metaphorical ontology points to k-cosmos as theophany. Not only words, but phenomena themselves, mental or physical. A redwood tree is not just a redwood tree; it is a manifestation of the immanent God and a metaphor of the God Himself. It is to be loved, revered, and adored, and it is not to be cut down for any reason short of absolute necessity. Everything that exists is a metaphor for Being; everything is the God's stuff. Deep down where the darkness of understanding opens endlessly into light, metaphors become reality itself.

The theory of metaphorical ontology is not intended to placate reductionists by reducing religion to "mere metaphor." Metaphor has inherent, cognitive meaning. The new cosmos will not be achieved by the surrender of religion to science any more than the other way around. Metaphorical truth is at least as real as scientific and historical truth. They are languages in which we attempt to reply to the Great Poet.

The wonder is all there for us: that there should be anything at all; that we are able to understand anything at all; that the cosmos is delicately balanced so that our existence and our knowledge can be. Can we presume to be able to capture these wonders and pin them like butterflies on a collector's mat?

We can construct a new m-cosmos where science, history, religion, and art all point together through that center of reality that is truth. But will they converge? Will that search for the ultimate principle that began with the ancient Greeks and passed through Aquinas to Newton to Hawking draw all modes of thought together? Is there one truth that all of us honest people are heading for? I used to think so, and it may well be true. But I wonder. What if the center is not a point at all? What if the richness of the cosmos is inexhaustible? What if that truth that we seek turns out to be multiple truths, shimmering, gleaming, beckoning up, out, in, beyond, into unimagined vistas? Being fully alive entails being fully honest with ourselves. When we achieve that honesty and that openness of heart and mind, a new m-cosmos will form itself and delight the k-cosmos as well as ourselves.

To sum up: k-cosmos exists; our intellectual and moral capacities allow us to construct a new m-cosmos; the new m-cosmos that may emerge in this century is beautiful beyond hopes. Both/and and more and still more.

Years ago, when I felt my personal cosmos merging into something larger, I was standing on the bluffs above the restless sea in Mendocino, and I wrote

MEDITATION STANDING ON THE MENDOCINO HEADLANDS

Cogitation is my history. In ancient stone I

calcified the syllabus of my intent. Sun and shadow limned my lines; I tutored the birds in my vernacular. In my own image and likeness

I made them. For me seas were symbols merely indenting the coast of my mind

with bights of certitude. But the sea stirs, frozen now no longer, and random rain disturbs the brown grass. A wide wind smarting of salt unguys the text that I have boasted on these bluffs. Caves I have not built--or seen-- resound beneath my feet, unfirming the ground with secret syllables. The rippled bay disperses the shadow of my headland. O sea scour me of syntheses

purge me of parallels

loose my taut grip. The canvas will slacken; it will not fall. Did I think I could

bring the waves to my witness

fathom that deep

teach the tide to turn? These geographies do not belong to me. The sea tells its own story.

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Commentary: Helen Couclelis

“Physical knowledge … has the form of a description of a world. We define the physical universe to be the world so described” (emphasis in the original).

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