Spiritual and Religious Aspects of Big History

Discussion

Barry Rodriguez:

"In 1954, the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS) formed, which included astronomer Harlow Shapley, a founder of cosmography, which had led to studies in Cosmic Evolution at Harvard University. IRAS helped found Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science twelve years later, and its contributors included leading scholars and educators in macro-historical studies, like astrophysicist Eric Chaisson and biologist Ursula Goodenough.74Archbishop Lazar Puhalo of the Orthodox Church in America had been a dynamic and early advocate for science, rationalism, and faith. His book, On the Neurobiology of Sin (2010), served as a bridge between the two cultures. He joined the dialogue of big history, speaking, along with other big historians, at the Global Futures 2045 conferences in Moscow (2012) and New York (2013). He raised important moral questions about issues like immortality and artificial intelligence and participated in the IBHA conferences.

Cosmologist Brian Swimme worked with Catholic philosopher Thomas Berry and began the Center for the Story of the Universe in 1989, which was affiliated with the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. This led them into deeper collaboration with religion scholars John Grimm and Mary Tucker, who founded the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale University in 2006. Their production of The Journey of the Universe (2011) was a multimedia synthesis of Berry’s and others’ views of spiritual meaning in the cosmos. Parallel to this work, the Philadelphia Center for Religion and Science had grown into the Metanexus Institute by 1997 and, through its director, William Grassie, became a supporter of big history. Jennifer Morgan, a journalist and educator, also grew out of this tradition of the Universe Story. After participating in an Earth Literacy Program at Gene-sis Farm in Blairstown, New Jersey, she composed the Universe Story Trilogy for children between 2002 and 2006, consulting with noted scholars like astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and anthropologist Jane Goodall. She then developed the Deeptime Network (2014) with a mission to unite all faith traditions with each other and with science.77Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’, On Care for our Com-mon Home (2015) led to renewed actions by Catholics around the world to conserve the planet. Among them, in 2016, Prashant Olalekar and Orla Hazra merged these ideas with Thomas Berry’s “New Story” and a big history paradigm to establish their course, Awakening to Cosmic Compassion, at the Department of Interreligious Studies, St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai.78Educator Luis Calingo had served as Provost of Dominican University of California when it added big history to its core curriculum. In 2015, he became President of Holy Angel University, a major research institute in central Luzon, Philippines (his home area) and, two years later, sent professors to the Summer Institute in Big History at Dominican. Holy Angel then began a two-course big history sequence the following year. With the largest Roman Catholic population in Asia, but acknowledging the Philippines’ Islamic and animistic traditions, Holy Angel promotes big history along with its many philosophical traditions.79While much of the overt and well-publicized efforts at rapprochement between science and religion exist in a western context, especially among Christians, that does not mean that such efforts do not exist elsewhere. Besides helping Malaysia’s farmers adapt to changing land and climate, soil scientist Shamshuddin bin Ju-sop also had been active in guiding Muslims to see how Islam and modern science are bound together, as in his popular text, The Earth Story: Lessons from the Quran and Science (2006). Similarly, physician H. Su-darshan, a Vedic scholar living among the Soliga tribal people of South India for over forty years, adapted his worldviews and medical practices in a complex weave of science and community service, as delivered by his medical/educational NGOs, the Karuna Trust, and the Vivekananda Girijana Kalyana Kendra.80While big history discussions often centre on urban forms of education, it must be kept in mind that many tribal societies from which civilization grew maintain holistic and inclusive concepts of existence. It is acknowledged that their low-impact survival strategies could help correct the lifestyle of dominant societies. Far from being an exotic primitivism, or a return to nature, tribal experience encompasses Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), while connecting with the scientific community, as in the 1994 founding of the Alaska Native Science Commission. Traditional societies have a major potential to re-envision our future in a big history context. Such bridges have already been opened, as in biologist Edward Wilson’s The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth (2006) and recently led to the global anthology, Science, Religion, and Deep Time (2022), edited by big historians Lowell Gustafson, Barry Rodrigue, and David Blanks."

(https://jbh.journals.villanova.edu/index.php/JBH/article/view/2721/2582)