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

3. The Book of Naturome: A New Translation

Markos, Anton, et al. Aut Moses, Aut Darwin? Das, Pranab, ed. Global Perspectives on Science and Spirituality. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2009. Charles University, Prague, philosophical biologists endorse a more “biosemiotic” view of evolution (search Markos) whence “meaning, morphogenesis, imitation, mimicry, pattern recognition, signals, symbols,” and so on, engender an alternative view of an oriented emergence. These informative features then lead to novel insights into a natural book of creation.

Hence, after the Thirty Years’ War the expectations of Europe became fixated on another text – the Galilean “Book of Nature” – in the hope that its text would not require any interpretation: it is “open,” i.e., accessible to everyone and readable by anybody. Moreover, this is the only book that is singular and common to all: the world as shared, rational, and understandable – self-explanatory and understandable in itself. What is written is also given: the “text” is not only about reality, it is that very reality. (137)

Markos, Anton, et al. Living as Languaging: Distributed Knowledge in Living Beings. Stephen Cowley, ed. Cognition Beyond the Brain. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013. In accord with Markos’ 2002 Readers of the Book of Life, Charles University, Prague, scholars continue an interpretation that nature, evolution, and human might be most known as a natural literacy project. Since reading, writing, and speech are prime attributes of our daily lives, a creative universe seems to be trying to learn, say, record something through our perceptive articulation.

We trace life at different levels of organization and/or description: from protein ecosystems in the cell up to the cohabitation of individuals within and between historically established lineages. Ways of such cohabitation depend on experience of particular guilds or aggregates; they cannot be easily foretold from any basic level of description, they are distributed across all levels, and across all members of the community. Such phenomena of interactivity constitute a lived world which, we argue, represents a genuine analogy with domains of human cultures and languages. We draw an analogy with three levels of meaning as defined by Rappaport (Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010) and make an attempt to show that life and languaging are virtually analogous. (Abstract)

McCalla, Arthur. The Creationist Debate. London: Continuum, 2006. A scholarly work whose first chapter is The Two Books. The Renaissance began with a traditional sense of the “doubleness” of manifest beings and objects whose overt presence was a sign, signature or symbol of an archetypal, immaterial source. Thus a system of correspondences served to unite and inscribe a numinous creation with a comprehensible revelation. But as more physical descriptions took over, this Platonic depth was set aside. A mechanical philosophy proceeded to drain such spiritual essence, which then impeded an accord of scripture and earth. Isaac Newton, however, avidly pursued an alchemical complement to his mechanics which could retain such vital principles that imbue matter in motion. Some centuries later, as a still apocalyptic history rushes to its term, these strains remain unresolved, and the grand project which began the scientific enlightenment remains abandoned.

McInerny, Ralph. Aquinas and Analogy. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996. An exposition of the 13th century synthesis of a worldly spiritual creation founded on an innate correspondence.

McKnight, Stephen. The Modern Age and the Recovery of Ancient Wisdom. Columbia, MO, University of Missouri Press, 1991. A well-written study of the Renaissance conviction that an Atlantean age would be recovered when the findings of the dawning scientific project were brought into accord with "prisca theologia" in the “important tradition of salvation through knowledge.”

McLeish, Tom. A Meta-Metaphor for Science: The True and the Fictional within the Book of Nature. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews. 45/3, 2020. A York University, UK natural philosopher traces the ancient heritage of such a second numinous dispensation at different times and schools. Its essential basis was considered the entire world as an emblematic text meant to be read and understood. Later 20th century brushes indeed allude to a genetic-like code-script such as Erwin Schrodinger (1943) wrote about. So as to ground and at last achieve this familiar historic closure, when it is so needed, our new 2020 review cites this venerable volume, which may just now appear as an EarthWise erudition quite written in a genetic scriptome.

Evelyn Fox-Keller is unsurpassed in the perspicuity with which she has analysed the power of metaphor within science, to the way it defines scientific discourse, and in developing methodologies that address semantic ambiguity. This paper considers a great metaphor for science itself. The ‘Book of Nature’ idea is at least as old as Augustine, and enjoyed strong advocacy in other ages. But I note that the significance of books changes with their availability, the language they are written in, the communities educated to read them, and so on. I will suggest ways that science has been construed differently following these changes in the metaphor’s meaning, including a suggestion that part of the early modern shift is from pure “reading” of the Book of Nature, to writing it.

Merrell, Floyd. Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics, and the New Physics. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1991. The Purdue renaissance person achieves a unique vista upon the writings of the Argentine fabulist (1899-1986) which engages their intuitive affinity with quantum interconnectedness and the literal textuality of such deep realms. These are deftly taken up in chapters such as The Demise of Totalizing Quests, The Universe as Library, and Suspended within Language. While late science may call into doubt older certainties, the implicate/explicate theories of David Bohm can be availed to suggest paths to an essential source. Merrell has continued his quest in many writings, see An Informational Essence for examples, also William Bloch above for a similar entry. For sage Borges himself, one may consult Other Inquisitions 1937 – 1952 (University of Texas Press, 1964).

The multiple images (that is, metaphors) I have evoked in this inquiry force the conclusion of an unlimited iterability (readability) of texts, of the universe (as “text”), or of the books housed in the Library (as the Universe). (240-241)

Mews, Constant. The World as Text: The Bible and the Book of Nature in Twelfth-Century Theology. Heffernan, Thomas and Thomas Burman, eds. Scripture and Pluralism. Leiden: Brill, 2005. A Monash University historian further chronicles this European advent of an imagination that God’s extant creation is in some edifying way a literal book, if only we could learn how to read. This sense of two companion scriptures reigned until into the 19th century, and still may still persist, as Hans Blumenberg muses, in efforts to decipher the genetic codes.

Munowitz, Michael. Knowing: The Nature of Physical Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. A celebratory history of physics as the reading of nature as a text. But due to the insensate mechanical paradigm, no sense of content or message to be found and translated is considered.

We ask question after question of an indifferent universe that would just as soon remain mute; and slowly, patiently, one sentence at a time, we write our own version of the book of nature. (book jacket)

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. The Garden of Truth. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. In his latest volume, the preeminent Islamic scholar and professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University lucidly teaches its subtitle: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition. This is a strong endorsement of an abiding natural scripture, of which the textual Quran and indeed Islam could be appreciated as a prism. Nasr goes on, once again, to explain that such greater creation is made legible by virtue of its structural principle whereof human beings are a microcosmic exemplar.

Since in Islam the revelation came in the form of a sacred book, many Muslim sages have looked upon nature as a book of God, as did many of their Jewish and Christian counterparts. The cosmos is in fact God’s first and primordial revelation. There is an eternal and archetypal Quran, which is the archetype of both the book revealed to the Prophet of Islam as the Quran and the cosmos, which many Sufis in fact call the cosmic Quran. (46)

Nasr, Seyyed Hossien. Knowledge and the Sacred. New York: Crossroad, 1981. Amongst its many erudite reflections is an Islamic witness of the scriptual nature of cosmic creation.

Although the goal of sacred knowledge is the knowledge of the Sacred as such, that is, of that Reality which lies beyond all cosmic manifestation, there is always the stage of gathering the scattered leaves of the book of the universe…precisely because the cosmos is a book containing a primordial revelation of utmost significance and man a being whose essential, constitutive elements are reflected upon the cosmic mirror and who possesses a profound inner nexus with the cosmic ambiance around him, sacred knowledge must also include a knowledge of the cosmos. (189)

Numbers, Ronald. Science and Christianity in Pulpit and Pew. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Of note in this work by the University of Wisconsin historian is the chapter Reading the Book of Nature through American Lenses which documents an especially strong bent in this new world of verdant natural expanse to imagine, seek and accept a second, complementary scripture.

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