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Dancing with the Sacred: Evolution, Ecology, and God
by Karl E. Peters
Harrisburg, PA:Trinity Press International, 2002

This first volume of the occasional online Harvard Square Library Review presents a surprisingly fresh view of religious experience which the Library Journal has recommended.--Herbert F. Vetter, D. D.

Review
Jerome A. Stone, Meadville Lombard Theological School, Chicago; author of The Minimalist Vision of Transcendence

This is an engaging and readable statement of a naturalistic theism, a version of the emerging theological movement often known as Religious Naturalism. It is the fruit of a lifelong wrestling with the issue of being religious in a scientific and pluralistic age by the co-editor of Zygon: Journal of Science and Religion. It deals with how to live responsibly and find meaning in today's world. The writing is given extra intensity by the disclosures of the author's grief and triumph as he lived through his wife's terminal illness.

Following an autobiographical introduction, Peters then gives a brief picture of the current situation of religion confronting the scientific world view and the plurality of religious traditions and our present global environmental crisis before moving on to reflections on how to be religious in our emerging global society.

Early in the book, we read about what Peters calls the sacred source of existence and development. Although Peters keeps in touch with the world's ancient religious traditions and with personal conceptions of God, he articulates a revisionary evolutionary naturalistic notion in which the creative cosmic mystery will be nonpersonal. Specifically, what can be called serendipitous creativity is a two part process: the occurrence of variations in cosmic, biological, and human history and the selection of some of these variations to continue. In short, God is the creative process which is made up of a set of interactions that create variations plus a set of interactions that preserves some of them. This means that cosmic and biological evolution and individual life can be thought of in Taoist fashion as a dance or conversation where no one leads and there is no goal but where each mutually influences the others. The pay-off is participation in the dance itself. Further, he sees the scientific ideas of fluctuation and equilibrium as parallel to the Jewish and Christian ideas of Spirit and Word.

As the book progresses, Peters adopts a focus on being human. He suggests that environmental care will be strongly motivated if we expand the altruism we naturally feel toward family and kin by a picture of evolution that points out the kinship of all living things in their DNA. Especially helpful is Peters' idea of our selves as webs of phenomenal, cultural, biological and cosmic strands which stretch out into the past and the future. This gives great moral and existential significance to our "big selves" which stretch out before and after our bodily existence. His idea of the importance of mindfulness in finding our sacred center is also helpful. Extremely valuable sections deal with loss and suffering and being at home in the universe.

This book is one of the clearest, intellectually rigorous and emotionally compelling statements of religious naturalism. Peters belongs in the group of people who could be called religious naturalists, including Spinoza, Samuel Alexander, Santayana, Dewey, Mordecai Kaplan, Ralph Burhoe, and such Chicago theologians as Wieman, Meland, and the later Bernard Loomer. Contemporary religious naturalists include Michael Cavanaugh, Willem Drees, Ursula Goodenough, Charley Hardwick, Henry Levinson, Robert Mesle, Loyal Rue, this reviewer and, I believe, Gordon Kaufman, Don Cupitt, and William Dean.

The lineage of this book includes Charles Darwin, Henry Nelson Wieman, and Ralph Wendell Burhoe, founder of Zygon and the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science. To this lineage Peters adds wide reading in recent science, particularly Eric Chaisson, Ilya Prigone, and studies in evolutionary theory, primatology and the environment. He also adds a wide knowledge of world religions.

One of the major issues in religious naturalism is whether it is desirable to use a naturalistic God language. The older religious humanists such as John Dietrich, Curtis Reese, Charles F. Potter and the signers of the Humanist Manifesto as well as recent writers like Donald Crosby (A Religion of Nature, SUNY Press) find god-language, however transformed from the traditional usage, to be either irrelevant or undesirable. Peters stands with Wieman, Burhoe, Samuel Alexander and Mordecai Kaplan in developing a naturalistic theism. He conceives of God as the creative process in the world, opting for the earlier Wieman of Normative Psychology of Religion and The Growth of Religion rather than the Wieman of The Source of Human Good in conceiving of this creative process as cosmic in scope rather than limited to the human sphere. Peters further agrees with Burhoe in taking Darwin's ideas not as the enemy of religion, but as the key to the creative process. In other words, God is the process of natural selection or more precisely, following Burhoe, God is the twofold process of innovation and selection in cosmic, cultural, and personal evolution. Peters then relates these ideas to traditional religious languages, both Christian and non-Christian. He thinks of Jesus as a radical innovator whose innovations were selected to continue. Much like Wieman, he thinks of Christ's resurrection, not as his personal continuation, but as the survival of his innovations. But, despite this revised traditional religious language, a secular humanist could find much richness in Peters.

Note that on this view there is no "warfare between science and religion." Scientific inquiry supplies the basic theoretical information about our world and ourselves. The religious traditions, if we sift through them carefully, can supply the raw material of wisdom by which to live—emotional and moral orientation and ritual. And since our cultural life is a continual process of innovation and selection, religious practice and theory should be continually winnowed by our scientific understanding. Of all religious naturalists Peters ranks with Ursula Goodenough in fusing intellect and passion in his writing.

The summer conference in 2002 of the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science on Star Island addressed the theme "Is Nature Enough?" Many of the participants asked the question "enough for what?" It seems that there are several theoretical, moral and emotional needs of humans. Then the question became whether Nature is enough to satisfy these needs. Peters is quite clear that Nature is enough for our needs, although both our understanding and our needs may need to be modified. John Haught proposed at the conference that there are "sunny religious naturalists" and "dark day religious naturalists." Karl Peters is a religious naturalist for all seasons.

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Additional Reviews

Michael Cavanaugh, President of the Institute on Religion in and Age of Science
www.amazon.com

 

As president of IRAS (the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science) I know that one of the most persistent accusations against those who try to understand religion naturally, is that there is no ‘oomph,’ no emotional depth, in what they say. It is too rational.

It would be hard to imagine that accusation being made against Karl Peters's book Dancing With the Sacred. Page after page reveals the sense of struggle, and ultimately the sense of joy, that Peters has experienced in terms of making sense of his own life and that of friends he observes.

The result is not a syrupy story, however. It is a deeply emotional and satisfying, but still deeply rational and objective, treatment of issues that have traditionally been dealt with supernaturally. Peters shows in sensitive detail why supernatural treatments have not worked for him, why he thinks (accurately, in my opinion) that they have not worked for large segments of modern persons, and most importantly how a more natural approach CAN and DOES work.

One final comment. I will predict that many readers will find this book to be the most exciting thing they have ever read.

If modern science, and evolution in particular, leads you to conclude that no personal God governs the universe, does that make you an atheist? No, replies Zygon editor Peters. In lieu of a personal God, he describes a "naturalistic theism, in which the sacred or divine is thought of as a system of nonpersonal processes within the natural world."In other words, the divine character of reality is expressed in the very forces of cosmic and biological evolution. Variations arise, and through the processes of nature some of these variations spawn new aspects of existence: reality is both designless and bubbling with creativity. God is not one with whom we dance; God is the dance itself. Whether this qualifies as theism is a matter of definition. Peters's vibrant optimism and joy of life comes ringing forth from his science-based spirituality.

Karl Peters has created an astonishing new dialogue between science and religion. Using insights from evolutionary biology, process theology, and the range of world religions, he proposes that evolution can provide a key to becoming religious.

Dancing with the Sacred weaves together three themes:

• How the Sacred can be understood as the creative activity of nature, human history, and individual life.
• How human beings might understand themselves in ways that motivate them to live more in harmony with the rest of life on plant Earth, and
• How people might live meaningfully in a world in which suffering and eath are creatively intertwined with life.

Peters suggests that God is a process that includes the emergence of new possibilities in nature, human history, and personal living. God is like a dance, he says, and by participating in this creative process we are dancing with the Sacred.”

This is Biology: The Science of the Living World
Ernst Mayr
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

"For those wishing to explore the nature of science and evolutionary theory, I recommend Ernst Mayr’s This is Biology: The Science of the Living World. Mayr is one of the greatest biologists of the twentieth century. Now well into his nineties, he is still writing clear and insightful books taht nonscientsits as well as scientists can appreciate.” — Karl Peters

 

As reviewed by Walter J. Bock
American Scientist, March-April 1998

Without question, the 20th century has been the epoch of biology — as measured by its advances, its total research support including that for practical areas such as medicine and agriculture, and its growing importance to our future. No other science has been more relevant for humans during the past 100 years or will be for the foreseeable future. Hence a thorough understanding of biology is essential for all who want to consider themselves educated and responsible. But such knowledge is not easy to obtain, even for professional biologists, because of the breadth of research disciplines and the diversity of explanatory systems within biology.

The author presents a broad scope of biology covering more than two centuries, demonstrating an encyclopedic grasp of empirical facts and theoretical concepts of the life sciences. This Is Biology is a project that very few biologists would even consider undertaking and even fewer could complete successfully.

This Is Biology is a most fascinating book because it is not a perfectly finished work. This is a volume of importance for anyone with the slightest interest in biology, and one that gains ever more importance with one’s increasing interest. It is not a book for light bedtime reading, but one for concentration and contemplation. The rewards are great, however, making This Is Biology a pleasure to recommend without reservations to the layperson, the general scientist and the professional biologist alike.

Ernst Mayr, the Alexander Agassiz Professor Emeritus of Zoology at Harvard University, is renowned for his work to create a “modern synthesis” approach to evolutionary biology, integrating the theories espoused by both Darwin and Mendel. Having earned numerous prizes and honorary degrees, Mayr has also published a multitude of books, including The Growth of Biological Thought, Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought, and The Evolutionary Synthesis.

The Sacred Depths of Nature
Ursula Goodenough
New York: Oxford University Press, 1997

“Goodenough, a cell biologist, describes clearly for the nonscientists some of the detailed explanations of biology. Calling herself a “nontheist” and a religious naturalist, she shows how science itself can evoke religious attitudes similar to those generated by traditional religious symbols expressed in poetry and music.” — Karl Peters

As reviewed in Publisher's Weekly, October 26, 1998

In eloquent prose, Goodenough, a noted molecular biologist, offers a scientist’s insight into the dialogue between science and religion. Beginning with an autobiographical sketch, her inquiries cut across the boundaries of cosmology, astrophysics, cell biology, evolutionary theory, sexuality and death, moving into the realms of philosophy and theology. Displaying open-mindedness to non-scientific approaches in her search for ultimate undersatnding, she writes with equal respect of Taoism’s enigmatic, ironic credo and of the 19th century Transcendentalists’ humanistic vision. This spiritual diversity, accompanied by scientific observations drawn from such authorities as Stephen Hawking and Edward O. Wilson, making for a stirring, enlightening read.

As reviewed by Barbara Smuts
Scientific American, May 18, 1999

Goodenough aims to ‘present an accessible account of our scientific understanding of Nature and then suggest ways that this account can call forth appealing and abiding religious responses.’ She does this by beginning each chapter with a factual description of a phenomenon critical to life, such as how DNA codes for proteins or how natural selection works, and concluding with a briefer section labelled ‘Reflections,’ in which she shares the thoughts and feelings this scientific knowledge stirs in her.

How she came to terms with such feelings reveals the personal foundations of her religious naturalism:

"Mystery generates wonder, and wonder generates awe. The gasp can terrify or the gasp can emancipate."

Goodenough's emancipation, through what she calls a ‘covenant with Mystery,’ represents her very personal, hard-won experience of the Divine. This covenant allows her to revel in, rather than retreat from, the paradoxes she encounters everywhere as both a scientist and a mortal being.

Perhaps an imperative to experience our world as numinous lurks deep within us all, a legacy of tens of thousands of years of ancestral religious practice. The Sacred Depths of Nature can thus be viewed as an invitation to bring together aspects of experience only recently rendered separate by the rise of modern science—but to bring them together in a new way, based on an account of reality potentially shared by people everywhere. Although the emergence of a universal religion based on a shared scientific worldview seems like a distant dream, Goodenough might be right that this is our best hope for a desperately needed global ethic dedicated to the preservation of life on earth.

Ursula Goodenough is a Professor of Biology at Washington University. Distinguished in the field of cell biology, she has written numerous acclaimed texts on genetics and biology and has served as the President of the American Society of Cell Biology and the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science.

The Future of Life
E. O. Wilson
New York: Random House, Inc., 2002

Another of the world’s leading scientists, Wilson is a lover of all life based on what he knows as a scientist. In this book, he says that the central problem of the twenty-first century is how to raise the standard of living of the poor while preserving the variety of other species as much as possible. He outlines how ethics, religion, science and technology, government, NGO’s (non-governmental organizations), and private citizens can cooperate to address this problem and preserve the diversity of our natural world.— Karl Peters

As reviewed by Lesley Reed
www.amazon.com

The eminent Harvard naturalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Edward Wilson marshals all the prodigious powers of his intellect and imagination in this impassioned called to ensure the future of life. Opening with an imagined conversation with Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond, he writes that he has come ‘to explain to you, and in reality to others and not least to myself, what has happened to the world we both have loved.’ Based on a love affair with the natural world that spans 70 years, Wilson combines lyrical descriptions with dire warnings and remarkable stores of flora and fauna on the edge of extinction with hard economics. Wilson has penned an eloquent plea for the need for a global land ethic and offers the strategies necessary to ensure life on the earth based on foresight, moral courage, and the best tools that science and technology can provide.

As reviewed by Amanda Paulson
The Christian Science Monitor, April 25, 2002

The Future of Life not only gives a vivid picture of the bounty of species – and their rapid disappearance – but an impassioned call to action and a blueprint for saving the earth's biodiversity.

Wilson wrote The Future of Life—which he begins with an open letter to Henry David Thoreau and peppers with his own sense of wonder—hoping that more people would feel the imperative he does to change humanity's destructive trajectory.

Edward O. Wilson, Pellegrino University Research Professor and Honorary Curator in Entomology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, is considered the founder of “sociobiology,” a branch of evolutionary biology. His published works including The Ants and On Human Nature have earned him numerous awards and recognitions, most notably two Pulitzer Prizes.

The Liberation of Life
Charles Birch and John B. Cobb
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University, 1981

“This is the best science and religion book of the 1980s. Like Wilson, biologist Birch and process theologian Cobb combine a concern fro the environment with social justice.” — Karl Peters

As reviewed by Richard Randolph and Jeremy Yunt
www.counterbalance.net

Liberation of Life is a unique book. Its combined philosophical breadth, scientific rigor and specificity, and interdisciplinary scholarship make it one of the very few works to successfully weave together a micro and macro explanation of life's complexity and interrelatedness. In an outward movement from the biological to the social, Birch and Cobb attend to molecular ecology and then move slowly towards wider issues of sustainable economics as well as social and environmental justice. Here, they examine a diverse spectrum of topics, including modern technology and its accompanying myth of ‘progress,’ the nature and relations of market and socialist economies, sustainable agriculture, animal rights, genetic engineering, and sustainable energy production. Whether attending to the micro or macro dimensions of existence, their explicit goal is to liberate the concept and reality of life at the molecular, individual, and population levels. Writing from a Christian perspective, biologist Birch tries to show how a better understanding of life's scientific basis can release us from the bonds of outdated and untenable scientific theories concerning life itself. Philosopher and theologian Cobb tries to show how new ecological conceptions of life, that are suggested by current scientific research, both support and expand scientific and religious views of life, which have been impeded by mechanistic science and dualistic religion.

John B. Cobb, the current co-director of the Center for Process Studies is highly regarded as a proponent of process theology. In addition to publishing a litany of works about this branch of religion, he has held numerous positions in academia, including the Ingraham Professorship of Theology at the School of Theology at Claremont and the Avery Professorship at the Claremont Graduate School. Charles Birch, Professor Emeritus of the University of Sydney, is a noted biologist and theologian who has worked for more than 40 years to integrate these two fields of interest into a single worldview.

The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
New York: HarperCollins, 1993

“Writing in the framework of scientific naturalism that respects religion and offers religious insight, psychologist Csikszentmihalyi suggests that we have evolved to play a self-conscious role in the future evolution of ourselves and our planet.” — Karl Peters

As reviewed by the Creative Spirit Network
"Book Notes" (www.creativespirit.net)

By studying when people are happy and what makes them happy, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has developed a scientifically based mysticism of enjoyment. As hedonistic as it sounds, it's a theory which has many connections with spiritual traditions. By using experimental methods, such as calling people at odd hours of the day to check on how happy they were at that moment and why, the professor discovered that what makes us happy is when we are absorbed in an activity, enjoying the process of the activity itself and not concerned about potential outcomes. Happiness is the psychology of intrinsic motivation, doing something for the sake of the doing. When people become thus absorbed, they enter the flow.

The secret of the serene happiness of the sage is that as self and world have become one, the flow of consciousness and the flow of life have become one. In that complexity of flow called enlightenment, there is both happiness and harmony to share in abundance.

A professor and former chairman of the psychology department at the University of Chicago, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi has extensively investigated the psychology of happiness and “optimal experience,” revolutionizing modern psychological thought with his bestselling works including Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

The Universe Story
Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry
New York: HarperCollins, 1992

“One task of creation spirituality, and of many others in science and religion, is to develop a narrative of the evolutionary history of the universe that provides a sense of our place in the scheme of things and guidance for how we should live. This narrative is often called the ‘epic of evolution’ or ‘epic of creation.’ Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry present this epic in The Universe Story.” — Karl Peters

As reviewed by James Berry
Trumpeter, 1993

This work, The Universe Story, is not simply another book about ecology and the natural world. It is a successor story to Genesis and it will have the impact of Genesis over the next generations, if it fulfills its bold and daring intention which is to provide to the human inhabitants of Earth a new explanation for what is, and for how everything, including the human, fits into the created order. It provides the basis for establishing the new rules for living, rules which recognize sacredness in creation and recognize human dependence on the created order and especially on Earth as the central reality through which humans encounter the divine in creation. This book does what an origin story must do. It deals with the stuff of Genesis. It tells the story of creation as it could never before have been told because it incorporates what the human mind has learned through its inquiries into the fascination of stars and particles, of galaxies and grasshoppers. It could not previously have incorporated all the revelations of biology, geology, anthropology, archeology, physics, chemistry and astronomy, and the relationships of matter, space, time and energy. Nor could it have put them in a proper relationship with poetry and music and architecture and the other fruits of the spirit.

Like Genesis it begins with a beginning: the creation of heaven and earth and it goes through the stages of evolution through the primordial flaring forth through the galactic formations, the shaping of the solar system, the origin of the planets, the rise of life and of humans and goes on through the historical developments of the last 40,000 years. And it ends with a vision of what might be.

Another new book on religion and science related to Dancing with the Sacred is Science and the Search for God, which has received the following reviews.

Science and the Search for God
Gary Kowalski
New York, Lantern Books, 2003

"Kowalski has written the story of faith and science in a way that reads almost like a novel. It is written for lay people, but scientists and theologians will profit as well. The days of estrangement should end. No book has more promise than this one of hastening that end."--John Cobb, Professor Emeritus, Claremont School of Theology

"Eclectic and wide-ranging in its gentle yet acute reflection of how we might think about the nature of things both scientifcally and religiously, this book offers much material for discussion and food for thought. Mr. Kowalski's ruminations are at once intelligent, humorous, humble, daring, and thought-provoking."--William A. Graham, Dean, Faculty of Divinity, Harvard University