(logo) Natural Genesis (logo text)
A Sourcebook for the Worldwide Discovery of a Creative Organic Universe
Table of Contents
Introduction
Genesis Vision
Learning Planet
Organic Universe
Earth Life Emerge
Genesis Future
Glossary
Recent Additions
Search
Submit

II. Pedia Sapiens: A Planetary Progeny Comes to Her/His Own Actual Factual Knowledge

3. The Book of Naturome: A New Translation

Glattfelder, James. Information-Consciousness-Reality. International: Springer Frontiers, 2019. This open access 650 page volume is online in full from its Springer site. The author is a Swiss physicist with advanced degrees from and postings at the University of Zurich. Its many chapters and section include The Semantics of Symmetry, Invariance and Structure, The Two Volumes of the Book of Nature, The Simplicity of Complexity, The Fractal Nature of Knowledge, A Universe Built of Information and The Consciousness of Reality. The book outline is well organized, integrated, explained and referenced (over 1,000). Its broad compass surveys self-organizing complexity sciences, classic, quantum and computational physics, philosophies and paradigms, economic and social cultures all the way to our post truth dilemma.

But perhaps things are not as bad as they appear. We are slowly seeing the emergence of a new age. We have the first blueprints for decentralized economic interactions with the potential for collective intelligence—adaptability, resilience, and sustainability. Overall, the universe appears to be guided by an invisible force driving it to ever higher levels of self-organized complexity. (21)

The Dawning of a New Age: Perhaps we will soon be able to translate our amazing powers of individual intelligence into collective intelligent behavior. Maybe soon we can construct an economy that is adaptive, resilient, and sustainable. After all, the universe has an intrinsic propensity to forge complexity. Self-organization appears like a fundamental force guiding cosmic evolution. (36)

In the long journey of the human mind attempting to decode the workings of reality, one trusted companion has to be abandoned: the materialistic and reductionistic scientific worldview. What new notion should fill the void? Slowly a novel worldview is emerging, supported by different theoretical traditions. Most intriguingly, at the nexus of these formal approaches a new ontology of reality is becoming most apparent. Two novel mantras are spreading through humanity’s collective mind: Information is physical, and Information represents the ultimate nature of reality.” (473)

Goldwasser, Orly. How the Alphabet was Born from Hieroglyphs. Biblical Archaeology Review. March/April, 2010. This illustrated history by a Hebrew University scholar of Ancient Near East Languages ranges over three millennia to survey how pictorial etchings slowly evolved into scriptural letters. And from our global vista several millennias on, might it be imagined as a genetically textual cosmic creation try to write down, describe, and conceive itself via the human phenomenon?

Grassie, William. Science, Semiotics, and the Sacred. Harper, Charles, ed. Spiritual Information. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2005. The theologian founder of the Metanexus Institute writes a cogent chapter as witness to a greater creation meant to be seen as a written natural testament. This traditional persuasion of an ordained universe and human may finally become legible in this worldwide century, which the extended quotes well convey.

Many religions have understood language to be in some way primordial to the material constitution of the Universe.” (39) “Modern humans, informed by science, live in a universe that is more enriched with awesome subtleties and gorgeous details than our ancestors could possibly have imagined. Paradoxically, however, our Universe seems also to be more spiritually impoverished that that of traditional peoples. This new Universe as understood by modern science seems to import a concomitant loss of significance, meaning, and purpose in our lives. (39)

In the evolutionary context of human development over the last two million years, we might rather say that Nature teaches our species to speak, listen, and think, because nature is already pregnant with linguistic meanings and patterns “out there” that thankfully have the potential to map onto the “in here” realities of our mind-brain cultures. (42) In this new view, science can be seen as a kind of translation project, where we try to learn the language of an alien set of phenomena and try to understand the terminology, syntax, and grammar that the phenomena authentically “speak.” The semiotics of our scientific translations is represented in mathematical notations, diagrams, charts, and models. (42)

This new relational, information-centered ontology arising in the sciences today provides a wonderful moment for the recovery and reinterpretation of traditional religious worldviews. Today, the Universe is far grander that our ancestors could have possible imagined, but somehow they seem to have already intuited its deep, spiritual, informational structure through which all things come into being. (357)

Habel, Norman. The Implications of God Discovering Wisdom in Earth. Van Wolde, Ellen, ed. Job 28: Cognition in Context. Leiden: Brill, 2003. In these proceedings of a Dutch conference upon this numinous text, the Flinders University theologian describes our fraught discourse as a Divine endeavor to witness and gain knowledge of this Creation. In this regard, the secret truth at the heart of wisdom is to realize such great work is accomplished via an ingrained code that manifestly imbues everywhere from person to planet.

It is not the phenomena themselves, but the inner mystery or code of these phenomena that Job is challenged to discern, a code which itself can be canned ‘wisdom.’ (288) Wisdom is linked to a particular dimension of the phenomena of Earth, a hidden code/way/law imbedded in the natural order of things. (294)

Habel, Norman, ed. Readings from the Perspective of Earth. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000. Reflections on the Earth Bible Project, which originated in Australia, that believes there is a natural wisdom which reveals a sacred creation in which human beings participate. Six Ecojustice principles are stated in this context: Earth’s intrinsic worth, interconnectedness, nature’s own voice, cosmic purpose, mutual custodianship, and resistance to wrongs.

4. The Principle of Purpose: The universe, Earth and all its components, are part of a dynamic cosmic design within which each piece has a place in the overall goal of that design. (48)

Hadot, Pierre. The Veil of Isis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. From ancient Greece to Renaissance Europe, nature was seen as suffused with a hidden hieroglyphic language we are bidden to decipher. The natural cosmos is often likened to a poem, indeed a second scripture, if only we could learn to read. But in the 17th century a male physical science began a take over of feminine organic earth and now denies any presence of an innate meaning and message.

Haila, Yrjo and Chuck Dyke, eds. How Nature Speaks: The Dynamics of the Human Ecological Condition. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. A collaboration between Finland and the U. S. that remains unsure whether nature can communicate or ought to. The main theme is an attempt to better understand human-ecosystems in terms of complex systems theories, but without a sense of an abiding universality, the papers fragment and wander. Best effort to me is Susan Oyama’s update review of her developmental systems theory.

Harkins, Franklin. Reading and the Work of Restoration: History and Scripture in the Theology of Hugh of St. Victor. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2009. Rather than another dusty study, if such a 12th century corpus is well remembered and recounted, as this Fordham University theologian achieves, it provides vital portal for our late 21st century. Hugh, (1096 – 1141) a scholar and canon of the monastery of St. Victor in France, advanced some the earliest education philosophy. Indeed, the human condition, in its alienated, disordered state, can yet be righted and saved by a detailed program of ordered reading, first in the liberal arts and subsequently in sacred scripture. Some nine centuries on, since this palliative task quite remains, in some way we might now realize our phenomenal work is to write and read both the universe and human into full flourishment?

Here we will see that Hugh understands properly ordered reading in the arts as the real beginning of the process whereby the human person is restored to the image of God. The Victorine’s view of restoration by reading is inextricably bound up with the foundational Christian narrative, (i.e., the historia) of creation, fall, and redemption. (11) With these words, the Victorine master shows himself heir to the ancient tradition, which Origen originates and John Scotus Eriugena hands on to the medieval West, of the two books of divine revelation. According to Eriugena, both creation and Scripture are books that are able to lead human readers from their visible or literal aspect to the invisible rationality or spirit of their divine author. (81)

Harper, Charles, ed. Spiritual Information. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2005. An eclectic collection of 100 essays by scientists, theologians, psychologists and philosophers on philanthropist John Templeton’s concept that if we are mindful, in a obvious and subtle number of ways a numinous universe and its Creator is still being revealed.

The moment that we ground human language in a semantically constituted and semantically rich cosmos, then we have solved the problem of incoherence that troubles contemporary philosophy of science and philosophy of language. (William Grassie 42) With a broadened outlook, our diverse religions might be better able to live together in peace. Believers in each religion might come to see that all religions are complementary, giving us views of the same reality seen from different angles. (Freeman Dyson 54) In a similar vein, Cosmic Order understood as Divine Word is implemented in Nature, which is in turn studied by science. Creation is not a succession of unrelated instantaneous acts. God has spoken, and as rational creatures we are capable of reading Nature’s ”book.” (Lydia Jaeger 153)

Harrison, Peter. The Bible and the Emergence of Modern Science. Science and Christian Belief. 18/2, 2006. With the Protestant reformation came a rejection of allegorical readings of nature, which were held to convey a deep, if elusive meaning, to more of a focus on surface things themselves, which then led to a disenchantment of the world.

Harrison, Peter. The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Arguably the most complete and perceptive history of a second dispensation of a natural testament as it arose in the humanist Renaissance. The 16th, 17th and 18th centuries were engaged in the translation and exegesis of nature so as to decipher its incarnate, beneficent correspondence. Theologial Harrison then implies we should still be about this vital project.

So it was that interpretive skills which in previous generations would have been directed towards uncovering further connections in the pages of sacred scripture, were turned outwards to a new text - the book of nature. The allegorical imagination was directed to the natural world, seeking patterns and similitudes in this new sphere. Through this reorientation nature was constructed as a coherent and meaningful text in its own right. Crucially, just as a determination of the meaning of separate elements of scripture required the conviction that the sacred page represented a single, coherent unity, so the interpretation of the material things was now made possible by the ‘discovery’ of ‘nature’. (47) The meaning of nature, then, like the meaning of scripture, was a matter of relating the parts to the whole. As a single passage of scripture might be made to bear the meaning of the whole, so discrete material objects were seen to be reflections of the whole. (47)

So it was that interpretive skills which in previous generations would have been directed towards uncovering further connections in the pages of sacred scripture, were turned outwards to a new text - the book of nature. The allegorical imagination was directed to the natural world, seeking patterns and similitudes in this new sphere. Through this reorientation nature was constructed as a coherent and meaningful text in its own right. Crucially, just as a determination of the meaning of separate elements of scripture required the conviction that the sacred page represented a single, coherent unity, so the interpretation of the material things was now made possible by the ‘discovery’ of ‘nature’. (47) The meaning of nature, then, like the meaning of scripture, was a matter of relating the parts to the whole. As a single passage of scripture might be made to bear the meaning of the whole, so discrete material objects were seen to be reflections of the whole. (47)

Harrison, Peter. The Territories of Science and Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. The author is a University of Queensland historian and scholar in this field. Search here and his website for many prior works. The perennial project continues into the 21st century to ever discern and decipher a Divine image inscription in natural creation and creatures, which patently must be there for us to read. Might we finally imagine, in these latter days, a fulfillment by way of a parents to children genetic genesis?

Previous   1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8  Next