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POLITICS BY OTHER MEANS
Science and Religion in
the Twenty-First Century
William Grassie
A Metanexus Imprint
Copyright © 2010 by William Grassie.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010901676
ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-4500-3849-2
Softcover 978-1-4500-3848-5
Ebook 978-1-4500-3850-8
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This book was printed in the United States of America.
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74147
Contents
1. Epiphany on the New Jersey Turnpike ......................................................... 11
Religion by Other Means ...................................................................... 15
2. Ten Reasons for the Constructive Engagement of Science and Religion .... 17
3. Metanexus: The Very Idea ........................................................................... 23
4. Beyond Intelligent Design, Scientifi c Debates, and Cultural Wars ............. 32
5. Which Universe Do You Live In? ................................................................ 36
6. Toward a Constructive Theology of Evolution ............................................ 39
7. Universalism and Particularism: Judaism in an Age of Science .................. 60
8. Resources and Problems in Whitehead’s Process Metaphysics ...................72
Peace by Other Means .......................................................................... 85
9. Sleepless in Tehran ....................................................................................... 87
10. Universal Reason: Science, Religion, and the Foundations of
Civil Societies ............................................................................................ 100
11. Science, Religion, and the Bomb ............................................................... 108
12. Engaged Contemplation for a Troubled World .......................................... 117
13. Leeches on the Road to Enlightenment ..................................................... 133
14. Nationalism, Terrorism, and Religion: A Biohistorical Approach ............. 142
15. Entangled Narratives: Competing Visions of the Good Lie ...................... 158
Evolution by Other Means ................................................................. 185
16. Biocultural Evolution in the Twenty-fi rst Century ..................................... 187
17. Useless Arithmetic and Inconvenient Truths ............................................. 207
18. Rereading Economics: New Economic Metaphors for Evolution ............. 218
19. Post-Darwinism: The New Synthesis .........................................................231
20. Eating Well Together: Donna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto .... 245
21. In the Heavens As It Is on Earth: Astrobiology and the Human Prospect .... 259
22. A Thought Experiment: Envisioning a Civilization Recovery Plan .......... 271
23. Millennialism at the Singularity: The Limits of Ray Kurzweil’s
Exponential Logic ...................................................................................... 280
Postscript .............................................................................................. 301
24. All My Relations: The Challenge Ahead ................................................... 303
Index ................................................................................................................. 315
11
Introduction
1. Epiphany on the
New Jersey Turnpike
As a high school and college student coming of age in the nineteen-seventies, I
used to hitchhike a lot, when such things were still possible. When I was seventeen,
I traveled across Canada and the United States with my thumb and a backpack.
I traveled through Europe and up and down the Eastern seaboard. It was not just
an adventure; it was a study in anthropology, psychology, and sociology. These
road trips were also an exploration of the landscapes and impact of the internal
combustion engine.
Late one winter afternoon, as a freshman at Middlebury College, I found
myself on the road again hitchhiking from Vermont to Washington, DC. I was
taking a winter term course at the time entitled, “Ethical Strategies for a Global
Community,” team taught by Professors Steven Rockefeller and David Rosenberg,
who both became important mentors for me during my college career. The course
examined issues around world population growth, food production and distribution,
energy consumption, technological innovation, environmental degradation, and
violent conflicts around the world. I was quite engaged in the course and disturbed
by what it meant for our future.
My seventh ride of the day dropped me off late in the afternoon on the Garden
State Parkway, about a mile before Exit 11 of the New Jersey Turnpike, where I
needed to reposition myself strategically to catch my next ride south. So I walked
along the highway with cars and trucks roaring past me. I paused on an overpass
to watch the bright orange, red, and purple sunset over the smog-filled sky, eight
lanes of rush-hour traffic beside me, sixteen lanes of the NJ Turnpike below me,
and acidic diesel fumes and noise all around me. I was tired and cold. I still had
many miles to go, and it was getting dark.
12
POLITICS BY OTHER MEANS
This fossil-fuel civilization couldn’t last, I thought from my perch above the
highway, reflecting back on the readings and lectures from the weeks before. And
when it collapses, the world would be in big trouble. A shiver ran down my spine.
It came to me like an epiphany, not an intellectual realization but a visceral feeling
in my gut, standing there over the New Jersey Turnpike with the setting sun. I
knew that I would live through a great global crisis, that there would be much
suffering, but that much could be done to alleviate the suffering and minimize
the destruction, and that out of the collapse would come many new possibilities.
Without words, a voice seemed to say to me, “Billy, pay attention—work
hard—you don’t need to worry—all will be provided.” My fears dissipated, my
heart expanded, and my life was suddenly focused. Before long, I caught a ride
that took me all the way to DC for a different adventure and another story.
That epiphany on the New Jersey Turnpike is one of the moments that marked
the beginning of my career as a hopeful pessimist. It was a great blessing to receive a
calling and vocation at such a formative time in my life. Shortly thereafter, I stopped
hitchhiking and started studying, including travelling to study—Israel-Palestine, the
divided Germany, the Nazi death camps of Poland, the nuclear weapons industry of
the United States, the police state in the Soviet Union, the slums of Philadelphia,
and more. I had no idea then how far this road would take me over the last thirty
plus years, nor how much the world itself would change.
As a hopeful pessimist, I have the good fortune of always being happily proven
wrong. No nuclear weapons have gone off—yet. There has not been a real global
economic and environmental collapse—yet. There has not been a major pandemic
or massive global famine—yet. May it always be so! Of course, these statements
obscure the fact that hunger, poverty, and disease are ongoing, that wars continue to
be fought with incredibly destructive conventional weapons, that species are going
extinct and climates are changing at an alarming pace, and that we find ourselves
today in the midst of major economic dislocations. If we measure human (and
animal) suffering in absolute numbers, rather than by some calculus of percentages,
then absolute suffering has certainly increased dramatically in our lifetime, because
the number of sentient beings on the planet has been growing at an exponential rate.
If we measure suffering by percentages, then humans are in many ways significantly
better off today than they were thirty plus years ago. The cup was always half-full
and half-empty and still very much at risk of being knocked off the table.
The world today is a lot different from the one I imagined from my perch
above the New Jersey Turnpike. I am a lot different too. The New Jersey Turnpike,
however, has not changed. It is still there, resurfaced multiple times, expanded
in places, and replicated around the world in many millions of miles of new and
expanded highway systems. Over a billion new cars and trucks have replaced the
old vehicles whose old tires and carcasses collect in dumps and junkyards around
the world. Over a trillion barrels of oil have been burned in the interim. Exit 11 is
still an inhuman landscape best traversed inside an aluminum-steel can traveling
1. EPIPHANY ON THE NEW JERSEY TURNPIKE
13
at 65 mph with the windows closed and the stereo turned on. Presumably, I have
driven over four hundred thousand miles in my own journey since then and flown
at least as far in airplanes around the world.
Out of college, I found myself working with religious organizations, addressing
nuclear disarmament, citizen diplomacy, conflict resolution, alternative agriculture,
environmental advocacy, race relations, and community organizing. Ten years later, I
found myself in graduate school pursuing a doctorate in comparative religion, where
ironically I started studying science again. I came to see that science, or more precisely
scientism, could function like a religion for many people, indeed that it was the
“religion” of my family of origins. Scientism could be as dangerous and dysfunctional
as any other religion, but also as wholesome and transformative. I wrote a dissertation
on what it would mean to interpret the new scientific cosmology as a mythopoetic
narrative, much as cultural anthropologists interpret the mythic cosmologies of primal
societies. I now understand my own intellectual quest to be about grounding global
ethics (natural law philosophy) in contemporary science (natural philosophy) in
dialogue with comparative religion (revelation). If these ideas can be translated into
intellectual and popular consciousness, there would be many positive implications.
Following graduate school, I taught for many years at Temple University, as
well as the University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore College, and Pendle Hill, a
Quaker retreat center outside Philadelphia. On the road, I founded the Metanexus
Institute on Religion and Science and hitched a ride with the John Templeton
Foundation in what turned out to be a long and productive collaboration. I was
privileged to travel the world and meet extraordinary scientists and spiritual leaders,
and to ponder great questions and read great books, all the while seeking to weave
together received wisdom with new scientif ic knowledge, always with an eye to
crafting a safer and healthier future for our planet and ourselves. I am pleased to
report that this unlikely engagement of religion and science is not only profoundly
transformative, but also endlessly fascinating and fun. That is what I hope to share
with you in this book.
This book is a collection of essays, reflections, and book reviews that I wrote
on this journey, hitching rides on different highways and back roads, still caught
between the apocalyptic and utopic elements of my internal combustion epiphany
on the New Jersey Turnpike. Today, I am less certain of myself and see much
more ambiguity in the world. I have many new concepts to help me understand
the dynamics of global and personal transformation. I remain a hopeful pessimist,
sometimes even a considered optimist. In trying to change the world for the better,
I find myself changed instead. I haven’t been disappointed, though I still anguish
over so many tragedies, big and small. More than ever, I am amazed and humbled by
the many compassionate, intelligent, and creative people who do make differences
in the world, differences big, small, and immeasurable.
We live in a remarkable moment in the natural history of our planet and in the
cultural evolution of our species. This bears repeating. Indeed, the exact phrase is
14
POLITICS BY OTHER MEANS
repeated many times throughout the essays collected in this volume. We are waking
up to the realization that we are in the midst of an epochal transition in the material,
causal, and symbolic relationship between human cultures and other-than-human
natures. The exponential growth in human population and consumption patterns has
significantly altered every bioregional ecosystem of the world and the atmospheric
chemistry of planet. Our species numbers 6.8 billion and is still growing. We
have become godlike in our powers to alter the evolutionary trajectory of nature
for better or worse. Technoscience and global capitalism have brought us to a
threshold, profoundly transforming our ecological and cultural legacies. Scientists
are now calling this the Anthropocene, a new epoch in evolution when humans
begin to dominate the atmosphere, the geosphere, the biosphere, and now also the
“genome-sphere.” Perhaps we are also creating a “noosphere,” a sphere of networked
information beamed through fiber-optic cables and bounced-off satellites, in print
and on the airwaves, a kind of emergent super-consciousness, encircling the planet,
as predicted by the Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Perhaps this noosphere holds an emergent promise for humanity and this rich,
blue-green planet to which we belong.
I have titled this book Politics by Other Means to reference the famous
dictum “war is politics by other means” attributed to the Prussian major general
and diplomat, Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831).1 In an age of weapons of mass
destruction, we need very different politics and nonviolent means. In an age of
global economic and environmental dangers, we need very different policies and
processes. In an age of new sciences, we need a new metaphysics. Albert Einstein
warned us that “The splitting of the atom has changed everything save our modes
of thinking, and thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe.” This book is about
new modes of thinking. The constructive engagement of religion and science—many
religions and many sciences—is really politics by other means. Far from esoteric
scholasticism, I hope you will find the essays collected here not only fascinating
and provocative, but also practical and transformative.
May we all be blessed with many more epiphanies on this extraordinary
journey, as we seek to craft a common future worthy of our magnificent cultural
and ecological inheritance. The Universe, I will argue, is not meaningless and
without purpose, but is best understood as extravagantly generous, providing the
improbable opportunities to be and to become, to think and to choose, to love
and to be loved. God-by-whatever-name, loves each one of us more than we can
possibly imagine. “Pay attention,” the voice said, “work hard—you don’t need to
worry—all will be provided.”
1. The actual citation is “war is nothing but the continuation of policy with other
means.”