Talk Two: Origin Story
In this talk I am hoping to persuade any of us that still have doubts that the time has come to fully embrace the emerging scientific Origin Story. I don’t mean pay lip service to it, but to actually embrace and work with its theological and Christological implications and opportunities. I have noticed that for many in this regard there is still the tendency to ‘hedge bets’; evolution does not really contradict the Bible, for example, or there may well have been a Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago but it is the affirmation of God in the first chapter of Genesis that really matters. I have been one such hedge better. Can I invite us to let go, at least for the duration of these talks, such ‘hedge betting’ and join me in trying to embrace this emerging new and very important origin story, and see where that takes us. Some of the emerging story may well not be true of course, but in general cultural terms it is now the dominant origin story and we ignore it at our peril if we are serious in standing testimony to Christ in our time and culture. It is no longer enough to decry fundamentalism and penal substitutionary theory and pay lip service to the wider culture; we have to come up with a broader more inclusive understanding of Christ within this new origin story that has power to persuade and transform and unify.
Modern histories of the universe and the world now abound. I have chosen David Christian’s Origin Story: A Big History of Everything because it is one of the most recent and it builds upon his work on Big History over a long period. It is well written and engaging. I found myself looking at the world around me with new eyes and a stronger sense of connection as I read it, much as I did when I first accepted the claim of geneticists that every human being on the planet is related to common ancestors, chromosomal Adam and mitochondrial Eve, so called. We can think of ourselves scientifically as one human family. This is not mythological thinking. It is scientific.
But Christian actually takes us back much further than chromosomal Adam and mitochondrial Eve, to LUCA, our Last Universal Common Ancestor, the first living organism. He writes:
She [Luca] was not a free-living cell but a rocky labyrinth of mineral cells, lined with catalytic walls composed of iron, sulphur and nickel, and energised by natural proton gradients. The first life was a porous rock that generated complex molecules and energy, right up to the formation of proteins and DNA itself. (Christian 2018:91)
We can even argue that we can go back even further in declaring that we are ultimately all star dust created in the Big Bang, but of course it is what happened to that star dust that is the main story. There is an extraordinary capacity to unite in the evolutionary story, which is technically a myth in the best sense of the word.
Christian gives God short shift in his Origin Story, but he is not a militant atheist, and he is honest about the limitations of the emerging origin story.
Frankly, today we have no better answers to the problem of ultimate beginnings than any earlier human society had...... we still can’t explain it any better than novelist Terry Pratchett did when he wrote, “The current state of knowledge can be summarized thus: In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.” (Christian 2018:21)
More on God later.
It is not my intention to go into any great detail about the text. He organises it around the idea of thresholds that mark the key transitions that constitute the history of the universe. He identifies eight thresholds: In the Beginning, Stars and Galaxies (thresholds 2 and 3), Molecules and Moons, Life, Humans, Farming, and The Anthropocene. He finishes with a chapter onWhere Is It All Going, raising the stark choices we humans face and the challenges they present. His organisation of the text is also around key concepts that give a further continuity. Energy is the fundamental concept in his origin story; matter is compressed energy and life is the interplay of energy and information.
Like so many evolutionists he does not hesitate to reify important evolutionary concepts. He gives motive and intentionality to these concepts. I used to object to this wholeheartedly declaring evolutionary scientists wanted to have their cake and eat it, and that the real challenge for them was to write about evolution, natural selection, entropy and so on without making these abstract ideas the equivalent of persons with motive and intention. Perhaps Dawkins’ understanding of evolution as a blind watchmaker is the icing on the cake in this regard. But I have come to wonder if maybe it is in fact impossible to write about evolution without reifying concepts because the seeming presence of intentionality and perhaps even motive in life does seem to appear very early on. They can’t be escaped. Purpose is maybe somehow indwelling life from its earliest and simplest forms. It is interesting that vitalist ideas are being seriously re-visited, particularly by some feminist environmental thinkers.
Christian accepts this equivocation and exploits it. On the one hand he affirms the primacy of inert matter; on the other he gives it intentionality, even agency, which implies motive. It raises the all important question, is evolution a descriptive idea or an explanatory one? I personally think the same question can be asked of natural selection. For me they are descriptive. Only by ‘smuggling in’ intentionality and agency in by the back door as Christian does do they become explanatory. For example:
Indeed, complex adaptive systems, such as bacteria, your dog, or multinational companies, act as if every component is an agent with a will of its own, so each component is constantly adjusting to the behavior of many other components. And that yields extremely complex and unpredictable behaviours. In using the word agent, I have smuggled in a new idea that will become increasingly important: the idea of information. (Christian 2018:77)
So you can see there is much in all this that is suggestive of something at work in the evolution of our species that the ideas of materialistic science are beginning to pick up, but at the same time deny. Hence I am happy to let such scientists continue to reify their concepts. It may well be pointing to a truth they still consciously deny. Perhaps purpose is discernible in the universe, not just to the philosophic mind but also, some time in the future, to the scientific.
What I want to do now is look at where I think Christian’s text is not adequate and where I think he misses what I think are essential things to include in any modern origin story.
I have already mentioned that he sells ‘God’ short; but his ‘God’ that he rejects seems to be the traditional church God. In fact, ‘God by any other name’ seems to walk into his story from the start by the backdoor. There are two women I know well. One is a staunch church goer of the fundamentalist kind; the other has not been to church for a very long time. I love them both. The first is so sure of her God that she is hesitant to pray with me because she thinks I don’t call God ‘Father’; which is not true by the way. The other talks to the Universe; she commits everything to the Universe without a sideways glance at the Bible, and expects grace and answers to come back to her from the Universe. I wonder if there is something here that applies to Christian and others like him. Let me explain.
For Christian God cannot be included in any modern origin story. He writes:
Most versions of the modern origin story no longer accept the idea of a creator god because modern science can find no direct evidence for a god. Many people have experiences of gods, but those reported experiences are diverse and contradictory and they cannot be reproduced. They are too malleable, too diffuse, and too subjective to provide objective scientific evidence. (Christian 2018:26)
We will return to this question of subjectivity later. Then to add insult to injury he uses two arguments beloved of Richard Dawkins which I have always struggled to believe any intelligent human being could possibly put forward in a serious discussion. The first argument is originally from Bertrand Russell.
At the age of eighteen, Bertrand Russell gave up on the idea of a creator god after reading the following passage in the autobiography of John Stuart Mill: “My father taught me that the question, ‘who made me?’ cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, ‘who made
God?’” (Christian 2018:19)
He then caps this with:
And there's another puzzle. If a god is powerful enough to design a universe, that god must surely be more complex than the universe, so assuming a creator God means explaining a fantastically complex universe by imagining something even more complex that just... created it. Some might think that was cheating. (Christian 2018:20)
So on these two extraordinarily naive understandings, God is dismissed. But Christian is quite unconscious of the backdoor. ‘God by any other name’ sneaks back in. What about the Universe, for instance, like my sister. Surely no one can deny that we are products of the Universe. Could we not play with the idea of the Universe as God? How ‘bout the Cosmos. Let’s not hesitate to reify them into personal beings with motive and intention and agency, just like Christian and others reify evolution and natural selection.
But Christian’s favourite is Nothingness and the mystery of the Quantum world.
Quantum physics tells us, and particle accelerators—which speed up subatomic particles to high velocities by means of electric or electromagnetic fields—show us, that something really can appear in a vacuum from nothing, though grasping what this means requires a sophisticated understanding of nothing. (Christian 2018:23)
And so he finishes the section in which he denies God any part in the story with,
As quantum physics allows things to appear from a vacuum, it seems that the entire universe really did pop out of a sort of nothingness full of potential.(Christian 2018:38)
A sort of nothingness full of potential. This reminds me of David Bohm’s implicate order before it becomes explicate, or Hegel’s concept of Spirit. Is not this a spontaneous creatio ex nihilo? I personally have no problem in praying to a nothingness full of spontaneous potential. Wow! Even happy to call it Father.
So, the problem is not with spontaneous creativity. Christian seems to be fully endorsing this. It seems to be with the word ‘God’, as he thinks of it, that the problem lies. And this is where we, disciples of Christ and members of the remnant of the institutional church, need to find a new flexibility and willingness to play with concepts and engage the world people like Christian inhabit. If we could but lighten up a bit and become ourselves more spontaneous and engaging in the modern world without claiming any ecclesiastical or traditional authority for what we think. We are coming out of a long tradition in which those before us built defensive walls out of ideas and then argued for those walls on pain of excommunication or death.
Continuing this way of understanding Christian discipleship has no future and is itself a sort of death.
There is some evidence that new ways of approaching theology and ideas about Christ are emerging that are more flexible. It is being called Theodrama, originally from the work of Urs von Balthasar, the famous Catholic theologian but now being developed amongst a number of both Catholic and Protestant thinkers. Experimenting with Theodrama rather than doctrine and dogma is the sort of flexibility I am meaning. I think it will be increasingly productive. Ideas can be played with within a sense of Big Story without arguing over doctrines and dogmas. On top of that Theodrama is taking some of the methodology of improvisational theatre and theatre sports into its orbit as a way of working with concepts. An idea might be ‘blocked’, or it may be ‘accepted’, or more importantly still it maybe ‘over accepted’. It is in over acceptance that spontaneity can enter the process and new creative ideas emerge. This is a new way to do theology that necessarily brings with it the challenge of bringing these new ideas up against the tradition and its doctrines and dogmas. This is a difficult task.
An example of this is to be published next month. As mentioned in my Introduction, Professor Scott Cowdell at Charles Sturt University in Canberra has written a book on the anthropological thinker Rene Girard entitled Rene Girard and the Non-violent God. And he is framing it in terms of a Theodrama. I have been privileged to be part of a group reading the book with Scott.
This brings me to my next problem with Christian’s Origin Story. Christian barely mentions religion and his understanding of the human condition is quite naive. I suspect he shares the view so common amongst
materialists that religion was an aberration amongst primitive people that has been made completely redundant by the rise of modern science. Such staggering cultural appropriation amongst otherwise intelligent human beings is hard to imagine possible. But there you are. There is little feel for the great challenge human communities had and have for staying together, for organising themselves socially, for dealing with forces that disrupted and threatened; in other words the very stuff of religion. Not so with Girard.
Girard was a French academic who worked for the bulk of his life in the States at various universities. He died a few years ago. His first book was an analysis of some great novels in which he realised that the writers understood something about human nature of which the bulk of us are unaware. This was the particularly human nature of desire. Without saying as much he neatly reframed the idea of sin.
It is not possible to look at Girard in any detail here but I warmly suggest you have a look if you have not already. His first book created much interest in academe, but not nearly as much as his second, Violence and the Sacred in which he showed human desire leading to communal fragmentation leading to uncontrollable scapegoating and murder leading to the communal experience of transcendental peace and the reconciliation of the community. In one swoop he had come up with serious ideas about the origin of religion and sacrifice, myth and culture.
Unfortunately for his sudden rise to academic stardom, he became a Christian toward the end of writing his first book. This did not colour his second but it certainly did his third book, his magnum opus, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, a direct quote from Christ. In a way this ended academe’s fascination with his ideas and he went into limbo until discovered by some Catholic theologians. This then propelled him into an illustrious career as a non-theologian writing theology and anthropology and pointing to the great truths of the human condition and Christ as revealed in the Scriptures. His importance has been likened to Darwin’s by some, and he has been called the most significant apologist in the modern period.
Scott divides his Theodrama into five acts within a general understanding of evolution.
1. The Pre-Human Paradise of Savage Innocence.
2. Hominization, the Primal Murder, and Providence. 3.The Breakthrough.
4. The Best of Times. The Worst of Times.
5. The Un-Theorized Eschaton.
I have questions for both Scott and Girard, but I fully concur with the general direction of what they have done and are doing. And I love the idea of Theodrama. Scott works hard to bring Girard’s ideas up against the Bible and the Tradition, something that I find in the end unconvincing. I don’t feel the same commitment to the Tradition as Scott; I think we have reached a point where everything should be on the table. On top of that, I question Girard’s understanding of the scapegoating mechanism as an essential element in the hominization process. I am more interested in it really coming into play in the great transition from hunter/gatherer life to settled agricultural life when human communities swelled in size so markedly. This tallies with the great archeologist and anthropologist Jacque Cauvin’s suggestion that the birth of the gods and the origins of agriculture are intimately related, something that seems to be confirmed in the extraordinary discoveries at Gobeckli Tepe. It is currently being argued by researchers that hunter/gatherer groups were never large and were remarkably egalitarian, which included leadership by women. Religiously they were deeply connected spiritually with the environment with varying forms of shamanism and communal sacrifice for the sharing of food. Issues of authority, priesthood, ritual and especially sacrifice for group cohesion came later as the communities got bigger. It was then the scapegoating mechanism came into play, I am thinking. This way of thinking is different from Cowdell’s.
But my point here is that there is much fruitful and exciting things to be working on in such Theodrama as part of any Origin Story, and that it will be very important for thinkers like Christian to begin to take these issues seriously. The ubiquitous nature of human sacrifice, for instance, can no longer be denied, a practice that eventually moved into animal sacrifice. What does that tell us about ourselves and our origin and story and our methods of holding community together.
But the issue that I most wish to raise in being critical of Christian’s origin story is his failure to do justice to human subjectivity, as does the scientific materialistic world generally. He of course does not deny human subjectivity.
No brainy creature (not even you or I) is in direct contact with its environment. Instead, we all live in a rich virtual reality constructed by our brains....... Sensations, emotions, and thought together create the inner, subjective world that all humans, and probably many other large-brain species, experience. (Christian 2018:141)
Consciousness and the mind-body problem is the other great frontier of science, along with the Big Bang. For scientific materialism consciousness is an epiphenomenon arising out of the complexity of matter, something as Christian says is ‘constructed by our brains’. In other words he is saying our brains are the cause of our subjectivity, and yet our subjectivity is all we know and can know directly, not only of ourselves but of the world. It is our ‘I’ pure and simple, an entirely psychic entity that experiences and exists only in psychic images, however this may be connected to the body. The psyche has as much evolutionary history as our bodies, going back to the origins of life, to LUCA in fact. Our brains are not the cause of our subjectivity, our psyches evolved with our bodies. In fact, looking from the inside, our psyches are the cause of our minds. Mind emerges from psyche.
Modern science has never taken psyche seriously, because science does not take individuality seriously. Science deals with statistical generalities, and has claimed this as the only real knowledge. But when we say we know someone, we do not know them scientifically. We know them psychically; we understand them through our capacity for emotional connection and empathy. Such knowledge and understanding can be had not only with other persons but with animals and other living things. Our psyches are deep evolutionary structures that know the world because the world formed them. And the crowning glory of our psyches is our capacity to think and reason.
Our capacity for rationality is the icing on a huge cake that does not yield itself easily to rational investigation but is the very basis upon which our lives are built. Any Origin Story that does not take the evolution of our psyches and our subjectivity as seriously as the evolution of our bodies is to be questioned. Psyche is part of the origin of life, as is matter, however we understand their relationship, if we ever do.
One of the most telling philosophical critiques of science in this regard is the recent book by Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo- Darwinian Conception of the Nature is Almost Certainly False. And Nagel is in no way denying we have evolved.
So my main criticism of Christian’s Origin Story is that he does not take psyche seriously and see it as an evolved structure as complex and magnificent as our bodies. Our minds are dependent on these psychic structures that began with life, the inner face of outward living matter, entirely valid in itself.
So here is the emerging shape of a grand Origin Story that may in part replace the story as we have understood it from the Bible. How then do we incorporate the Bible into this grand Origin Story and see it in its historical origin while remaining true to what it tells us of the truth of God and Christ. That is the focus of our next talk.
In this talk I am hoping to persuade any of us that still have doubts that the time has come to fully embrace the emerging scientific Origin Story. I don’t mean pay lip service to it, but to actually embrace and work with its theological and Christological implications and opportunities. I have noticed that for many in this regard there is still the tendency to ‘hedge bets’; evolution does not really contradict the Bible, for example, or there may well have been a Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago but it is the affirmation of God in the first chapter of Genesis that really matters. I have been one such hedge better. Can I invite us to let go, at least for the duration of these talks, such ‘hedge betting’ and join me in trying to embrace this emerging new and very important origin story, and see where that takes us. Some of the emerging story may well not be true of course, but in general cultural terms it is now the dominant origin story and we ignore it at our peril if we are serious in standing testimony to Christ in our time and culture. It is no longer enough to decry fundamentalism and penal substitutionary theory and pay lip service to the wider culture; we have to come up with a broader more inclusive understanding of Christ within this new origin story that has power to persuade and transform and unify.
Modern histories of the universe and the world now abound. I have chosen David Christian’s Origin Story: A Big History of Everything because it is one of the most recent and it builds upon his work on Big History over a long period. It is well written and engaging. I found myself looking at the world around me with new eyes and a stronger sense of connection as I read it, much as I did when I first accepted the claim of geneticists that every human being on the planet is related to common ancestors, chromosomal Adam and mitochondrial Eve, so called. We can think of ourselves scientifically as one human family. This is not mythological thinking. It is scientific.
But Christian actually takes us back much further than chromosomal Adam and mitochondrial Eve, to LUCA, our Last Universal Common Ancestor, the first living organism. He writes:
She [Luca] was not a free-living cell but a rocky labyrinth of mineral cells, lined with catalytic walls composed of iron, sulphur and nickel, and energised by natural proton gradients. The first life was a porous rock that generated complex molecules and energy, right up to the formation of proteins and DNA itself. (Christian 2018:91)
We can even argue that we can go back even further in declaring that we are ultimately all star dust created in the Big Bang, but of course it is what happened to that star dust that is the main story. There is an extraordinary capacity to unite in the evolutionary story, which is technically a myth in the best sense of the word.
Christian gives God short shift in his Origin Story, but he is not a militant atheist, and he is honest about the limitations of the emerging origin story.
Frankly, today we have no better answers to the problem of ultimate beginnings than any earlier human society had...... we still can’t explain it any better than novelist Terry Pratchett did when he wrote, “The current state of knowledge can be summarized thus: In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.” (Christian 2018:21)
More on God later.
It is not my intention to go into any great detail about the text. He organises it around the idea of thresholds that mark the key transitions that constitute the history of the universe. He identifies eight thresholds: In the Beginning, Stars and Galaxies (thresholds 2 and 3), Molecules and Moons, Life, Humans, Farming, and The Anthropocene. He finishes with a chapter onWhere Is It All Going, raising the stark choices we humans face and the challenges they present. His organisation of the text is also around key concepts that give a further continuity. Energy is the fundamental concept in his origin story; matter is compressed energy and life is the interplay of energy and information.
Like so many evolutionists he does not hesitate to reify important evolutionary concepts. He gives motive and intentionality to these concepts. I used to object to this wholeheartedly declaring evolutionary scientists wanted to have their cake and eat it, and that the real challenge for them was to write about evolution, natural selection, entropy and so on without making these abstract ideas the equivalent of persons with motive and intention. Perhaps Dawkins’ understanding of evolution as a blind watchmaker is the icing on the cake in this regard. But I have come to wonder if maybe it is in fact impossible to write about evolution without reifying concepts because the seeming presence of intentionality and perhaps even motive in life does seem to appear very early on. They can’t be escaped. Purpose is maybe somehow indwelling life from its earliest and simplest forms. It is interesting that vitalist ideas are being seriously re-visited, particularly by some feminist environmental thinkers.
Christian accepts this equivocation and exploits it. On the one hand he affirms the primacy of inert matter; on the other he gives it intentionality, even agency, which implies motive. It raises the all important question, is evolution a descriptive idea or an explanatory one? I personally think the same question can be asked of natural selection. For me they are descriptive. Only by ‘smuggling in’ intentionality and agency in by the back door as Christian does do they become explanatory. For example:
Indeed, complex adaptive systems, such as bacteria, your dog, or multinational companies, act as if every component is an agent with a will of its own, so each component is constantly adjusting to the behavior of many other components. And that yields extremely complex and unpredictable behaviours. In using the word agent, I have smuggled in a new idea that will become increasingly important: the idea of information. (Christian 2018:77)
So you can see there is much in all this that is suggestive of something at work in the evolution of our species that the ideas of materialistic science are beginning to pick up, but at the same time deny. Hence I am happy to let such scientists continue to reify their concepts. It may well be pointing to a truth they still consciously deny. Perhaps purpose is discernible in the universe, not just to the philosophic mind but also, some time in the future, to the scientific.
What I want to do now is look at where I think Christian’s text is not adequate and where I think he misses what I think are essential things to include in any modern origin story.
I have already mentioned that he sells ‘God’ short; but his ‘God’ that he rejects seems to be the traditional church God. In fact, ‘God by any other name’ seems to walk into his story from the start by the backdoor. There are two women I know well. One is a staunch church goer of the fundamentalist kind; the other has not been to church for a very long time. I love them both. The first is so sure of her God that she is hesitant to pray with me because she thinks I don’t call God ‘Father’; which is not true by the way. The other talks to the Universe; she commits everything to the Universe without a sideways glance at the Bible, and expects grace and answers to come back to her from the Universe. I wonder if there is something here that applies to Christian and others like him. Let me explain.
For Christian God cannot be included in any modern origin story. He writes:
Most versions of the modern origin story no longer accept the idea of a creator god because modern science can find no direct evidence for a god. Many people have experiences of gods, but those reported experiences are diverse and contradictory and they cannot be reproduced. They are too malleable, too diffuse, and too subjective to provide objective scientific evidence. (Christian 2018:26)
We will return to this question of subjectivity later. Then to add insult to injury he uses two arguments beloved of Richard Dawkins which I have always struggled to believe any intelligent human being could possibly put forward in a serious discussion. The first argument is originally from Bertrand Russell.
At the age of eighteen, Bertrand Russell gave up on the idea of a creator god after reading the following passage in the autobiography of John Stuart Mill: “My father taught me that the question, ‘who made me?’ cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, ‘who made
God?’” (Christian 2018:19)
He then caps this with:
And there's another puzzle. If a god is powerful enough to design a universe, that god must surely be more complex than the universe, so assuming a creator God means explaining a fantastically complex universe by imagining something even more complex that just... created it. Some might think that was cheating. (Christian 2018:20)
So on these two extraordinarily naive understandings, God is dismissed. But Christian is quite unconscious of the backdoor. ‘God by any other name’ sneaks back in. What about the Universe, for instance, like my sister. Surely no one can deny that we are products of the Universe. Could we not play with the idea of the Universe as God? How ‘bout the Cosmos. Let’s not hesitate to reify them into personal beings with motive and intention and agency, just like Christian and others reify evolution and natural selection.
But Christian’s favourite is Nothingness and the mystery of the Quantum world.
Quantum physics tells us, and particle accelerators—which speed up subatomic particles to high velocities by means of electric or electromagnetic fields—show us, that something really can appear in a vacuum from nothing, though grasping what this means requires a sophisticated understanding of nothing. (Christian 2018:23)
And so he finishes the section in which he denies God any part in the story with,
As quantum physics allows things to appear from a vacuum, it seems that the entire universe really did pop out of a sort of nothingness full of potential.(Christian 2018:38)
A sort of nothingness full of potential. This reminds me of David Bohm’s implicate order before it becomes explicate, or Hegel’s concept of Spirit. Is not this a spontaneous creatio ex nihilo? I personally have no problem in praying to a nothingness full of spontaneous potential. Wow! Even happy to call it Father.
So, the problem is not with spontaneous creativity. Christian seems to be fully endorsing this. It seems to be with the word ‘God’, as he thinks of it, that the problem lies. And this is where we, disciples of Christ and members of the remnant of the institutional church, need to find a new flexibility and willingness to play with concepts and engage the world people like Christian inhabit. If we could but lighten up a bit and become ourselves more spontaneous and engaging in the modern world without claiming any ecclesiastical or traditional authority for what we think. We are coming out of a long tradition in which those before us built defensive walls out of ideas and then argued for those walls on pain of excommunication or death.
Continuing this way of understanding Christian discipleship has no future and is itself a sort of death.
There is some evidence that new ways of approaching theology and ideas about Christ are emerging that are more flexible. It is being called Theodrama, originally from the work of Urs von Balthasar, the famous Catholic theologian but now being developed amongst a number of both Catholic and Protestant thinkers. Experimenting with Theodrama rather than doctrine and dogma is the sort of flexibility I am meaning. I think it will be increasingly productive. Ideas can be played with within a sense of Big Story without arguing over doctrines and dogmas. On top of that Theodrama is taking some of the methodology of improvisational theatre and theatre sports into its orbit as a way of working with concepts. An idea might be ‘blocked’, or it may be ‘accepted’, or more importantly still it maybe ‘over accepted’. It is in over acceptance that spontaneity can enter the process and new creative ideas emerge. This is a new way to do theology that necessarily brings with it the challenge of bringing these new ideas up against the tradition and its doctrines and dogmas. This is a difficult task.
An example of this is to be published next month. As mentioned in my Introduction, Professor Scott Cowdell at Charles Sturt University in Canberra has written a book on the anthropological thinker Rene Girard entitled Rene Girard and the Non-violent God. And he is framing it in terms of a Theodrama. I have been privileged to be part of a group reading the book with Scott.
This brings me to my next problem with Christian’s Origin Story. Christian barely mentions religion and his understanding of the human condition is quite naive. I suspect he shares the view so common amongst
materialists that religion was an aberration amongst primitive people that has been made completely redundant by the rise of modern science. Such staggering cultural appropriation amongst otherwise intelligent human beings is hard to imagine possible. But there you are. There is little feel for the great challenge human communities had and have for staying together, for organising themselves socially, for dealing with forces that disrupted and threatened; in other words the very stuff of religion. Not so with Girard.
Girard was a French academic who worked for the bulk of his life in the States at various universities. He died a few years ago. His first book was an analysis of some great novels in which he realised that the writers understood something about human nature of which the bulk of us are unaware. This was the particularly human nature of desire. Without saying as much he neatly reframed the idea of sin.
It is not possible to look at Girard in any detail here but I warmly suggest you have a look if you have not already. His first book created much interest in academe, but not nearly as much as his second, Violence and the Sacred in which he showed human desire leading to communal fragmentation leading to uncontrollable scapegoating and murder leading to the communal experience of transcendental peace and the reconciliation of the community. In one swoop he had come up with serious ideas about the origin of religion and sacrifice, myth and culture.
Unfortunately for his sudden rise to academic stardom, he became a Christian toward the end of writing his first book. This did not colour his second but it certainly did his third book, his magnum opus, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, a direct quote from Christ. In a way this ended academe’s fascination with his ideas and he went into limbo until discovered by some Catholic theologians. This then propelled him into an illustrious career as a non-theologian writing theology and anthropology and pointing to the great truths of the human condition and Christ as revealed in the Scriptures. His importance has been likened to Darwin’s by some, and he has been called the most significant apologist in the modern period.
Scott divides his Theodrama into five acts within a general understanding of evolution.
1. The Pre-Human Paradise of Savage Innocence.
2. Hominization, the Primal Murder, and Providence. 3.The Breakthrough.
4. The Best of Times. The Worst of Times.
5. The Un-Theorized Eschaton.
I have questions for both Scott and Girard, but I fully concur with the general direction of what they have done and are doing. And I love the idea of Theodrama. Scott works hard to bring Girard’s ideas up against the Bible and the Tradition, something that I find in the end unconvincing. I don’t feel the same commitment to the Tradition as Scott; I think we have reached a point where everything should be on the table. On top of that, I question Girard’s understanding of the scapegoating mechanism as an essential element in the hominization process. I am more interested in it really coming into play in the great transition from hunter/gatherer life to settled agricultural life when human communities swelled in size so markedly. This tallies with the great archeologist and anthropologist Jacque Cauvin’s suggestion that the birth of the gods and the origins of agriculture are intimately related, something that seems to be confirmed in the extraordinary discoveries at Gobeckli Tepe. It is currently being argued by researchers that hunter/gatherer groups were never large and were remarkably egalitarian, which included leadership by women. Religiously they were deeply connected spiritually with the environment with varying forms of shamanism and communal sacrifice for the sharing of food. Issues of authority, priesthood, ritual and especially sacrifice for group cohesion came later as the communities got bigger. It was then the scapegoating mechanism came into play, I am thinking. This way of thinking is different from Cowdell’s.
But my point here is that there is much fruitful and exciting things to be working on in such Theodrama as part of any Origin Story, and that it will be very important for thinkers like Christian to begin to take these issues seriously. The ubiquitous nature of human sacrifice, for instance, can no longer be denied, a practice that eventually moved into animal sacrifice. What does that tell us about ourselves and our origin and story and our methods of holding community together.
But the issue that I most wish to raise in being critical of Christian’s origin story is his failure to do justice to human subjectivity, as does the scientific materialistic world generally. He of course does not deny human subjectivity.
No brainy creature (not even you or I) is in direct contact with its environment. Instead, we all live in a rich virtual reality constructed by our brains....... Sensations, emotions, and thought together create the inner, subjective world that all humans, and probably many other large-brain species, experience. (Christian 2018:141)
Consciousness and the mind-body problem is the other great frontier of science, along with the Big Bang. For scientific materialism consciousness is an epiphenomenon arising out of the complexity of matter, something as Christian says is ‘constructed by our brains’. In other words he is saying our brains are the cause of our subjectivity, and yet our subjectivity is all we know and can know directly, not only of ourselves but of the world. It is our ‘I’ pure and simple, an entirely psychic entity that experiences and exists only in psychic images, however this may be connected to the body. The psyche has as much evolutionary history as our bodies, going back to the origins of life, to LUCA in fact. Our brains are not the cause of our subjectivity, our psyches evolved with our bodies. In fact, looking from the inside, our psyches are the cause of our minds. Mind emerges from psyche.
Modern science has never taken psyche seriously, because science does not take individuality seriously. Science deals with statistical generalities, and has claimed this as the only real knowledge. But when we say we know someone, we do not know them scientifically. We know them psychically; we understand them through our capacity for emotional connection and empathy. Such knowledge and understanding can be had not only with other persons but with animals and other living things. Our psyches are deep evolutionary structures that know the world because the world formed them. And the crowning glory of our psyches is our capacity to think and reason.
Our capacity for rationality is the icing on a huge cake that does not yield itself easily to rational investigation but is the very basis upon which our lives are built. Any Origin Story that does not take the evolution of our psyches and our subjectivity as seriously as the evolution of our bodies is to be questioned. Psyche is part of the origin of life, as is matter, however we understand their relationship, if we ever do.
One of the most telling philosophical critiques of science in this regard is the recent book by Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo- Darwinian Conception of the Nature is Almost Certainly False. And Nagel is in no way denying we have evolved.
So my main criticism of Christian’s Origin Story is that he does not take psyche seriously and see it as an evolved structure as complex and magnificent as our bodies. Our minds are dependent on these psychic structures that began with life, the inner face of outward living matter, entirely valid in itself.
So here is the emerging shape of a grand Origin Story that may in part replace the story as we have understood it from the Bible. How then do we incorporate the Bible into this grand Origin Story and see it in its historical origin while remaining true to what it tells us of the truth of God and Christ. That is the focus of our next talk.
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