The evening version of that sky was starred so thickly in our neighborless nights that the Milky Way had vast companionship. The Big Dipper and rarer Little Dipper of my childhood I later learned to place among Orion, the Pleiades, Cassiopeia, Taurus, Scorpio. Later still I learned how these constellations were formed by human imposition on distant-from-each-other stars, constellations, galaxies.

I remember hearing somewhere along the way that “space” actually begins just above any planet or other object’s surface, and I love that idea. Although I will never travel in a space beyond that of planet Earth’s gravitation pull, I can know that my fascination with and curiosity about what lay above me and around me is a cosmological thread that connects my 60-year-old self with my six-year-old self as surely as any other tie that binds.

And that’s where the religious part of religious naturalism comes in for me. I understand religion as the ties that bind: people to themselves, people to each other, people to that which matters and has worth to them … but also, the substrate of what ties all to all.

For most of my life, I have wandered various branches of Christianity, seeking in theological exploration some way to make sense of a connective fire in my bones: fire for love, for justice, fire to make more life more possible for me and for others.

I won’t say I plumbed every depth of wisdom and practice, but I went pretty deep, following my love and curiosity and desire into spirituality, ministry, various degrees, different fields. I’ve been a journalist, pastor, professor, chaplain, and am now an educator of chaplains. I have struggled with what is limiting or lacking in Christianity, and done my best to break through those limits and remedy those lacks, particularly in doing my part to address Christianity’s need for decolonization and anti-racist practice. Indeed, my PhD resulted in a constructive theology of white anti-racist thought grounded in practice. There have been spaces where that work has made a difference, and I am grateful for that.

As Christian Wiman says in My Bright Abyss, God calls some of us to doubt that faith might take new forms. I have followed and fought with all the power of my doubts, all of my life, and am coming to a space of some equanimity that I have done what I can in the space between and among and around the world of doubt and faith. The meaning and inspiration and calling I find in Christianity has ebbed lower and lower, even as my gaze and life have taken me deeper into the world that has always been making it possible for me to live. I know I have not always returned the favor. I will spend the rest of my days doing what I can, not because of what I believe in or hope for, but because of what I see, and how those lights and darks and greens and blues and oceans and firs fill me: with air, with joy, with life.

For many years, the hackberry I climbed as a child served as a story of finding God in the breath of wind in the highest branches, and of the saving graces of that finding. That tree represented uplift; that tree represented salvation, from family and other troubles; that tree represented sanctuary.

Now the story is simpler. The tree is no longer a metaphor for what saved me and gave me life.

The tree itself is what saved me, gave me the breath of life; the tree itself was the sanctuary, the salvation, the bridge between an ever-changing sky and ever-changing me.

I have learned from the work of various scientists and naturalists how interconnected the world is, how each element sustains others, shares energy, and in dying makes energy available that enables new life. I believe our work as human beings is to follow this natural model, and to become more aware of the ties that give rise to us and bind us to everything.

Without privileging our species, I do feel humans have a particular responsibility as a part of the natural world that not only has consciousness, and but now also bears culpability for planetary-scale harm. We can do better, and we must, to help make more life more possible.

My hope is that as we come to a wider and deeper awareness of the joyous entanglement that is our true nature and our true calling, we will live into that entanglement with all the life-giving joy and justice we can.

by Riccardo Cravero

I think that what makes RN appealing to me is the fact that a naturalist worldview can account for pain, suffering and evil and explain them as part of our lives and equally real, instead of just considering them some kind of accidental defect of an otherwise perfect world, as many metaphysical and theological traditions do or to conceive them as an inherent feature of the world, as other more pessimistic metaphysical theories proposed.

For those traditions, this world can be either the “best of all possible” or the worst.

As a pragmatist and meliorist [the belief that the world can be made better by human effort], I think this world is far from being perfect, but I trust our ability as a species to exploit in a good and wise way our natural relationship with our environment (the world, broadly speaking) and to gradually shift the balance in the direction of a more acceptable and enjoyable situation.

To do so, we must know ourselves, our desires, impulses and drives and this is where the naturalistic worldview proves to be of great help, since it can illuminate many aspects of our condition as human beings.

The picture we get is not as enjoyable as many would like to think: we humans are sometimes “inhuman”, and that means that is our actions increase the effects of the ugly parts of our nature, affecting negatively that balance.

But we must account for the causes of evil dispositions, because they are just as natural as the ones we cherish the most. An act of kindness is natural for a social species like us, but the desire for power and domination through violence is also a strong motivating force in history, deeply ingrained in our psychology.

We can accept the fact that we are not naturally good or evil and begin to think of our nature as a series of sometimes divergent impulses, acknowledging that altruism and solidarity, empathy and kindness are just as human as all the violence in our history.

The possibility of explaining and accepting the evil part of humanity, and to effectively contrast it, is to me far more appealing than any proposal aimed at finding out the inherent goodness of it or to radically condemn it. 

Meliorism is all about going past fixed and absolute metaphysical moral evaluation of this world (the best possible? the worst? the only one possible, a necessary one?) and take a more creative, active and engaged stance. Even if we point out with insistence the many defects of the present world, we never take it as the only possible scenario.

My take on Religious Naturalism seems sometimes a bit too pessimistic, since I think that we humans are inherently prone to some of the evil dispositions we despise. But to me the conclusion we should draw from this premise is that we should acknowledge this and fight them, trusting in the fact that we are not wholly evil or destined to be like that.

Despite my background in religious studies, “religious naturalism” is a term that I encountered for the first time just several months ago. I’ve noticed that friends and relatives who share my interest in religion and spirituality weren’t familiar with it either.

by Michael Barrett

This paper advances the proposition that religious naturalism is a big idea whose time has come. Not a new idea – its roots go back to thinkers of the ancient world – but an idea reborn in the light of modern science. However if religious naturalism really is an idea whose time has come, why aren’t more people jumping on the bandwagon? Why isn’t this school of thought more widely known?

The answer seems to be that at present religious naturalism is little more than an embryonic cultural undercurrent heralding a future development, an undercurrent nevertheless that is gaining momentum in response to a number of clearly perceptible trends:  disappointment that the great religious traditions have not delivered on their promises;  dissatisfaction with the prevailing neo-liberal market economics of growth and consumption; and a growing understanding of humankind’s critical dependence on the natural world.

There are those who hold that a religious naturalist world-view will almost inevitably come into its own in the coming decades, not so much because it will be preached or promoted, but as an adaptive reaction to crises that before too long will be confronting humanity worldwide.

What do we mean by ‘religious naturalism’?

‘Naturalism’ is a view of the world and man’s relation to it in which only natural, as opposed to supernatural or spiritual, forces and laws are recognised. ‘Naturalism’, like ‘nature’, implies a view of the whole world including life itself and all of earth’s evolved bio-diversity, and by extension human society and culture.

The term ‘religious’ is used here not to refer to any particular faith, philosophy or cultural system, but to suggest the kind of affective experience – emotional or ‘spiritual’ feelings of awe, wonder, respect, reverence or at-one-ness that can be evoked by nature.

Religious naturalism seems to be a way of thinking, feeling, seeing the world, perhaps a way of living, in which some people – including a number of contemporary philosophers and scientists – experience a deeply felt sense of being bound in commitment to the natural world.  The titles of some of their books hint at important aspects of this distinctive world-view: Religion is not about God (L.Rue, 2005); When God is gone everything is holy’ (C.Raymo, 2008).

The historical background of religious naturalism

The roots of the religious naturalism world-view can be traced back to the ancient classical world, and on through the renaissance and enlightenment eras, but notably Spinoza among the philosophers of the past is generally recognised as an important forerunner of religious naturalism.

In late 19th and early 20th century, in America and Britain, religious naturalism diverged along two paths: a mainstream non-theistic approach, as seen for example in the work of agnostic pragmatist George Santayana, and a theistic approach in which the transcendentalist Emerson was a significant influence.

Up until the middle of the 20th century religious naturalism continued to develop, influenced variously by the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, the mysticism of Teilhard de Chardin, and the emergentist philosophy of Samuel Alexander. In America religious naturalism flourished in the work of philosophers such as Henry Nelson Wieman and Bernard Meland, whose thinking is set out in some detail in Jerome Stone’s Religious Naturalism Today: the Rebirth of a Forgotten Alternative (2008).

Stone notes that throughout the development of religious naturalism a key issue has been the use and meaning of the ‘God’ word, with most religious naturalists falling into one of four categories: those who think of God in terms of the totality of the universe, such as Samuel  Alexander; those who think of God as the creative process within the universe, such as Wieman; those, mainly humanists, who think of God as the sum of human ideals (in the 1920s and 1930s religious naturalism was developing in parallel with the humanism movement); and those who would not use the ‘God’ word but are nonetheless religious persons. A contemporary example whose work is discussed below is the scientist Ursula Goodenough, who describes herself as a ‘religious non-theist’.

Most mainstream religious naturalists would take the position that science and religion are two complementary views of life and the world – ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ in the words of palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould – and we can experience a deeper reverence for nature, and a sense of the sacred in the emergence of life in the universe, precisely because of our burgeoning scientific understanding.

In 1954 the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science was founded in the United States, and in 1966 the Institute established its quarterly publication Zygon, the Journal of Religion and Science. In recent years the Institute’s conferences, and Zygon articles, have contributed to a current resurgence of interest in religious naturalism. At the same time a steady stream of books – including those mentioned below – have been written by authors who in varying degrees identify themselves as religious naturalists.

Nature is Enough

A leading contemporary religious naturalist writer is the philosopher Loyal Rue. In the first part of his most recent book Nature is Enough (2011) he examines the notion of the meaning of life and the emergence of meaning in the world and in the mind. In the second part, Religion Naturalised, Nature Sanctified, Rue affirms the naturalist’s belief that outside of nature, or prior to nature, there is nothing meaningful to talk about. If God exists, then God is a natural being, or a natural process, or nature itself.

‘But this does not mean’, he writes, ‘that naturalists cannot be genuinely religious. If we mean by ‘religious’ a set of attitudes and sensibilities (rather than a set of metaphysical doctrines or an institutional allegiance), then we might bring ourselves to accept the fact that some people find their intellectual and emotional responses to the natural world to be recognizably religious.’

Rue admits that religious naturalism is unlikely in the immediate future to grow into a recognizable movement or tradition, but makes a confident prediction: ‘I fully expect the day to arrive when religious naturalism will prevail as the most universal and influential religious orientation on the planet. The source of my confidence in this prediction is the epic of cosmogenesis itself. Given a chance, this story is too compelling, too beautiful, too edifying, and too liberating to fail in captivating the imagination of a vast majority of humankind.’

The Sacred Depths of Nature

One of the best-known religious naturalist writers is Ursula Goodenough, distinguished biologist and professor at Washington University and former president of IRAS (the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science).

In her book The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), often cited as a notable example of mainstream religious naturalism thinking, she writes as a scientist about the origins and evolution of life on earth, and the development and functioning of organisms. But she writes poetically and personally about awareness and emotion, about value and meaning, and about the religious feelings of wonder, awe, and reverence for nature that she experiences in her work as a practicing scientist.

Identifying herself as a ‘religious non-theist’, she shares Loyal Rue’s position that all religions evolved to address two fundamental human concerns – the cosmological (‘how things are’), and the ethical (‘which things matter’). In this view the role of religions is that of integrating the cosmology and the ethics into a compelling explanatory narrative that should serve to guide us in the conduct of our lives.

Reinventing the Sacred

Most mainstream religious naturalists take the view that traditional ideas of the sacred that associate it with the supernatural are no longer acceptable, not just because they are not believable, but also because they are core doctrines of religions that can be dangerously divisive. And yet an undeniable human yearning for the sacred highlights the importance of redefining the sacred. We need, and value, whatever helps to give meaning to our lives.

In his book Reinventing the Sacred (2008 ) theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman redefines the sacred in terms of creativity. His research in self-organising systems supports the view that natural law alone is not adequate to describe the evolution of complex systems, much less human life, agency, or values.

He takes the God word to be a symbol that we invented as a way of denoting a radical creativity which for some four billion years has been a feature of the natural universe, the earth’s biosphere, its emergent biodiversity, and now human life. This creativity, supplementing natural law and requiring no supernatural creator, deserves in its own right our wonder, awe, and reverence and, he suggests, could serve as our new sacred.

Notable among a range of books that set out in various ways to describe aspects of the religious naturalism world-view are philosopher Donald Crosby’s A Religion of Nature (2002), philosopher Karl Peters’ Dancing with the Sacred (2002), and physicist Chet Raymo’s When God is Gone Everything is Holy (2008).

These and other religious naturalist writers share a number of core ideas that are driving the current resurgence of interest in religious naturalism: the need to re-define the sacred for the twenty-first century; the importance of accepting and honouring our contemporary understanding of how the world and life itself emerged according to natural forces and laws; and the epic of evolution as a cosmological narrative with real potential to unite people of different cultures in conscientious stewardship of the earth.

The Epic of Evolution

This notion, of a potent cosmological mythic narrative, capable of generating and sustaining a new planetary ethic and thus helping to unite us in the face of crises that many now see as almost inevitably confronting humanity in the coming decades, is central to the religious naturalism world-view.

The phrase epic of evolution was highlighted in 1978 by socio-biologist E.O.Wilson, and the narrative of a universe evolving in a continuous fourteen billion year process, from big bang to self-conscious human life and culture, was further developed in The Universe Story (1992), a seminal work by cosmologist Brian Swimme and cultural historian Thomas Berry.

They describe their vision of the epic of evolution as ‘a new type of narrative, one that has only recently begun to find expression … that has as its primary basis the account of the emergent universe as communicated to us through our sciences… This is the only way of providing in our times what the mythic stories of the universe provided in their times for tribal people and for the earlier classical civilisations.’ They assert that ‘the narrative of the universe, told in the sequence of its transformations, and in the depths of its meaning, will undoubtedly constitute the comprehensive educational context of the future’.

The AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) entitled their 1997 annual conference The Epic of Evolution, and published a university level text that included papers on cosmic origins, the emergence of life, the rise of our species, and the evolution of culture, society, religion and ethics. In 2006 astrophysicist Eric Chaisson’s book The Epic of Evolution set out our scientific understanding of the universe as it evolved through transformational epochs, from elementary particles, to galaxies, stars and planets, and on to chemistry, life, and human culture.

Over the past two decades religious naturalist writers have drawn on the epic of evolution, proposing that this mythic narrative of humanity’s place in, and critical dependence on the natural world offers a cosmology grounded in modern science on which humankind could forge a new ethical paradigm.

A looming crisis

It seems inevitable now that a crisis of significant proportions is going to arise from a number of interacting trends in population, resources and environment that have been well understood for several decades. The human population of the planet is on track to increase by up to forty per cent, to around ten billion, by the turn of this century. Aspirations for materially improved life-styles on the part of a population of that size will make formidable, perhaps impossible, demands on the world’s finite resources.

A well-rehearsed litany of consequences can be predicted: resource-hoarding by rich countries; breakdown of civil order in poor countries that fail to cope with food and energy shortage, water depletion, loss of productive land, collapse of health systems, all resulting in chaotic movement of population and, potentially, in territorial conflicts or wars.

It seems unlikely that traditional religions, with their belief systems undermined by science, and their values eroded in a secular society, would be capable of influencing significant numbers of people towards a radical change of aspirations and life-style.

Adaptation in the face of change

The writing of religious naturalists is underpinned by a persuasive logic: that although the cosmological myths and narratives of the great religious traditions are no longer sufficiently compelling to ensure that we control and adapt our behaviour, what is lacking in those narratives – what was not available to Jesus, Muhammad, or the Buddha – is a true understanding of the place of our planet and its biodiversity, including human life, in the context of the evolving universe.

Today we have begun to understand our place in nature, and we know that for some four billion years life on earth evolved in fits and starts, explosions of biodiversity and extinctions, but what remained constant was the rise of increasingly complex levels of consciousness.

Consciousness and its evolution are not yet understood by science, but it seems more than plausible that consciousness must have emerged and developed in the process of successful adaptation in response to the challenges of surviving in a changing environment.

And we know that when changes in their physical environment threatened the viability of animal species they ensured their survival by adapting their behaviour. Similarly, when the human cultural environment has changed – when major shifts have occurred in the global ‘zeitgeist’, the spirit of the age – history shows that in response we have successfully adapted our ideals and aspirations, our lifestyles and behaviour.

Some grounds for optimism?

Humanity still ponders the big questions posed down the centuries by the philosophers of the classical era, the medieval theologians, the religious mystics, the enlightenment thinkers, the pre-modern scientists – the only questions worth spending any time on: What am I? Where is this? How come? So what?

Today we are beginning to know something of what we are, and where this is: of our genetic inheritance of some four billion years of evolving life; of the hundred billion neurons networked in our brain, and the colony of trillions of cells that constitute our body; and we are mapping our universe, imaging stars in galaxy clusters at the far edge of the observable universe, and looking back some fourteen billion years to seek answers to the how come? question.

But crucial to survival as we trash our planet in a frenzy of consumption and waste is the question so what? How are we to conduct our lives? We are desperately in need of a new ethical system to match our cosmology, our new mythology based on the epic of evolution.

Might a philosophy of religious naturalism turn out to be a truly big idea, whose time has come? Not many people have jumped on the bandwagon yet, but perhaps religious naturalism, grounded in the epic of evolution, stands a better chance than traditional schools of religious thought of giving us a vision of the world that could help us cope with the coming global crisis.

Michael Barrett
Oxford
September 2014

by Eugene Troxell

The major reason I regard the cosmos as worthy of human reverence is because it contains or exhibits characteristics that I used to associate with God when I was a traditional Christian Theist.  Those characteristics are creativity and mystery.  First to Creativity!

I regard the cosmos as creative because it continually exhibits qualities or characteristics completely unlike the qualities it had exhibited at an earlier time.    Of course most of these changes occur during periods of time that make the cosmos seem unchanging to a being for whom 100 years is a long period of time.  If we regard the cosmos (or the current version of the cosmos) as originating with the Big Bang, we are saying there was a time when only energy existed.  Then there was a fairly long period in which the only elements in the cosmos were hydrogen and helium.  At that time the only qualities or characteristics the cosmos seemed to possess were those of hydrogen and helium

Hydrogen and helium are gravitational substances.  The gases collected into enormous balls.  As the balls of hydrogen became larger, they exerted great pressure on the hydrogen at the center of the balls.  This pressure caused the gas to become increasingly hot.  Eventually the gas at the center of the balls became hot enough for nuclear fusion to occur and the enormous balls of hydrogen became stars.  As the hydrogen of the star fused, its atomic structure altered.  In that way the hydrogen changed into other elements, so that the cosmos began to possess the characteristics of oxygen, nitrogen, and eventually all the other elements in addition to the characteristics of hydrogen and helium.

After the stars burned for a few billion years they exploded as super novae.  As that happened, all the material of the star, the hydrogen along with all the other elements that had become formed in the star, spread out in space.  The fusion that had been occurring in that star stopped as the material of the star dispersed.

Solid elements were scattered about by the super novae and some pieces eventually became large masses of solid material.  The gravity of those masses attracted various gases that became their atmosphere.  Some of these masses became satellites circling balls of hydrogen that were still burning as stars, so the temperature on the satellites became suitable for other changes to occur.  This combination of factors provided a place for gases and other materials to come together and combine into compounds–materials or substances composed of more than one element.  As the compounds formed, many exhibited characteristics that were totally different from the characteristics of their original materials.   For example, hydrogen could combine with oxygen under the right circumstances to form water.  Hydrogen, which is extremely flammable, combines with oxygen, which is necessary for substances to burn, and the end result is something that extinguishes fire.  The resultant water has characteristics extremely different from the characteristics of hydrogen and oxygen alone.

The term “emergence” is used when substances come together to form new material with radically different characteristics from those of the individual materials.  That type of creativity constantly produces characteristics totally unlike the those of the component materials.  There are much more complete accounts of emergence.  In particular Chapter 50 of The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science,  “The Sacred Emergence of Nature,” by two scientific scholars, Ursula Goodenough and Terrence W. Deacon, presents carefully detailed accounts of these natural developments.

Emergence is sometimes described as “something more from nothing but.”  Another example is when matter with only the characteristics of non-living material combines into a form that constitutes an elementary building block of what eventually becomes living material.  In this case “life” is the something more.  The cosmos began to contain many more characteristics as new materials combined under different circumstances with chemical reactions bringing about billions of new qualities.  As living organisms came into existence, they continually changed into more and more complex living beings.  Terrestrial evolution built upon the basic living beings to form millions of other types of organisms, each with qualities even more different from the original hydrogen than were the qualities of single celled organisms.

Some varieties of the elemental living beings formed varieties of social systems.  Social living provides extremely fertile ground for new developments to occur.  For example, in the social systems of the beings that became humans, language, intellect, tremendous amounts of consolidated knowledge, limited autonomy, economic systems, computers, etc., etc. were developed, all due to the fact that humans live in complicated social systems. That does not mean that social living is all that was required for those developments.  But it was an essential feature in the sense that the various developments could not have occurred without social living.  At that point it is possible to say that some particular configurations of the primordial hydrogen, existing shortly after the Big Bang, had developed the ability to understand what it was doing, along with millions of other behavioral differences.

In my opinion there is no reason whatsoever to think this constant development of new types of characteristics and ways of behaving has come to an end.  It seems apparent that a billion years from now parts of the cosmos will be behaving in ways  that are so different from the way anything behaves at this time that our infantile intellects could not imagine these new characteristics even if a being from that time tried to explain them to us.  Of course one of the features of the present terrestrial evolution that is currently evolving at warp speed is the human intellect.  Our present imaginations can come up with thousands of possibilities that would have been unimaginable to Aristotle, unless he were able to go through a whole new developmental process in the reality of the twenty first century.  Again, there is no reason to think all the new possibilities have now come into being, and even less reason to think that we now know all the different types of material and forces that have already developed.  The idea that it is possible to predict what the cosmos will be like 10 billion years from now is as unwarranted as the idea that one could have predicted that some day that primordial hydrogen would have been able to understand what it is doing.  And in ten billion years it is reasonable to expect the existent reality to have characteristics or qualities that are as different from what exists now as our present reality is different from what existed ten billion years ago.

That could be regarded as Creativity with a capital “C.”  Yes, it all developed out of the potential of the primordial hydrogen.  No, there is no reason to believe  intention was involved in the creative process.  Support for this statement will be provided later in this essay.  The cosmos is every bit as creative as what has been regarded as God.  However, the creative cosmos has anthropomorphic characteristics only in the human beings it has produced.  And the “natural” creation has taken place over a great deal more time than humans had regarded as required by divine creativity.

Some may object to the reference of this material cosmos as being creative, since no intention was involved in the process.  Usually the term “creativity” is used only when something has been produced intentionally.  If something comes into being only due to the natural development of material that is already present, that is not usually called creation, even if the resultant material is quite different from what had been there before.  I am calling this development creativity because the resultant developments are so radically different from what was already present in the material development of the cosmos.  If some object to use of the term “creative” in this manner the defense is that the developments do not seem sufficiently wondrous when they are called simply developments, and the language presently has no other terms for better expression of what is being communicated.  The developments did not occur out of nothing, as people regard god’s creation as occurring.  But the resultant characteristics are so radically different from what was already there, especially if one compares what was supposedly present at the time of the big bang to what is here now, that the term “creativity” is warranted.

CONSCIOUS BEINGS

Human beings developed out of the living material of the creative cosmos after life had developed out of non-living material.  The non-living material needed a place where water could exist in a liquid form in order to become living material.  The living beings originally were unicellular.  It was probably only after many unicellular forms had existed for millions of years that the living beings became capable of doing something similar to what we now would regard as sensing.  That is, individual living beings began to be able to react to the presence of other individual beings, as well as other changes in their environments.  At some time after that happened they slowly became capable of responding to a variety of changes in their environments, including other living beings.  Of course, I have no basis for assigning amounts of time for these occurrences, nor any good basis for talking about these conjectures as actual occurrences.  But some of these changes occurred over some period of time until the unicellular organisms were able to become organized into multicellular organisms.

Most animals have little, if any, self awareness.  Some are able to recognize themselves in certain circumstances.  But we have no reasons to believe that most non-human animals realize they will die at some time, or agonize over past mistakes, as humans frequently do.  Non human animals live in the present moment much more than humans do.  Humans frequently think about what is to happen next, or has just happened, or about something else completely because something in the immediate environment reminded them of it.  The fact that we do not live only in the present moment is both a tremendous advantage, and an unfortunate source of personal agony.  Some religions regard our inability to live more in the present moment as the major source of human unhappiness, and consequently develop methods of practicing being able to live in the present moment.  Nevertheless, the fact that we do not live totally in the present moment is due to the particular way we think.  It is due to the fact that we have intellects.   And that is what makes possible our tremendous ability to develop elaborate strategies for accomplishing all of what we commonly regard as humanly created aspects of our world.

Because we have such elaborate self awareness compared to other animals we usually regard ourselves as separate beings, not as integral features of an ongoing creative process.  That is why death seems so dreadful.  It does not seem like we will still exist as different features of the great whole of which we are integral features even now while we are alive.  It seems as though death means we will no longer exist.  But, as Buddhism has historically stressed, the feeling of separateness is an illusion brought about by our intellects.

We regard the self concept we have unknowingly created as our actual being.  So we do not regard our animal nature as a temporary feature of a larger whole.  We feel like independently existing separate beings.  Consequently we regard death as either the end of our selves, or as a time of transition into a very different type of being.  Either possibility makes death into something possibly bad, and thus makes death into something fearful.  Possibly a better way to regard death is to think of it as the end of our illusory separateness, with all its joys and agonies, as what constitutes our actual material being continues functioning as different types of integral features of the creative cosmos.  Rather than going to some separate place or type of being we simply blend back into the Creative Cosmos, of which we had actually been integral features even while we had the illusory feel of separateness.

The particular configurations of material that become humans can be regarded as the Creative Cosmos’s way of bringing about a new stage of creativity.  We can reasonably regard the Creative Cosmos as going through individual changes which open up the possibility of countless new manifestations of its being.  Once liquid water became a possibility developments that would not have been possible without it came into being.  Once life developed millions of types of living beings developed.  And with humans the Creative Cosmos has become capable of creating new types of beings with qualities quite different compared to what was there before humans had developed.  When I say only humans can function as humans do, I am not making any claims about possible life forms in other parts of the cosmos.  For all we know some other life forms may have developed powers that are far greater than what have developed among humans on the planet earth.  But nothing else in the cosmos that we know much about can marshal a huge collection of shared knowledge to make elaborate novel intentional plans and then collectively carry them out.

In my opinion the type of development possible for the materials of the planet earth, which have already developed primarily out of hydrogen, rival the creation I had, in my life as a theist, attributed to god.  And if we want to refer to the cosmos as god, we may do so.  However, this creativity is no longer “magic.”  It is due to the natural development of that primordial hydrogen.  And by referring to it as “god” we are not referring to it as a separate being with a separate consciousness or any type of anthropomorphic characteristics.  What we can count as “god” is the whole creative cosmos acting as a unit.  There is no separate creative feature of the cosmos as far as we know.  The cosmos as a whole is creative.

But where did the hydrogen come from, some may ask.  It came from the same place the magical, anthropomorphic god that humans used to believe in came from.  If we need a further “creation” to account for what we might regard as a beginning for everything, we should need a similar type of creation to account for the existence of a god.  If our traditional god does not need a creator to account for its being, neither does the primordial energy that eventually developed into everything that exists now.  We accomplish nothing by merely postulating something else as a creative force which we simply declare not to need a further creator.

HUMANS AND EVOLUTION

But it is not entirely correct to say the traditional idea of an anthropomorphic god contributed nothing more to humans than is apparently contributed by naturally developing energy or hydrogen.  Since the traditional idea of god was a being that could act intentionally, it apparently could tell humans how to behave, and what was the meaning of their lives–what they should strive to accomplish in their intentionally lived natural lives.  Traditionally humans were supposed to behave in proper ways to be worthy to join god in heaven, or to continue life on earth in a new form of life after having lived in the human form that had enabled them to become self conscious, or something like that.  Can our lives have a “direction” or a “meaning” or a “purpose” if we are not intentionally given this purpose by our creator?  Yes, they can have a meaning or a purpose.  But it is important that we no longer deceive ourselves into thinking that we have merely recognized the purpose god has given us.

We are the first beings on this planet that are capable of living in a completely purposeful manner, though not the first beings capable of acting purposefully.  Purpose requires intention.  Intention normally requires at least a minimal degree of understanding.  It is difficult to postulate a time at which minimal understanding developed among living beings.  But we can safely say that the actions and lives of human beings are capable of being intentional to a much greater degree than had been present before humans.  Humans can create values and use the values to guide major parts of their lives.  It is very questionable whether any other type of animals is capable of creating or recognizing values other than the natural outcomes of their natural ways of being.  Certainly nonhuman animals can value their offspring, their mates, and other members of their social groups.  But they do not choose these values out of a variety of choices, as is possible for some of the values that humans hold.  If we create the values intelligently the values may seem like values that were already present and that we have merely recognized.  But humans usually have multiple choices as we create values, whether we recognize the choices or not.  We have no reason to believe that non human animals can intentionally or consciously chose certain values rather than other possible values.

At this time humans are major directors of evolution on the planet Earth.  Our numbers and powers have enabled us to just “take over” much of the earth, thus taking away habitat for thousands of other plants and animals that had previously depended upon that part of the earth as their habitat.  It is now the case that thousands of species extinctions occur every year, virtually all the result of human changes of natural habitats.  Of course, as some plants and animals go extinct other species of plants and animals that have depended upon those now extinct species may not be able to continue to live.

At this time humans cannot stop being directors of evolution on the planet Earth.  Our numbers and powers are such that we will continue being a major force driving evolution in modern times whether we want to be or not.  The only major alternative we have is to continue unintentionally directing evolution as we have been–as the unintended side effects of our various attempts to make ourselves more comfortable–or to acknowledge that we are directing evolution and to make how we direct evolution into a major value in our lives.  Then we could make intentionally directing evolution on the planet Earth into one of our major purposes for living.

In the billions of years the Earth has had various forms of life there may have been other times at which individual species have played dominant roles in the evolutionary development of terrestrial life.  But this is the first time this has happened on this planet when the species doing the directing has been able to understand that it is doing this.  We are the first species that has had the option of attempting intentionally to direct terrestrial evolution.  Of course, our own existence as a species also requires us to begin paying much more attention to the ways we are directing evolution than we have been.  If we keep going on as we have been, on the belief that we don’t really need to pay attention to the effects we are having on the Earth’s biosphere, it is quite likely that we will unintentionally pass some tipping point that will render the biosphere unable to continue supporting some species of plants or animals that happen to be essential to our own existence on the planet.

Our human ancestors did not face these types of problems.  It is not until the end of the nineteenth century that human technology had been developed to the point at which it could have drastic effects upon the planet’s biosphere.  It is also at around the same time that modern medicine became much more effective than medical practices had been in the past.  A major result was that the infant mortality rate dropped considerably, so that many more births produced people who survived to become adults.  And as more people survived more people gave birth to infants with continually higher chances of surviving.  The result of that has been that during the Twentieth Century, despite wars that have claimed hundreds of millions of human lives, the human population of the planet has increased by more than five billion people.  The size of the increase of the population alone is much, much larger than the maximum number of the human population at any time in the past.  Moreover, more and more people are living lives that exceed the luxuries of the royalty of times past.  All of this consumes more and more of what we now frequently regard as the Earth’s resources, meaning the features of the Earth that humans primarily need and/or use.

And, of course, the depletion of resources is not the only effect of our constantly increasing population.  The unintended by-products of our use of the resources, the various types of pollution we produce, are changing the biosphere in a variety of other ways.  The composition of the oceans is being radically altered, and the composition of the atmosphere has already suffered major alteration that is continually being made even worse.  These and other changes humans have caused in the Earth’s biosphere have the power to cause so much further change that it is no longer only non-human living beings whose existence is threatened.  The continued existence of human beings can no longer be assumed.  The Earth’s biosphere must meet certain very general conditions in order for it to support the human species.  No other planet in our solar system even comes close to meeting those requirements at this time.  If we continue changing the Earth’s biosphere as we have been doing, it will soon be likely that the Earth also will be unable to support human existence.

These changes have come about, in large part, because humans have been unable to understand the types of beings that we are, why we are residents of the planet Earth, and the types of effects we are having on our home planet.  Our understanding of all of these important matters has been blocked by our beliefs in the traditional religions that have played important roles in the development of human beings.  We have been unable to understand that we are major directors of the course of evolution on this planet, and that we are directing it without paying much attention to what we are doing in that regard.  Even as more and more people begin to understand what is happening it is still the case that the majority of humans adhere to beliefs concerning supernatural features of the creative cosmos.  In many people’s beliefs those supernatural parts of our existence are able to control the actual consequences of our behavior, so that it seems reasonable to most people to think we would not be able to cause the extinction of our own species unless that is what the supernatural features of our cosmos want to happen.  If that were true, our future possible extinction would not actually be the result of our own behavior, because it could not be happening if the supernatural features of the cosmos did not want it to happen.

The belief in supernatural features of the cosmos has been extremely important, possibly essential, to the existence of humans.  Various versions of that belief helped different human societies exist when their social systems evolved institutions whose existence required obedience to certain rules of behavior.  The members of the social system did not understand why obedience to the rules was essential for the existence of the social system nor did they understand the importance of their social system to their own existence.  This was the case when the social systems of our primate ancestors incorporated particular features that went beyond the social behavioral requirements of nonhuman social animals.

As our social systems became more sophisticated the changes in the social system required behavioral changes and restrictions that had not been present before, when the behavioral requirements of basic social systems were, in large part, genetically inherited.  Both the existence of personal possessions and complicated methods of communication required social behavioral patterns that were not needed by the very basic social living of nonhuman social animals.  Moreover, the addition of personal possessions, which required a rule against stealing, also created considerable temptation to engage in stealing.

The members of the social system did not understand specifically why stealing had to be prohibited.  The major reason for the prohibition was that the prohibition was necessary for the social institution creating personal possessions. But stealing was also a type of assault upon another member of the social group and any such behavior had to be discouraged among members of individual social systems.  So there were social restrictions upon such behavior, like the rule in the Ten Commandments saying “Thou shalt not steal.”  However, as I have said, it turned out that the rule against stealing was much more important than merely discouraging behavior that was unpleasant to other members of the social  system.  Without the rule against stealing personal possessions could not exist.  Without personal possessions nearly all of the developments that have made humans so different from our primate relatives could not have occurred.  The existence of modern humans depends upon the existence of personal possessions in thousands of ways that are, in one respect right before our eyes.  But in another respect they are so common that we do not usually even notice them.

Belief in supernatural beings provided a major motivation for individuals to avoid behaviors which they believed the supernatural beings wanted them to avoid.  One could not conceal one’s behaviors from a god.  Thinking all the required social behaviors of the continually more sophisticated social systems were required by all-knowing gods, who would very severely punish those who disobeyed the behavioral requirements, was a major factor in the continued success of the continually more complex social systems of developing humans.  As personal possessions became part of the social systems personal possessions became very desirable.  One easy method of acquiring possessions was to steal them from other people.  However, were everyone to behave in that manner personal possessions would simply cease existing.  So the complex systems needed the extra motivation provided by belief that god would severely punish them after they died if they did not obey god’s rules.  Those increasingly complex social systems have provided us with the ability to make our social systems into much more pleasant and protected manners of living than are available to nonhuman animals.  They have also provided humans with the ability to have much more power to wage deadly wars and to change the earth.  Thus, intentionally or unintentionally, humans are now capable of rendering the earth’s biosphere no longer able to support most of the life forms it now supports, including humans.

However, human beings are now capable of understanding the ways in which human behaviors bring about complex features of social systems that provide us with increasing amounts of power, as well as thousands of other apparent benefits.  We can understand why we need traffic regulations and laws.  We can understand why our legal system needs certain counter-intuitive rules in order for it to provide the best chance for justice.  We can understand that every social system, no matter what types of animals are living it, must not have members of the individual system preying upon other members of the same social group.  Social systems are such beneficial methods of saving genetic patterns because the members of the social group work together.  In order to do this they must be able to trust other members of the same group.  Such behavioral requirements are genetically inherited by members of non-human social groups.  This was also true of our primate ancestors.

But modern humans are largely free of such genetic behavioral requirements, or have evolved characteristics enabling them to override the genetic requirement against killing other members of their own social group.  (FOOTNOTE  The Ten Commandments do not mention murder.  There is a commandment against killing.  But prohibitions against most types of killing are not required for social living.  Only that type of killing called murder must be prohibited in order for human societies to exist.)  So we have a social rule against murder.  Such a rule, or a genetically acquired social constraint, is an absolute requirement for all social systems including those of humans.  We could not exist without a rule against arbitrarily killing other members of our own social system, just as we could not exist without personal possessions, which require a rule against stealing.  Many of our other behavioral rules may not be required for humans to be able to exist, but they still may provide major benefits to the members of the social group.

We can now understand why we need such rules.  However thinking these rules are god’s laws means we continue to believe they are required even after our living conditions have significantly altered.  Such changes in our living conditions may render social rules that were beneficial under previous living conditions now harmful.  Rules favoring large families are a prime example.  Possibly the most serious problem humans currently face is that of overpopulation.  Modern living conditions have made it much, much easier for humans to survive.  Modern living conditions require thousands of energy consuming devices that were not features of the living conditions of our ancestors only a hundred years ago.  That means we are continuously radically changing our biosphere in order to secure this energy, and further changing the biosphere as we make use of the energy along with other features of our biosphere.  A human population of over seven billion is turning out to be more than our biosphere is able to continue supporting.  Yet we continually encourage population growth by means of ancient rules against the use of contraceptives, against early abortions of accidental pregnancies, and against allowing terminally ill people to select their own means of bringing about their own death.  All of these rules are due to prior living conditions, but they are now among the rules threatening the continued existence of humans as a species, along with the existence of thousands of other species of plants and animals.  We continue to live by them because we continue to believe god wants us to obey these rules.  Since we do not understand the functions of such rules, we believe we have no other intelligent bases for selecting our behavioral rules.  But understanding of the functions of social behavioral rules is now possible to those whose can release themselves from the belief that they are following rules that a god has commanded them to follow.

A NEW PATH

Selecting an intelligent set of values, setting intelligent purposes for our individual lives, and consciously designing intelligent social systems can provide bases for requiring and selecting intelligent social rules.  The social rules of the past were not consciously selected.  They slowly became required as the social systems evolved.  Others were based upon groundless beliefs about how things ought to be.  It seemed natural to ancient people for women to be subject to men.  Men were stronger and the stronger tended to be the rulers.  It also seemed disgusting to many people for certain people to engage in sexual behaviors with other members of the same sex.  Consequently it seemed natural to regard those types of behaviors as wrong behaviors that were forbidden by god, as were other types of wrong behaviors.  As I have already explained, many of those beliefs about “god’s rules” were extremely important for those rules to have their beneficial effects upon human social/evolutionary development.  However, now that we can understand why some of these rules are required, and others are simply due to prejudicial human thought, it is very important that we spend much more time understanding why we need certain behavioral rules but not others.

First, however, let’s spend a bit more time positioning ourselves in this Creative Cosmos of which we are tiny parts.  To say that we are very small parts of a very big whole almost seems comical when we try to get a perspective on the size of ourselves and the size of the cosmos.  Scientists are presently saying that the whole cosmos contains billions (with a “B”) of galaxies and each galaxy contains billions or trillions of stars.  No estimate on the number of planets.  Our galaxy alone is extremely large.  But to think of it as only one of at least a billion of such galaxies just makes my mind spin.  We are tiny features of something extremely large.  On the other hand our bodies and brains contain billions of other living creatures, billions of synapses, billions or millions of cells, and trillions of atoms.  So relative to that dimension we are extremely large.

If this Creative Cosmos has a stable state of being, we can only characterize this stable state as being one of constant development.  Humans have been features of this constantly developing cosmos for only a very short time, depending upon what we might want to call the beginning of humans.  As far as we can tell the species development that has become human has been in the process of immediate development for less than a hundred thousand years.  But that is only one way of thinking of it.  It would make as much sense to say that the species development leading to humans began with the beginning of life or even with the evolutionary developments that led to the development of life.

Unless we cause our extinction fairly soon, we will continue developing until the intelligent beings to which our distant progeny give rise will consider us to be something like what we regard as primitive humans, at least culturally and possibly also genetically, with approximately the degree of understanding of our world and ourselves that we would ascribe to our ancestors of a few thousand years ago.  The world those future beings will inhabit will be extremely different from the world we now inhabit.

Does the existence of this future version of humans make any difference to us?  We will be long gone by that time.  Or will we?  That depends upon how we define ourselves at this time.  If we are intact spirits/souls inhabiting physical bodies, that happen to be occupying this world for a short time, we apparently will cease existing on this planet or continue existing in some other manner.  We are mere visitors of this planet.  But if that self concept that we consider to be our actual self, is indeed an illusion, something we merely project as a separately existing being, then our “death” is only the end of the illusion.  After our bodies’ deaths we would remain being integral features of the Creative Cosmos.  What composes our bodies would become merged with the larger whole while this particular state of a larger whole, this planet, remains temporarily distinct from the entire Creative Cosmos.  What our collective minds have produced likely will continue as features of the mind inherited by our offspring.

Of course, If our species goes extinct then it will not give rise to future intelligent species.  The type of beings that we are will have turned out to be both too smart, too faithfully conservative, and too short sighted for our own good.  That tragedy has not happened yet, however.  So we should go on continuing to expect our offspring to be able to continue to live and continue having offspring, while we do whatever we can to help that desirable scenario become an actuality.

Religions have given meaning to our lives while we have been discovering more about our true selves.  We are now in a position to understand that religions based upon belief in an anthropomorphic being are very likely illusory.  This is in part due to the fact that none of the characteristics of an anthropomorphic being make sense when they are projected onto an infinite being, as we have imagined our anthropomorphic god to have been.  Humans are finite beings, quite limited both temporally and in our abilities.  Consequently our characteristics are all consistent with our limitations.  Does this lack of an anthropomorphic god to give meaning to our lives mean our lives must now be meaningless?  Not necessarily.  The meanings our lives have had have actually been created by ourselves, even though we imagined them to come from an almighty being.  We could continue creating meaning for our lives and actually accept responsibility for the creation of the meaning.

We are integral features of a wondrously creative cosmos. During all the time we have any actual understanding of this cosmos it has been continuously creative in ever new ways.  By giving rise to humans it has opened enormous new pathways to give rise to extremely novel possibilities of creativity.  We are quite distinct from all the other creative novelties the creative cosmos has so far produced and upon which we depend.  Our self consciousness and our tremendous collective intellect have given rise to entirely new types of creativity, that we do not know to exist in any other part of this creative cosmos.  We could continue functioning in our recently developed creative mode to give rise to new types of creativity not possible, as far as we know, in any of the other ways the creative cosmos has of being creative.  We could consciously move in the same creative direction in which the creative cosmos, with and without us, has always been moving.  We could simply realize we are unique features of the creative whole and make further intentionally selected creativity be the conscious meaning of our lives.

HUMAN CREATIVITY

Throughout all known human history humans have always regarded themselves as a special “species.”  Actually, until fairly recently humans did not regard themselves as animals, and consequently not as a species of animal.  But we have always regarded ourselves as special.  In the days of old time religion humans were the reason God created the world.  Everything else on the planet was put here for human use.  Today many people still think basically that way about humans and the rest of the world.

More scientifically oriented people now regard humans as one of the species of animals that have developed on this planet.  So a common modern attitude is that humans are merely one species of animal, not necessarily better than any other species of animal.  Nevertheless since we who are judging what is better or special are ourselves human, it is natural for us to favor our species.  Thus humanism is a common substitute for theistic religion among people who have rejected the idea of a god.  But we still regard it as important to continue reminding ourselves that we are just another species of animal–nothing particularly special.

I would like to challenge that idea that there is nothing particularly special about humans.  As we have seen, a major way of regarding the cosmos, and one of the reasons I regard the cosmos as a type of “god,” is because it is so extremely creative.  Not only has that original hydrogen changed itself into all the other elements and into millions of compound materials, thus acquiring the characteristics of all these very different types of being, it has also changed itself into living beings.  As living beings, under the right material conditions, the original hydrogen has changed into millions of different types of living organisms, thus acquiring all the characteristics of those types of beings as well as the characteristics of different types of non living material.  Living organisms are capable of entirely new types of creativity.  Moreover, living organisms are capable of social living, thus bringing about types of creativity that are not possible by individual organisms.  Social living makes it possible for honeybees to produce honey, for example–a type of substance found nowhere else than where bees are present.   Honey is the only type of food that does not turn “sour” or decay no matter how long it remains unconsumed by a living being.

There are many other types of substances that are found only where a particular type of social animal is present.  This is particularly the case if that social animal is human.  Everything that we regard as “manmade,” as opposed to natural or “nature made,” is obviously among the items produced by humans.  However, human creativity is quite different from the creativity of any other animal.  Of course humans are capable of individually creating magnificent pieces of art, wonderful poems and other kinds of writing.  But that is not the type of human creativity upon which I want to focus.  I want to focus upon items that are not created by individuals, like automobiles, computers, television sets, etc.

Most human creativity arises out of group cooperation along with a type of cooperation that might be called something like social/species cooperation.  When I am talking to a group of people I sometime pull a ball-point pen out of my pocket and show it to the people.  “How many people do you think played a role in the production of this pen out of the completely raw materials of the earth?”  I personally would guess it is in the thousands, and possibly hundreds of thousands, depending upon exactly how we think of “out of the completely raw materials of the earth.”  There had to be people who knew how to select and procure the necessary materials for the different types of metals in the pen.  By the time we would move from those raw materials to the different types of metals required for the pen, many different types of machines with different people running the machines and guiding the work would have been required. There also would have been other individuals involved in moving the materials from one set of machines or factory to another.  Raw materials for the plastics would also need to be collected, transported to some type of factory, with the material from the first factory then going to other factories.  Different people with different types of knowledge and skills would be needed at each level of the production process.  Other types of machines and workers would be needed to press the metals into the necessary shapes and put them all together.  And this is what would be needed if we used humanly created machinery at every stage of the work.  Were we to consider what would be required to make all of that machinery out of the raw materials of the earth, along with figuring out what type of machines would be needed, how to build those various types of machines, etc., etc. the number of people involved would certainly approach the millions.  Then we might considered the roads, the trains, the airplanes, the ships involved in moving the materials from where they are taken out of the earth to where they are processed into different types of substances.  Of course, all those workers need to eat and sleep while they are doing all this, so farms and farmers are needed along with people to build roads and railroad tracks, etc., etc.

The social cooperation of all these different people is required in order to manufacture this very simple ball point pen out of the dirt of the earth.  No one individual was essential to the process.  But many individuals were required. No other types of social animals produce substances that require the consolidated work of so many different individuals.

What other social animals produce is limited to what is immediately required for the animals to be able to live.  Humans have the ability to make far more choices than other types of animals.  Consequently we can consciously decide to cooperate on various types of production.  Or, as in the old days of pyramid building, we can obey a king or queen who makes the decisions concerning our cooperative work.  Only humans are capable of such extensive types of cooperative effort, making use of types of types of knowledge and skills that have slowly developed over thousands of years.

Most of this “cooperative work” is accomplished without our realizing we are cooperating in the hundreds or thousands of different ways we have learned to cooperate.  In order for this work to be done humans have created an elaborate social environment within which thousands of different types of “social constructs” exist.  Social constructs have been defined in a variety of ways.  The definition I prefer is to say that social constructs are entities or features of our  world whose continued existence as distinct features of the world depends upon human thought.  Humans must “cooperatively” think in certain ways in order to bring social constructs into existence.  A few examples should help to explain what I am talking about.  An easy example is to think about the way we (all the sane people in the whole world) think of days.  Our days have individual names.  Monday is different from Thursday, and both are different from Saturday.  Our days come in groups of weeks, months, week-ends, etc.  None of this exists independently of humans.  Without humans the earth simply rotates on its axis so that at different times different parts of it are facing the sun.  When we are on a part of the planet that is facing the sun, we are aware of the light of the sun.  We call that a day.  And the next day is tomorrow, etc.  And each of those days has a name, and is part of a week and a month.  Without humans there are no weeks nor months, nor any dates, nor any specific times during the days.  This is being written in the year 2014.  That year exists only because people have been taught to think a certain way.  Where I am on the planet it is now about 2:30 in the “afternoon.”  Morning, evening, afternoon all exist as separate times because we think a certain way, along with the particular way we have of “telling time.”

We are not aware that our thought processes are cooperative in this manner, nor that the thought processes themselves are what produce the weeks, times during the day, etc., etc.  All of those ways of thinking of time are a major part of what enables humans to cooperate in the millions of different ways we engage in elaborate creative processes.  Everybody knows (or can know) when they are supposed to be someplace, how to determine when that time has arrived, along with what they are supposed to do once they get there.  And none of all that they know in that respect is part of nature.  It is all a product of human cooperative thinking.

This is only one tiny feature of the socially constructed world we all inhabit.  In the case of time, the ways of dividing up the time are uniform across the whole world.  In other cases the social construction varies somewhat from society to society.  In America we use miles to measure distances.  Miles are not part of nature.  They are products of human thought, as are yards, meters, acres, kilometers, pounds, liters, gallons, etc., etc.  All have very important purposes in terms of enabling humans to remain coordinated in their relationship to what they are doing to some feature of the world.

Whole books have been written about our socially constructed world and there is certainly a great deal more I could say here.  But I think this little bit is enough to open up an awareness of another way that human cooperation enables humans to be so amazingly creative.  The fact that we can create a ball point pen depends upon this elaborate social “reality” that is purely the product of a type of unconscious “group-think.”  We have no reason to think any other animal lives in such an elaborate social reality.

There is a sense in which items that are man made are not actually made by individual human beings.  Rather the knowledge of how to make thousands of different types of items, knowledge collected and refined over thousands of years, resides in societies and different individuals can, at different times, cooperatively make use of the knowledge to produce different “man made” items.  The knowledge of how to build something is what is particularly important, along with the ability to cooperate in order to produce the required results.  Although some individual like a Thomas Edison may have finished putting some collected bits of knowledge together in order to produce something particularly useful, he was working with knowledge that had been collecting for thousands of generations.

Human social living has created the possibility of types of creativity that would not even have been dreamed about only a thousand years ago.  Particularly during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries human creativity has gone completely beyond the types of creativity that was possible before modern humans came on the scene.  And we certainly have no reason to think human creativity has stopped or even slowed down.  If anything it is now expanding at ever more rapid rates of expansion.  But the type of creativity that we now regard as producing what is “man-made” is not performed by individual humans.  No individual human could create a ball-point pen out of the raw materials of the earth even if the person tried for an entire life-time just to do that.  And it takes even many more people to build something like a powerful computer out of the raw materials of the earth, even if we don’t talk about all the people involved in producing all the various type of factories and machinery involved in the production of that type of item.  Perhaps human types of creativity exist elsewhere in the cosmos.  Perhaps other types of creativity exist among other social beings on individual planets that are so different from what exists here that we might not even be able to imagine how a certain type of creativity comes about.  But nowhere else in the cosmos that we know about is the type of creativity produced by humans present.  Humans are part of nature.  But what humans have become is very far removed from most of what we regard as nature.

I have two major reasons for placing so much emphasis upon the differences between human creativity and the creativity of any other animal.  One is simply to establish that there is something very special about human creativity and consequently about humans.  However a major problem with the type of creativity that humans have developed is that humans are very close to rendering the biosphere incapable of supporting future generations of humans as well as generations of millions of other types of living creatures.  Even if we do not make it impossible for humans to continue inhabiting this planet there is little reasonable doubt that humans will need to go through some major very painful changes in order for the extinctions not to happen.  Our powerful creativity is a different order of creativity than had been present on this planet (or, as far as we know, anywhere else in the Cosmos) before the development of humans.  Humans are not just another animal species.

One contribution traditional religion makes to many people’s lives is to give their life a sense of purpose, or meaning.  This involves my second reason for placing the stress upon human creativity.  For most traditionally religious people the meaning is a matter of what happens after life.  There are different possibilities and one’s purpose in life is to live so that one will be granted a desirable situation as opposed to an undesirable situation.  Heaven and hell are prime examples here.  Heaven is to be in a very desirable state with God.  A companion of god perhaps.  Hell is a very undesirable place where one suffers for all of eternity.

Or perhaps what happens after death is that one is reborn as another type of animal.  In that case I am not sure what would be the most desirable animal.  But those who believe this think how they live this life will make a difference in that regard.

On the other hand even people who believe in old time religion sometimes see their purpose in life as accomplishing something in this life.  That could be as general as achieving happiness, or accumulating a great deal of wealth, or bringing forth wonderful children, or promoting world peace.  Unfortunately that can also include promoting the values they think god has laid out in his plans for all the people in the whole world.  Usually people who attach life’s meaning to some value in this life do so because they think that value is particularly important.  It may even be what they think god wants them to do.  Exactly what makes one value more important or more valuable than another may not be very clear.  Many people think living an ethically good life is what god wants them to do.  They particularly may think this is true if they believe god is the source of true or correct values.  Many people think that all “real” values come either from god or are natural values of the natural world.  If that is true then the important thing is to be able to recognize what is a real value and what is not.  Values cannot be something humans create, they think, because such values could have no real standing as values.  Humans, they think, could regard anything as a value, so that humanly created values must be “relative.”  They must be oriented somehow to something that only seems important to the person who created them, so they are “relative” to that person’s wishes or beliefs.

However suppose we see ourselves as this essay has been attempting to position us.  We are integral features of an ongoing creative cosmos.  We have already explored the various reasons for regarding the cosmos as creative.  It begins as something that is apparently very simple.  Then, little by little, it continually becomes increasingly more complex as different major features of it develop which open up entirely new directions for it to be creative.  Something as simple as liquid water opens up tremendous possibilities.  Then the development of living material out of nonliving material opens up major new ways of being creative.  As the living material develops under different circumstances, and also as it becomes social still greater possibilities of creativity develop. Then some social animals develop language and intellects, and that opens up tremendous new possibilities of creativity.

Humans are different from all other animals in that human culture develops knowledge of how the world “works.”  We develop knowledge of what to expect next after certain events occur.  We also develop knowledge of how to bring various events, entities, characteristics about.  And we use the knowledge that has already been developed to develop more knowledge of how things work.  This enables humans to develop artifacts that are constantly more complex and capable of acting and of changing other features of our environment into more and more sophisticated types of entities.  Humans today are capable of traveling to the moon.  Such sophisticated knowledge arose out of very basic knowledge of how to make fires, how to plant and grow plants, how to linguistically express more and more sophisticated types of ideas etc., etc.

The ability to make use of this type of knowledge and work is passed from generation to generation in humans due to our language and intellects.  Our ability to produce extremely sophisticated computers, along with uses to which we can put those machines, as well as thousands of other types of sophisticated machinery means that humans are a completely new type of creativity in the cosmos.  Of course there may be other animals or living creatures in other parts of the cosmos that would make our level of sophistication look to them like the cooperation of ants looks to us.  But relative to our actual knowledge humans engage in a level of creativity that is so different from that of any other terrestrial living being that comparing humans to non-human living beings is like comparing living material to the non-living material from which it developed.

We have no reason whatsoever to think that there was any intentionality involved in our development.  So we have no reason to think we developed for any “purpose.”  But it does make perfectly good sense for humans to regard our extremely sophisticated level of creativity as making it possible for humans, and thus the creative cosmos, to engage in constantly more sophisticated levels of creativity.  We have an ability to appreciate hundreds of different forms of beauty.  We also have the abilities to be amazed, to be full of wonder, at the sophistication of the different levels of creativity we see both in what we call the natural, or pre-human environment, as well as in the creativity that humans make possible.  This realization provides us with a perfectly sensible way to make our lives meaningful.  We are integral features of a constantly developing creative process.  We are the first beings with the ability intentionally to influence the creative process to develop into the ability to produce constantly more new and constantly more beautiful and wondrous forms of being.  Or we could cause our own extinction, along with the extinction of virtually every type of living being on this planet, thus bringing the wonderful forms of creativity we have developed along with other forms of creativity on this planet to an end.

We are integral features of a constantly creative cosmos.  We provide radically new ways to push the level of creativity forward, making it possible for the cosmos to be creative in completely new ways that, as far as we know, would be impossible without the special features that we provide to the creative whole.  We are the first known creatures to provide intentionality to the new directions in which we push the creative process.  We are also capable of using our special abilities to appreciate the different features of different types of creativity to understand new directions to make the our new methods of creativity even more beautiful and wonderful.  Exactly how we would intentionally direct evolution on the planet in order to make sure it remains capable of supporting millions of different types of living beings is something we do not understand very well at this time.  But it is something we could learn, were we willing to develop full awareness that we are the current major directors of evolution on the planet Earth.  And we are the only directors the Earth has ever had with the capacity to understand what we are doing in this regard.

We have already been playing this productive role throughout our entire lives, probably without understanding that it is what we have been doing.  How we individually make our contributions to the creative whole of which we are individual features could become a conscious feature of our lives.  This would obviously be a perfectly suitable way for us to establish purpose and meaning in our lives.  We are cosmic artists occupying a very special place in this creative cosmos of which we are integral features making unique contributions to the creativity of the cosmic whole.  Reflecting on this does not make us individually so special since we are temporary features of the magnificently creative cosmic whole.  But it does further bring out the fantastic creativity of the Cosmic whole that has created us as another feature of its creative potential.

by V.V. Raman

1. To regard the variety and range of the world around as manifestations of Nature and her laws: This to me is the philosophical perspective of Religious Naturalism.

2. Not just to observe and explain, but to revel in the manifestations of the Natural World: This to me is the experiential aspect of Religious Naturalism.

3. To feel the wonder of the illusory rainbow and the multicolor of the beautiful butterfly: These to me are parts of the aesthetic aspects of Religious Naturalism.

4. To regard the religions of the world as unplanned fruits of human cultural evolution: This to me is the perspective on religions of Religious Naturalism.

5. To partake of and rejoice in the feasts, festivities, and celebrations of cultures: This to me is the community aspect of Religious Naturalism.

6. To share in the sorrows of fellow humans in times of sadness and suffering, even while recognizing that all this is an evitable part of life on the planet: This to me is the empathetic aspect of Religious Naturalism.

7. To hope that with all our shortcomings and vices human wisdom and ingenuity will ultimately succeed in establishing peace among nations and harmony among belief systems: This to me is the hope aspect of Religious Naturalism.

8. To look upon our presence on this planet as an opportunity to actualize some at least of all the potential of human life, and to act in responsible ways for the wellbeing of others and for the safety of future generations: This to me is the moral dimension of Religious Naturalism.

9. To recognize the unfathomable nature of ultimate questions such as the why of human existence on the planet and to acknowledge our finitude in the presence of Cosmic Infinity: this to me is the humility aspect of Religious Naturalism.

10. To feel deep in the heart a sense of having received so much for a slice of time in Cosmic history without any asking: This to me is the gratitude aspect of Religious Naturalism.

by Michael Cavanaugh

My personal emphasis is on the noun Naturalism. My particular orientation within Religious Naturalism is best labeled – plain vanilla naturalism. It does not use god-language to express the positive philosophy of Religious Naturalism. Despite that orientation, however, I’d like to use this space to share my perspective on the adjective Religious in Religious Naturalism. I do that mainly because I am confident others here will articulate views I share about Naturalism, whereas my views on the adjective may not be as widely understood or shared.

So what are the religious impulses that make me call myself a Religious Naturalist? There are many, and there is no perfect way to spell them out short of writing a book, but here are seven impulses I consider religious impulses, which require a modifier for my basic naturalism. All of them have innate roots but function best with cultural training:

1. The impulse to connect with one another is a religious impulse. Historically, the Latin word ligere meant – binding together. A ligament is a structure that binds muscle to bone, and in molecular genetics a ligase is a biologically active molecule that connects one chemical to another. In Religious Naturalism the lig highlights the extent to which we live in community, connected to one another, appropriately connoting our evolution-mediated desire to live in society.

2. The impulses to awe and gratitude are religious impulses. The religious impulse features many grand psychological responses which Religious Naturalism claims as our own – a sense of awe, of gratitude for existence, of participation and involvement with the earth and with one another, and an affirmation of the natural order. An old Christian song proclaims “This world is not my home; I’m just a-traveling through.” I prefer to re-word that song radically, to say “This world it is our home, we’re not just traveling through.”

3. The affirmation of and discipline of emotion are religious responses. Loyal Rue has a great chapter on the use of religion to train the emotions, so I won’t go into great detail here. I will say that even though there are harmful tendencies within humans (such as the tendency to xenophobia, the tendency to eat too many fats, etc.), and even though those harmful tendencies are “natural” in a real sense, the “religious” part of Religious Naturalism means we have to train the emotions relying on rationality and contemplation and group processes (all natural themselves) to shape our emotions in positive ways.

4. The search for wisdom is a religious impulse. Much as I value science to inform my naturalism, I also value sources of wisdom, including our 40,000 years of religious tradition, to help me live my life. In particular, dealing with evil requires wisdom, especially the evil that arises from human conflict. But I include in evil anything that reduces the quality of life on this planet, be it global warming or cancer or tsunamis or untimely death (ordinary death is not evil per se – indeed it is good). All of this evil (including the evil within humans) is natural, and we have to work hard to change what we can, and learn to cope with the rest. A “religious” naturalism keeps us from merely accepting the glorious parts of nature and ignoring the rest – it requires us to sensitively and intelligently deal with the not-so-wonderful parts. But this use of tradition itself requires a very contemporary wisdom, because one must exercise wisdom to avoid buying into the dangerous and erroneous aspects of cultural and religious traditions that are contradicted by sciences, including especially the “soft” sciences like sociology, political science, and economics.

5. The need to manage motivations is a religious task. This religious impulse obviously overlaps with emotion and with innate tendencies and with our wisdom traditions, and it is deeply underscored by modern psychology, especially by biology-literate modern psychology. Motivation has deep roots, and it is not easy at all to understand or manage it, either in ourselves or in our groups. It is “where the rubber meets the road” in terms of how our scientific understanding intersects with personal choice and even governmental policies. Thus Religious Naturalism must accept the challenge of demonstrating how our scientific knowledge can support and impact our human sense of motivation.

6. Uncertainty is a religious impulse. It may sound strange to say that uncertainty is a religious impulse, and I do NOT mean that one is responding religiously if one is indecisive or wishy-washy. What I’d really rather say is that humility is a religious impulse, but that word will need some explanation, but it is indeed a kind of uncertainty that is the core of humility as I understand the word.

Some naturalists are very certain about almost everything they believe, and may fittingly be accused of being very similar to fundamentalists in that regard. But while Religious Naturalists also have good reasons for the things we believe, including for many a disbelief in God, we are not nearly as inclined as other naturalists to be certain. We might (as Ursula Goodenough does) simply have a “covenant with mystery” and don’t go into areas we don’t think we know anything about.

And some Religious Naturalists (including me) have adopted W.W. Bartley’s pancritical rationalism stance, which says that “every statement is criticizable, including this one.” Bartley’s book “The Retreat to Commitment” is a classic critique of modern liberal Protestants and others who take what he calls a justificationist stance – they try to prove their position conclusively. Bartley, a student of Popper, doesn’t believe this can be done, and thinks philosophies should do what science does, by holding our beliefs lightly though firmly, ready to change them if and only if someone makes a stronger claim.

So Religious Naturalists may not believe in God, and of course we are not required to re-examine their beliefs moment by moment whenever anyone wants us to, but in principle we are ready to change our beliefs if they can be shown to be wrong.

What is interesting about adopting humility and uncertainty as religious values is that it contrasts so completely with religious believers who KNOW they are right, whether they be fundamentalists or scientists. Indeed one could make an argument that such fundamentalists are NOT religious, but are idolatrous, creating artificial god-concepts and doctrines out of their own hard certainty.

Note finally that Paul Woodruff, who has written a wonderful book about reverence, takes this same approach when talking about both ancient Greeks and modern politicians, who were (or are) willing to substitute their own ideological certainty for deeper social values. A religious naturalist will strive, I think, to be reverent in THAT way, largely by recognizing his or her own lack of absolute knowledge and feeling appropriately humble about his or her beliefs, and I would also suggest that this humble mind-set is a precondition of other religious values Religious Naturalists affirm, such as awe and wisdom.

7. Finally, our inclination to morality and ethics is a religious impulse. I have more to say about this elsewhere, but here I’ll just say that a thoroughly naturalist understanding of morality, which includes cognitive and emotional aspects and which is informed by traditional wisdom and by a traditional study of philosophy modified toward a consilience with a modern understanding of human nature, makes me say (contrary to Jack Haught) that “Nature is Enough” – enough to sustain us, to explain our existence and nature, and enough to provide meaning in life. If anything, it is so awesome as to be more than enough.

by V.V. Raman

We pay homage to the wonder and splendor of Nature whose inexorable laws sustain the universe, from the minutest to the most magnificent.

We pay homage to Nature whose magic of chemistry gave rise to the first palpitations of life on this our planet, and continues to foster life on the planet.

We pay homage to Nature whose creative evolution resulted in the countless species of plants and animals, of microorganisms and insects that thrive on land, water, and air.

We pay homage to Nature under whose evolutionary urges we humans have come to be, with intelligence and emotions, with capacities for love and compassion, reasoning and exploration.

It is in this expression of gratitude to Nature that we join hands as Religious Naturalists, acknowledging the insights of science, the aesthetic creations of art and music, and the framework of working together as members of the  large human  family.

We take seriously the moral responsibility that is ours to strive for peace and understanding among the peoples in a spirit of mutual care and respect.