II. Pedia Sapiens: A Planetary Progeny Comes to Her/His Own Twintelligent Gaiable Knowledge

3. The Song Book of Naturome: A New Translation

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.

Olson, David R.. The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto scholar extols the extent that our historical humanity is distinguished by the formation of alphabets, inscribed editions, and deep literacy which serve to transfer outer and inner realities onto a textual, recorded corpus. Of interest here is a Reading the Book of Nature chapter which makes especial note of a narrative scripture and creation. See also for another take, two decades on, his The Mind on Paper volume (Cambridge UP, 2016).

Otten, Willemien. From Paradise to Paradigm: A Study of Twelfth-Century Humanism. Leiden: Brill, 2004. A Utrecht University theologian views this transitional medieval age as initiating a trialogue between God, nature and humanity. Peter Abelard, William of Conches, Alan of Lille, and others begin the confluence and parting of Nature and Scripture, which from this distant mirror continues today as a single historic encounter between divinity, cosmos, and self.

Oyama, Susan. Compromising Positions: The Minding of Matter. Barberousse, Anouk, et al, eds. Mapping the Future of Biology. Berlin: Springer, 2009. Reviewed more in A Quickening Evolution, a generous guide to historic and current intimations that nature is literally informational, textual, somehow encoded, at its essence.

Pagels, Heinz. The Cosmic Code. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981. The late physicist and author provides a natural philosophy of the scientific agenda and its original promise to interpret an intrinsic, salutary message.

I think the universe is a message written in code, a cosmic code, and the scientist’s job is to decipher that code. This idea goes back to Greece, but its modern version was stated by the English empiricist Francis Bacon, who wrote that there are two revelations. The first is given to us in scripture and tradition, and it guided our thinking for centuries. The second revelation is given by the universe, and that book we are just beginning to read. (343)

Palmerino, Carla. Reading the Book of Nature. Gorham, Geoffrey, et al, eds. The Language of Nature: Reassessing the Mathematization of Natural Philosophy in the 17th Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. In a collection on a prescient sense of a deep but discernible orderliness, a Radboud University philosopher of science commends Galileo Galilei’s iconic exemplar of a natural ordained scripture. The quote is his most famous statement, which graces so many volumes.

Peacocke, Arthur. Creation and the World of Science. London: Oxford University Press, 1979. A British biochemist and theologian attempts to rehabilitate the “two books” context in which science began. Some twenty five years ago, early outlines of an ascendant evolutionary hierarchy were becoming visible but a universal nonlinear dynamics and many other aspects of a developmental genesis had not yet been articulated.

Pedersen, Olaf. The Book of Nature. Vatican City: Vatican Observatory, 1992. The first address given in response to Pope John Paul II’s initiative to reunite faith and science. Theologian Pedersen proposes that Galileo’s metaphor of nature as a mathematical text deserves to be rehabilitated as a suitable concept to join modern science and received doctrine.

Pedersen, Olaf. The Two Books. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2007. A summary work by the late Danish theologian, edited by George Coyne, SJ and Tadeusz Sierotowicz, which considers in depth the historical pursuit of God’s given, spoken word and found works of creation.

Pitt, Joseph. Galileo, Human Knowledge, and the Book of Nature. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1992. A Virginia Tech philosopher of science credits Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) as achieving the prime transition from ancient metaphysics to a modern scientific method. The book opens with his classic paragraph (below) about a natural dispensation if we could only learn to read it, which is regularly quoted in works such as Max Tegmark’s Our Mathematical Universe (2014). See also Mario Livio’s Is God a Mathematician? (2009) which has a section on The Grand Book of Nature (72-79). In this regard, Galileo’s archetypal metaphor expands beyond an Abrahamic trope to represent a general, deep human quest to decipher such a numinous program-like scripture.

Philosophy is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes -- I mean the universe -- but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth. (Galileo, 1623)

Pope, Benedict XVI. Address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_academies/acdscien/2008/Booklet_38.pdf.. A conference was held on October 31 – November 4, 2008 by this Academy with the title “Scientific Insights into the Evolution of the Universe Life.” The closed-door, invitation only, convocation featured world class scientists and scholars such as Stephen Hawking, Martin Rees, Werner Arber, Michael Heller, Vera Rubin, and David Baltimore, along with a number of Nobel Laureates. But a rapprochement with religion got mixed reviews as it became clear that the theological position and Darwinian theories were not in accord, and in need of thinking through and clarification. A note in the November 14 issue of Science magazine “Vatican Science Conference Offers an Ambiguous Message” is a typical summary.

Pope Benedict XVI opened the Plenary Assembly with remarks that can be accessed via keywords at Google. Of interest is his placement of the Book of Nature as the central interpretative metaphor, even for evolution.

To “evolve” literally means “to unroll a scroll”, that is, to read a book. The imagery of nature as a book has its roots in Christianity and has been held dear by many scientists. Galileo saw nature as a book whose author is God in the same way that Scripture has God as its author. It is a book whose history, whose evolution, whose “writing” and meaning, we “read” according to the different approaches of the sciences, while all the time presupposing the foundational presence of the author who has wished to reveal himself therein. This image also helps us to understand that the world, far from originating out of chaos, resembles an ordered book; it is a cosmos.

Notwithstanding elements of the irrational, chaotic and the destructive in the long processes of change in the cosmos, matter as such is “legible”. It has an inbuilt “mathematics”. The human mind therefore can engage not only in a “cosmography” studying measurable phenomena but also in a “cosmology” discerning the visible inner logic of the cosmos.

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