Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World

Consecrating Science

Consecrating Science

Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World

Lisa H. Sideris

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2017 Lisa H. Sideris

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sideris, Lisa H., author.

Title: Consecrating science : wonder, knowledge, and the natural world / Lisa H. Sideris.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017003514| ISBN 9780520294974 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520294998 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520967908 (e-edition)

Subjects: LCSH: Environmental ethics. | Religion and science.

Classification: LCC GE24 .S54 2017 | DDC 201/.65—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017003514

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To Robert and Ridley, with love and gratitude

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Return of Mythopoeic Science

1. Seeking What Is Good in Wonder

2. The Book of Nature and the Book of Science: Richard Dawkins on Wonder

3. E.O. Wilson’s Ionian Enchantment: A Tale of Two Realities

4. Evolutionary Enchantment and Denatured Religious Naturalism

5. Anthropic and Anthropocene Narratives of the New Cosmology

6. Genesis 2.0: The Epic of Evolution as Religion of Reality

7. Making Sense of Wonder

Notes

Glossary of Terms

References

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A pleasant upside of spending several years writing a book is that it leaves you with many people to thank. This project began several years ago with a fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany, and has evolved quite a bit since that time. I am deeply grateful to the Carson Center and its director, Christof Mauch, for providing me the time and resources to think through what this project aimed to do, and for the opportunity to pursue my research in the company of a truly interdisciplinary, international collection of environmental scholars. Special thanks for intellectual, material, and moral support to Carson affiliates and alumni Kim Coulter, Lawrence Culver, Stefan Dorondel, Stefania Gallini, Agnes Kneitz, Cheryl Lousley, Katie Ritson, Alexa Weik von Mossner, and officemate extraordinaire Emilian Kavalski. I learned much from this brilliant and fun crew. The Carson Center experience opened up a new world of ideas to me, and it continues to be one of the brightest spots in the environmental humanities.

I owe a major debt of gratitude to my colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University. I am thankful for the abiding congeniality and intellectual diversity of the department I have called home, as a student and faculty member, for much of my life. Several colleagues read and responded to chapters and article spin-offs of the book in departmental colloquia and seminars, and some waded through early drafts in their entirety. Were it not for Constance Furey, my partner in writing accountability, I would still be digging out from under an avalanche of words and ideas. She is like a bodhisattva of the book-writing world who, as she nears the end of her own project, journeys back to help suffering colleagues cross the threshold. Winni Sullivan provided steady encouragement and excellent, and sometimes lawyerly, advice whenever I encountered adversity and intrigue of various sorts.

Graduate and undergraduate students in my God Species seminar in Fall 2015 at Indiana University helped me steer a path through the ever-growing mountain of literature on the Anthropocene, and allowed me to grasp the relationship of that scholarship to the movements and ideas I discuss in this book. I am grateful to them for taking on the challenge of the course with me, and for humoring my preoccupation with that dark topic, even when readings were ponderous and voluminous. Jacob Boss, Rachel Carpenter, Olivia DeClark, Jen Kash, Sarah Kissell, Jonathan Sparks-Franklin—my heartfelt thanks for your insights and stamina. My gratitude also extends to the IU Office of Sustainability for providing financial support for that seminar, and thereby supporting this project indirectly. Thanks also to the Institute for Advanced Study at IU for providing research funds in the latter stages of writing and editing. To Jonathan Sparks-Franklin and Carl Pearson: thank you for your fabulous editorial assistance and dedication to detail. Paul Tyler, my copy editor at the University of California Press, was prompt and meticulous, and very pleasant to work with.

Several portions of this book were presented publicly in one form or another, at one time or another. I can’t recount them all here, but I especially wish to thank Jeanne Kilde for a workshop at the University of Minnesota that significantly shaped what is now chapter 7. Penny Edgell, Alan Love, and Dan Philippon, among others, were generous and valuable interlocutors. A number of lectures delivered at Creighton University ended up as portions of this book. I am grateful to Ron Simkins and John O’Keefe for many productive conversations about religion, nature, theology—the relative merits of new stories and old stories—and for their continuing friendship.

Several friends and colleagues read and commented in detail on the entire manuscript in its near-final stages. A very special thanks to Whitney Bauman, Sam Deese, Sarah Fredericks, Constance Furey, Michael Northcott, Kevin O’Brien, Clare Palmer, Michael Ruse, Winni Sullivan, and an anonymous reviewer for their critical acumen and careful feedback. Certainly, I did not heed every word of their advice—so much the worse for me—but I am sure the final product is much stronger for their insights. I am also grateful to Clive Hamilton for fruitful exchanges about the Anthropocene and anthropocentrism—even if I remain rather unmoved in my general indictment of anthropocentrism. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Bron Taylor, whose express commitment to taboo-free zones within the field of religion/nature/ecology made it possible for me to engage with a veritable phalanx of critics in the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture. I am also sincerely grateful to Eric Schmidt at University of California Press for championing a project that made more than one academic editor a little skittish.

On a personal note, I thank my parents, Nancy Hatton Sideris and Homer Geri Sideris, for the countless ways in which they have shaped my particular view of the world. To my mother: Thank you for passing on to me your sense of wonder, as well as your survival instincts. To my father: There are many things about which we disagree, but I can’t help thinking that all that Presbyterianism left its mark on me, generally for the better. To my aunt Maria Sideris Chapis: Thank you for your positivity and broadmindedness, and for your faith in me.

Book-writing is an elaborately selfish undertaking, made possible through the indulgence of others who pick up the slack. This book is dedicated to my husband Robert and my son Ridley. Robert: Thank you for allowing me space and time to pursue my obsessions and fixed ideas—academic and otherwise—in my over-serious fashion. Ridley: I hope one day you’ll understand what all my talk of wonder was about, and why so much of it has to do with you.

Introduction

The Return of Mythopoeic Science

The sciences have an important role to play in the formulation of environmental ethics, and no less so in religious environmental ethics. The lack of coherence between religious environmental ethicists’ vision for nature and the realities of Darwinian science has been the subject of my own research.¹ I have argued that ecological theologians, as well as many secular environmental ethicists, tend to ignore, or make selective use of, scientific—particularly Darwinian—information about the natural world. Darwinian perspectives allow us to appreciate that processes of suffering, strife, and competition for finite resources are not only regular features of the natural world but integral to healthy natural systems. Ethical proposals aimed at eradicating or redeeming natural suffering and strife often put ecotheology at odds with the science of natural systems, and may even treat natural processes as symptomatic of a fallen state that needs to be radically transformed. In short, because these ethicists and theologians fail to take science seriously, they support values and ethical guidelines for the natural world that are largely incompatible with evolutionary processes.

And yet, I have become increasingly troubled by a growing constellation of movements within religious and secular environmentalism that takes science rather too seriously. The new cosmology, as I refer to this constellation of movements, cedes too much territory and authority to science and its alleged mythic potential. Proponents of this new cosmology see cutting-edge scientific knowledge as the primary vehicle for restoring enchantment, wonder, meaning, and value to the natural world. The new cosmology goes by a variety of names, including the Epic of Evolution, the Universe Story, the New Story, the Great Story, or Big History. In its various iterations, it proffers a grand narrative of cosmogenesis—the unfolding of the universe from the Big Bang to the present—as a sacred story, a common creation myth for the modern world and for all people. Science, in this movement, offers a wondrous new revelation, an updated sacred scripture. The claim is that only with the recent emergence of this big picture from science has it become possible to narrate a common story. Awe at the unfolding story of the universe, it is hoped, will confer a shared sense of belonging and obligation for the natural world. At the heart of this book is a detailed analysis of the ethical implications of these movements whose impacts are felt in a variety of disciplines and well beyond the academy.

This book does not aim to flesh out an alternative environmental ethic, particularly in an applied sense. I will not, for the most part, be sorting through claims about rights or duties inhering in or owed to particular organisms or entities in the natural world. Although I assume a moral stance that is largely nature-centered and anti-anthropocentric, I will not devote space to developing the contours of an ecocentric ethic, as I have previously done. Rather, I start from the assumption that an overtly human-centered and human-exalting worldview is inimical to genuine appreciation, wonder, and concern for the natural world not just because I believe this to be true (which I do), but because that is where my interlocutors start. In other words, the new cosmologists set out to create a new story to supersede the flawed anthropocentric, dominionistic, controlling attitudes they believe to characterize the traditional faiths. Their objective is to craft a new scientific myth that avoids these arrogant pitfalls. In this effort, as my recurring focus on the anthropocentric, anthropic, and (for want of a better term) Anthropocenic dimensions of these narratives illustrate, the new cosmology fails.

That said, I do promote an anti-anthropocentric perspective in a more indirect and subtle way, via the lens of wonder. Wonder that exalts the human species or the human mind as a supreme object of reverence is not only a debased and mistaken rendering of what it means to wonder. It is also a danger to the natural world and—I suspect—to our moral well-being and grasp of reality (reality being a favored, operative word in the new science-based religions). Wonder is not true wonder that takes the human as its object. Nor, I believe and will argue, is true wonder a wonder that revels in cataloguing all that is known. Readers may well take issue with my staking out a particular version of wonder as genuine or authentic (historically? empirically? by definition?), and my answers may not settle the issue. But I hope my readers will come to appreciate, as I have in studying these movements closely, that the wonder they celebrate is largely complicit with the forces that have created our crisis-ridden, human-dominated planet. Indeed, the wonder enshrined in these movements is a likely driver of these crises. I develop these and many related claims in the pages that follow. My focus, then, is less on applied ethics than on fundamental attitudes, dispositions, habits of mind, moods, and orientations toward the world around us. Above all, the orientation that interests me—and my interlocutors—is wonder. Like them, I am keenly interested in the placement, the positionality of the human vis-à-vis the universe. Unlike them, I reject the proposition that there exist clear answers to questions about our role in the universe, and that science can provide such answers.

This book, then, is also an extended meditation on wonder, influenced by my longtime engagement with the life and work of Rachel Carson, who celebrated wonder as a salutary and enduring orientation on the world. Informed and inspired by Carson’s account, I regard the appeal to wonder in these movements with some skepticism and sobriety. What is, or ought to be, the relationship between wonder and environmental values? How do we recognize and define appropriate and inappropriate forms of wonder that perennially emerge at the intersection of science, religion, and nature?² How do science and technology contribute to wonder and when do they become an enemy of wonder and a threat to nature’s well-being? How do we achieve a proper balance between techno-scientific powers—advances that may improve human life, enlarge our body of knowledge, and expand our imaginations—and values inhering in the natural environment and more-than-human life? These are questions that Carson’s work calls us to reflect upon, and they are more important today than ever. I critically examine a constellation of science-based ecospiritual movements with an eye to wonder’s long history, shifting meanings over time, and ethical significance. Profoundly impoverished forms of wonder have come to inhabit a significant segment of contemporary discourse in religious environmentalism, science and religion, and a handful of other disciplines caught up in a kind of creeping scientism. These questionable forms owe some of their currency to arguments aggressively disseminated by a few prominent (one might say, celebrity) scientists and science writers—notably, Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson. In setting the contentious terms and tone for much of our contemporary science-religion discourse, they have also strongly shaped—I would say, warped—our understanding of wonder. In various ways, the new cosmology, and its attendant consecration of scientific knowledge as a new myth, provides a case in point of distorted, deracinated wonder. Thus, I am also concerned with the way these movements understand the relationship between science and religion, and between the humanities and the sciences. I find troubling the hubristic, quasi-authoritarian, and intolerant attitudes that are sometimes expressed or encouraged by exponents of the new cosmology toward the nonexpert, the nonscientist, and members of other faith communities, generally. As I see it, the full range of issues and concerns I raise throughout this book can be traced back, ultimately, to questions of appropriate or inappropriate wonder.

THE NEW COSMOLOGY

Prominent advocates of the new myths include the cultural historian, former Passionist priest, and geologian Thomas Berry (1914–2009) and his protégé, the mathematical cosmologist Brian Thomas Swimme; religion scholars Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grim, and Loyal Rue; Big Historian David Christian; astrophysicist and science educator Eric Chaisson; biologist Ursula Goodenough; science writer Connie Barlow; and Christian pastor and popular author Michael Dowd. Many other scholars and popular writers could be listed here as well. In chapters that take up the new cosmology, I deal primarily with thinkers and projects having a notable impact on the discipline of religious studies (rather than, say, history), and within it, the subfields of religion and ecology and religion and nature, specifically.³ That said, the book canvasses a number of debates that will likely be of interest to scholars in fields beyond my own immediate area of research, such as science and technology studies, history and philosophy of science, environmental history and environmental studies, to name a few. I would hope that all scholars concerned about interdisciplinarity or the future of the humanities will find something here to intrigue or provoke them, one way or another.

Contributions to mythopoeic science and defenses of the new cosmology have long been warmly received by many science-religion scholars (and their academic outlets) as well as numerous scholars within the field of religion and ecology. These movements have inspired books, films, YouTube videos, websites, podcasts, and—increasingly—university course offerings. Beyond the academy, they appeal to audiences with atheist, humanist, and religiously liberal sensibilities.⁴ Some versions display elements of therapeutic or self-help spirituality, as with Dowd and Barlow, who offer web advice on how to evolutionize your life. Still others in the movement—Goodenough and Rue in particular—represent a trend toward atheistic religious naturalism or dark green religion, i.e., nature- and science-oriented spiritualities that eschew and often critique the supernatural worldviews and values of traditional faiths, notably the Abrahamic traditions.⁵

The individuals cited above and throughout this work frequently reference one another’s work and involvement in the new cosmology. While there are certainly differences of emphasis among them (which I spell out), they understand themselves as a fairly like-minded group, inspired by and contributing to a common vision and project of narrating the cosmos. Some, though not all, within this group take inspiration from the work and worldviews of Dawkins and (especially) E.O. Wilson.⁶ Those most influenced by an evolutionary paradigm tend to invoke the phrase Epic of Evolution, while those inspired by Big Bang cosmology refer to a Story or Journey of the Universe; however, Tucker and Swimme also deploy Epic terminology and Dowd and Barlow use a variety of terms interchangeably, including Big History. Whatever terms they use, all of these movements fit the description of epic science, as characterized by physicist-turned-philosopher Martin Eger: the turn to science for a new narrative of cosmic evolution and a fresh moral vision. The grand evolutionary epic begins at the beginning—with the big bang—and, after various stages of cosmic and terrestrial evolution, ends understandably with the advent of human culture, according to Eger. More significant even than the chronological sequence is the characteristic stance of the narrator—that omniscient, omnipresent subject . . . [who] speaks authoritatively, revealing the ultimate story in its ultimate form as an essentially finished product, even while pointing to things yet unknown and calling for additional investigation.⁷

These narratives define humans as the part of the universe that has become conscious of itself. Humans’ dawning geological consciousness, combined with empirical knowledge of nature, will enable us to guide the future unfolding of the cosmic process, allowing our species to live in greater intimacy and harmony with the Earth. A new story is urgently needed, the argument typically goes, because our culture⁸ is in the throes of a crippling condition of modernity known as amythia: we lack a functional cosmology, a serviceable myth that will orient us to what is real and important.⁹ Stories we have inherited, especially from the traditional faiths, are no longer plausible or relevant in light of modern science and our global environmental crisis. The conviction that stories determine our conception of reality and shape our fundamental values has deep roots in the philosophy of Berry, whose work exerts significant influence over many within the new cosmology. Our environmental crisis is all a question of story, Berry famously argues.¹⁰ Heeding this call, the new cosmology offers a functional cosmology—a better story—allegedly made possible by recent developments in science, ranging from the discovery of the Big Bang, to a deeply held belief in the unity of the sciences (what Wilson terms consilience).

Some advocates, as I have noted, draw less from Big Bang cosmology than from an evolutionary paradigm that provides a coherent framework for human origins and destiny. For these thinkers, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are particularly germane to the creation of a new sacred myth. Evolutionary biology, they believe, both explains our need for religious myth and provides the raw materials from which a new, and superior, myth can be crafted. Evolutionary psychology, for example, posits a human brain hardwired for narrative coherence. In making their case for an evolutionary epic, these thinkers often find inspiration in reductionist biology and sociobiological pronouncements about human nature, even if they themselves move beyond reductionism.

Thus, Wilson and Dawkins call for mythopoeticized science: the recasting of scientific information as a consecrated narrative or poetic vision. This commitment to the creation and dissemination of mythopoeic science is key to Wilson and Dawkins’s influence on the new cosmologists (in varying degrees for different individuals in the movement) and, more generally, it is one of the links between a certain mode of scientism and the narrative projects of religion scholars and religionists that I examine throughout this work. Chapters 2 and 3 focus attention on Dawkins and Wilson, respectively, not because I take their views to be representative of scientists generally (though neither are they wholly anomalous), but because their worldviews have inspired the forms of religious naturalism and science-based spirituality examined in subsequent chapters. Scientific materialism provides a satisfying alternative mythology to religion, Wilson argues. Belief in consilience similarly suggests that the disciplines will unite to tell a comprehensive narrative of the unfolding of evolutionary and human history. Wilson proclaims the evolutionary epic probably the best myth we will ever have.¹¹ This claim is celebrated by a wide range of Universe Story and Epic of Evolution devotees.

For his own part, Dawkins has long argued for the superiority of scientifically clarified—real—wonder vis-à-vis wonder at perceived mysteries, puzzles, or miracles. Science banishes mystery and the miraculous, but the knowledge it returns is itself a thing of wonder and the stuff of magic. These claims receive enthusiastic support from some proponents of the Epic of Evolution. Self-styled evolutionary evangelists Dowd and Barlow endorse the Epic as a religion of reality and hail Dawkins as its courageous prophet. Converts to this religion of reality are not believers but knowers.¹²

A distinctive celebration of knowledge-based wonder runs through these movements as a whole. The new cosmology calls on us to respond with awe and wonder to what is deemed most authentically real. Scientific information—if presented in sufficiently rich poetic and mythological language—is seen to fulfill many of the functions of a religious cosmology, while also orienting us toward deeper connection with and concern for the natural world. And yet, the wonder generated in these myths seems largely reserved for science and the scientific narrative first and foremost, and for nature only secondarily (if at all). Why this is so becomes clearer when we examine (particularly in chapters 2 and 3) how these dominant forms of wonder sit uneasily with a wondering response to and concern for the natural world.

A word about science and the sciences as discussed here: When I invoke science, the misuses of science, or the inappropriate reverencing of science, I do not envision the sciences as pernicious and threatening, nor do I indict scientists or scientific perspectives in some wholesale fashion. In fact, the vast majority of figures who appear in these pages are not scientists at all, though many are science enthusiasts of a sort.¹³ (I too am a science enthusiast, though perhaps of a different sort.) I do not take science to be a monolithic activity or a seamless and bounded entity independent of other human activities. On the contrary, it is the scientific mythmakers who frequently deploy generic and uncritical categories of science, as when they insist that modern discoveries in cosmology or evolutionary biology point to some particular or objective meaning, purpose, or value in the universe or for human life generally. In fact, I believe that a more fine-grained analysis and nuanced understanding of the sciences and of scientific methodologies actually undermines the very possibility of an integrated, unified narrative of the universe or of human evolution, while opening up genuine options for wonder. I understand science to be an important but (necessarily, even virtuously) fallible human activity that is by its very nature incomplete and ongoing, even as it enables us to apprehend, manipulate, and make predictions about a real world—a reality that is simultaneously out there in some sense and coextensive with our mental and social constructs. A unified, integrated science composed of a handful of general laws, like a vision of a thoroughly graspable, neatly patterned, purposeful universe, is just that—a vision, a dream.

To the new cosmologists, this is a beautiful dream. To others like me, it may feel forced and confining in its wishful or willful human-centeredness and unwarranted sense of its own certainty. The unified vision is not itself science but rather a selective use of particular scientific claims and discoveries, carefully arranged and narrated so as to support meanings and messages desired by some. Moreover, and despite their fascination with deep time, a kind of chronological snobbery inflects these narratives in their belief that cutting-edge science has now revealed a grand and coherent reality that eluded previous, unenlightened generations. The new cosmologists are not sufficiently aware of (or sufficiently forthcoming about) the extent to which their narrative, and its forms of wonder, are manufactured from appealing pieces of a sprawling and diverse body of scientific knowledge.

My critique, then, is aimed not at science per se, but at scientism. It is intended as an ideology critique, in the spirit of writer and social critic Curtis White who suggests that big, flashy stories told by Big Science are, at root, efforts to gain our consent to some particular version of reality.¹⁴ More specifically, my target is the consecration of science. By the consecration of science, I refer to practices and rhetoric that invest science with sacred meaning and purpose, sometimes to the point of conflating science and religion, or making science into a religion. I do not mean science consecrated in the service of something else deemed supremely valuable or inherently sacred, as a person might consecrate herself to God so as to serve God’s purposes. Consecrated science is not science that is obviously in the service of nature and its goods; nor is it science made sacred primarily through association with sacred nature—though some of its practitioners do desire to serve the good of nature and/or deploy terms like sacred in reference to it. Because it invests science with sacredness, consecrated science often emerges as a rival and competitor not only with other religions, but with nature itself. And yet, as Weber famously argued, science in and of itself cannot answer the key question of whether the knowledge it produces is worth having; for such assessments, we must reflect on our ultimate position towards life.¹⁵ Similarly, wonder that is closely and narrowly bound to knowledge production is ill positioned to determine whether or not the knowledge at which it wonders should be produced. Consecrated science is science too enchanted with itself to make these judgments wisely.

Reflections on the nature of science, or philosophy of science, do not comprise a major theme in the book (though see chapters 3 and 7 for elaboration). However, I maintain that an accurate and clear-eyed appraisal of what the sciences are, how they operate, and what they can reliably tell us about the world effectively pulls the rug out from under mythopoeic renderings of science and the overarching meanings imputed to these cosmological stories. More positively, such appraisal might also open up a genuinely fruitful and egalitarian dialogue between scientists and humanities scholars, and between science and religion. These dialogues are critical to environmental studies. Contrary to the mythopoeic project, reality is not the purview of science alone, and the humanities do not—and should not be expected to—earn their keep by dispensing truths formally ratified by the sciences. This is not to say that science can make no claims to truth or reality, but that its truths and realities are not the only ones worth celebrating. Humanists are right to reject the faux interdisciplinarity of a consilient agenda that denigrates humanities as the poorer cousin of science, or as a treasure chest to be looted by intrepid explorers under a banner of consilience. The humanities are not failed attempts at science-like explanations of the world, nor is their disciplinary role that of poeticizing, prettifying, or otherwise publicizing the real world revealed by science (see chapter 3).

In what follows, I also stress sensory engagement with the natural world not as a substitute for scientific knowledge gained through more abstract theorizing and high-tech tools, but as a crucial component of our affective engagement with the (also) real worlds we know and inhabit. When I critique a confining, knowledge-based form of wonder, I am not claiming that wonder at scientific knowledge is (always) inappropriate and problematic or (generally) irrelevant for the cultivation of wonder for nature. My claim is that the elevation of abstract, expert knowledge above our lived experience of the world cuts us off from the strongest source of our felt connection to the more-than-human world. It calls us away from much of what it is to be human: a living, breathing, bodily, earthbound—and ultimately death-bound—creature, surrounded by and enmeshed with other living and dying beings whose own worlds and realities remain somewhat opaque and mysterious to us. At times, we may yearn to be called away from embodied existence—our own and that of others—in all its messiness and tragic finitude, its vulnerability and suffering with which humans are deeply complicit.

At such times we might indeed turn to the universe—to the wonders of deep space and time, to our species’ emergence from such mysterious depths—with a powerful sense of relief. For there is something awesome about our ancient and infinite cosmos and we are right to feel gratitude for scientific discoveries that allow us to contemplate it. But the scale of the universe is not a human scale, and the overriding message of our global environmental crisis is that there is no escape from Earth or from ourselves as earthbound.¹⁶ We cannot have, and should not seek, a grand narrative emanating from nowhere, from space, or from the species.¹⁷ The universe is not the scale on which we can meaningfully connect and interact with our worlds. Perhaps sensing this alienation, the new cosmologists attempt to recast the universe as a distinctly human drama, a story in which we comfortably feel at home. But this move is also the wrong one, for it collapses an unfathomably vast and alien cosmos into something far less wondrous. It encourages a mood of self-aggrandizement, a kind of cosmic smugness that is contrary to wonder and, I think, demonstrably unscientific. The cosmic story as human drama too easily naturalizes and normalizes our entrance into the so-called Anthropocene epoch—a new stage of cosmic and geological unfolding in which our species assumes a managerial and directorial role. The generally anthropic modes of wonder underwritten by mythopoeic science are well positioned to applaud the ascent of the human in the Anthropocene age, and rather powerless to critique planetary dominance (chapter 5). If epic science directs our wondering gaze toward the human species and its immense journey, the Anthropocene provides the perfect backdrop. Put differently, the new cosmology is, quintessentially, paradigmatically, an Anthropocene narrative—and a problematically upbeat one at that.

In pointing out these problematic implications, I am not insisting that these authors necessarily endorse them. On the whole,¹⁸ these scholars do not intentionally promote hubristic or anthropocentric or dominionist (or technophilic) attitudes. I take them at their word that they mean to promote quite the opposite set of values. But they fail to make a convincing case that the environmental and human values they claim to privilege are in fact supported by the narratives they dispense. Moreover, the new cosmologists likewise fail to engage in a sufficiently critical way with many of the concepts and thinkers they endorse (or who endorse them). There are, I think, two factors potentially at work that exacerbate the new cosmology’s lack of critical engagement. One is that in attempting to create the big tent movement, they fail to develop, or they overlook, important distinctions between their own stated goals and those of their various constituents. Put differently, the desire of new cosmologists to create a large, unified environmental movement (or at least the appearance thereof) engenders a lack of critical reflection and an avoidance of conflict and disagreement. The second possible factor is a pronounced tendency among some of these practitioners to identify very strongly, and stubbornly—and often over the course of decades—with particular beloved figures: Thomas Berry, Teilhard de Chardin, Julian Huxley, and others. This almost hagiographic devotion to pioneers and projects also discourages and deflects critique and critical exchange. It leads scholars to invest too much in one particular agenda, and one type of answer to the problems that confront us. I have some sympathy with these moves. I too identify with and admire certain thinkers—notably, of course, Rachel Carson (an exalted figure in her own right, and one very rarely critiqued by environmental scholars; more about Carson in the final chapter). But I worry that these investments prove unhealthy and unproductive when they foster scholarly entrenchment or resistance to new ideas, or when they shield preferred projects and figures from critique.

WHAT IS AT STAKE?

How did we arrive at narrowed and impoverished articulations of wonder, and what, more precisely, do we stand to lose when we accept their terms? The first question is one I take up in chapter 1. I suggest answers to the second question in a variety of ways throughout the book as a whole, but it may be worthwhile to explain at the outset some of the reasons why I believe there is much at stake in how we define wonder vis-à-vis nature, science, and religion, and how we go about delineating its proper objects.

Proponents of knowledge-based wonder often portray science and religion as occupying the same explanatory slot, as if religions were nothing but inferior propositional statements about the world. Donovan Schaefer has noted a distinctly American tendency among critics of religion to posit religion as a deficient form of rationality, a misbegotten science in need of correction or elimination.¹⁹ Something similar inflects the new cosmology’s quest for an overarching story with scientific credentials. Wilson, in this vein, argues that a great epic needs to be universal, spiritually compelling, and above all, truthful.²⁰ On this account, the accurate materials that science furnishes for the myth-making enterprise result in a superior narrative that satisfies the intellect as well as the emotions. A scientific mythology, Goodenough claims, has the power to unite all of humanity because it happens to be true.²¹ Brian Swimme respects the stories of the past, but insists that they don’t actually give us a careful, accurate depiction of the universe, such as the New Story offers.²² Loyal Rue believes that the traditional religious stories are not sufficiently competitive according to empirical standards set by those invested in the competition. Each of the existing religious narratives lacks the objectivity it would take to make the competition—whether an internal variant or an external alternative—look implausible or irrelevant.²³ On these accounts, the truth of the story is inseparable from its assumed universal appeal, the operative (and, it seems, unfounded) assumption being that people are bound to believe stories that are empirically and verifiably true.

The tendency to compare scientific and religious explanations of the world—and to find religion wanting—is facilitated by a slippery understanding of the term cosmology, where cosmology encompasses scientific explanation (think Big Bang cosmology) and overarching metaphysical frameworks that confer sense and meaning to the world. Tucker, for example, defines cosmologies as focused descriptions of reality or explanations of the universe (mythical or scientific) and the role of humans in it.²⁴ Though this view sometimes allows that scientific cosmologies explain how things are but not how things ought to be or what has meaning (the purview of religious cosmology), the fact is that the new cosmology conflates the two. The scientific story provides all we need—not only how things are but which things matter.

Religions, and their contingent narratives, are thus easily displaced by science’s real world credentials. Appeals to the superior charms of science illustrate that science and religion are cast not simply as competing explanations for the physical world but as competing discourses of wonder. "Material reality, discovered by science, already possesses more content and grandeur than all the religious cosmologies combined," Wilson insists.²⁵ These pronouncements conjure images of modern mythmakers equipped with something like a grandeur meter²⁶ that can determine objectively and decisively that epic science offers more wonder than its mythic competitors.

Oddly, the superior wonder, magic, or grandeur said to infuse the new narratives is a function of the systematic displacement of abiding mystery, and the questioning impulse, with wonder at confident knowledge. The new narratives are demonstrably lacking in what Keats called negative capability: an ability to dwell in doubt, mystery, and ambiguity and to resist the categorization of all phenomena and experience into a system of knowledge.²⁷ Ambivalence toward uncertainty and mystery—expressed at times as outright hostility by Dawkins and Wilson—runs through these projects. The new scientific myth is often presented as something all-comprehending and omnicompetent. The story of the universe is thus poised to provide answers to humans’ most enduring questions: Where did we come from? Why are we here? How should we live together? How can the Earth community flourish?²⁸ Wilson, bolstered by faith in consilience, maintains that when we have unified enough certain knowledge, we will understand who we are and why we are here.²⁹ This form of displacement reaches toward the eradication of wonder itself.

Not surprisingly, alignment of wonder with an accurate rendering of physical reality also valorizes the disciplines most directly engaged in the production of scientific knowledge, while demoting other disciplines and ways of knowing. Enter consilience, Wilson’s term for a gathering-together of all the disciplines into a single body of totalizing knowledge. The new cosmology—like the consilient project with which it is sometimes conjoined—presents itself as a grand interdisciplinary venture in which all forms of knowledge and human creative expression play a vital role. Science provides rich and accurate content; the arts and humanities supply the requisite metaphors or images that ennoble the content and lend it a mythic aura. Indeed, it often appears that the essential, and delimited, role of the humanities is