God in Cosmic History: Responding to my Critics

Abstract

Even though Big History (BH) has successfully folded World History into Natural History, its method risks falling into a reductionist or materialist ideology we might label, scientism. BH’s windows remain closed to a fundamental human phenomenon, namely, the subjective experience of transcendent reality. Cosmic History, which augments BH, opens the big historian and the history student to treating human subjectivity, consciousness, and selfhood as ontologically basic and worthy of historical reporting and investigating. Further, by reporting on historical figures crossing the Axial Threshold who distinguished between intra-cosmic and supra-cosmic reality, the question of transcendence can be asked and historical answers critically examined. Seers in China, India, and the Middle East posited the existence of a transcendent moral order that defined all of us as belonging to a single universal human race. Despite the plurality of religious symbol systems, each is oriented toward an ultimate reality that surpasses its own history and attempts to grasp--or be grasped by--the unifying if not mystical power of this reality. This raises the question: can we reduce the concept of a universal humanity to brain functions bequeathed to us by our evolutionary inheritance? Or might we appeal rather to the axial insight regarding a transcendent and ultimate reality? KEY TERMS: Big History; Cosmic History; Evolution; Neuroscience; Reductionism; Religion; Diversity; Axial Age. BIO: Ted Peters is Research Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology and Ethics at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, and co-editor of the journal, Theology and Science, published by the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences. He is author of God in Cosmic History: Where Science and History Meet Religion (Anselm Academic 2017). One of the rightly celebrated breakthroughs in higher education has been the introduction of Big History into university curricula. By nesting World History within Natural History, big historians can search for factors within nature that have affected the course of human events and human self-understanding. Big History expands the mind and inspires the soul by assigning to us earthlings a role in the magnificent cosmic drama that began 13.8 billion years ago. Our role as responsible Homo sapiens takes on moral valence when we realize our responsibility to care for the fecund health of the planet on which we live. Despite these laudable achievements, I note that an explanatory gap has opened up within the Big History worldview. It is a gap between historical reports of a transcendent divine reality and the big historian’s attempt to provide a strictly secular explanation based in large part on evolutionary theory. The result is that a significant historically retrievable phenomenon has not been sufficiently accounted for by the big historians, namely, the Axial Breakthrough (Bellah 2011, 2012; Jaspers; Voegelin; Peters 2017a,b). By Axial Breakthrough or Axial Threshold I refer to events shocking the human psyche that occurred in different parts of the world during the first millennium before the common era. After the rise of city-states and during the early stages of empire, a transcendental insight dawned on certain individuals in China, India, and the Middle East. This transcendental insight shed new light on the human condition in the recorded ruminations of Confucius, Lao Tzu, the Upanishadic Brahmans, the Buddha, Zoroaster, the Hebrew prophets, and Plato. Whether theists or non-theists, these thinkers cultivated belief in a transcendent moral order and a transcendent ground for human reasoning that is trans-tribal and universal in scope. In some instances this breakthrough became the basis upon which whole cultures were constructed with local ethnic identities placed within a growing sense that there exists a single universal humanity. This ancient history gradually morphed over two and a half millennia into contemporary beliefs in universal human dignity complemented with respect for ethnic and religious diversity. In order to study the Axial Age, the student must graduate from Big History and take up Cosmic History. I am electing the term, Cosmic History, to include the content of Big History along with the God-question. I choose this term for two reasons. First, scholars can distinguish two forms of pre-modern human consciousness, the intra-cosmic and the supra-cosmic. The divine figures in the myths of hunter-gatherers, early agricultural communities, and some city-state societies were intra-cosmic, part of the world order. For axial seers, however, the divine reality became transcendent, From Big History to Cosmic History Page 18 Origins: VII 4 Ted Peters supra-cosmic. The term, Cosmic History, opens the door to this historical retrieval. Second, Cosmic History, critically re-evaluates the world picture painted for us by contemporary cosmologists, astrophysicists, evolutionary biologists, astrobiologists, and other scientists. Rather than accept as given what non-scientists are told by scientists, the cosmic historian poses an ideology-critique of the scientific worldview in light of the question of transcendence. The key to this critique is the observation that both the scientific worldview and that of big historians who depend on it are unable to explain a most important daily reality, namely, human subjectivity. For us in the modern world, historical meaning and even history itself reside in human subjectivity. In subjective consciousness we find a door opening to transcendental awareness. Cosmic History puts both subjectivity and transcendental awareness back into the cosmos. In what follows I wish to demonstrate the difficulty contemporary scientific discourse confronts when attending to human subjective consciousness. Then, I will turn to Big History proper, demonstrating how its windows are unnecessarily closed to the transcendental breeze that could be blowing through (Peters 2017a; 2017b). Big historian Lowell Gustafson invites such interaction. “Our over-arching narrative has many gaps and questions. Much remains to investigate and ponder, share and debate” (Gustafson, 2017, 2). Perhaps pondering the subjectivity gap will open us to a more comprehensive grasp of reality and a transcendental grounding for the concept of universal humanity. My subjective consciousness: who took it away? Why do we find traditional history departments lodged among the Humanities in today’s universities? Why isn’t history considered a science? Here is the answer: the historian must attend to first person human subjectivity, whereas the scientist can restrict research to third person objective data. The historian risks losing his or her mind when taking scientific vows uncritically. Let me illustrate by looking briefly at the current controversy over the relationship between the mind and the brain. “The mind...is the brain,” writes philosopher Daniel Dennett (Dennett, 107). Laboratory brain researchers don’t say this. But philosophers and psychologists do. What this particular philosopher has done prematurely is to fill in a gap, an explanatory gap not yet bridged by actual scientific data. What appears to be nonmaterial, our mind, is actually material after all. Thus says the scientist or, better, the reductionist materialist. When fishing in the scientific pond, the historian might catch a form of materialism that will lead to a loss of mind. How did we get here? Let’s ask a historian of human thought. This challenging intellectual conundrum was ineluctably posed by the split between subject and object inherited from Renė Descartes by modern scientific researchers and the philosophers who rely on such science. Empirical research has produced libraries of new knowledge leading to objective explanations. We can only applaud and thank the last four centuries of scientists for their accomplishments. Nevertheless, human subjectivity and first person consciousness do not fit this research model. A gap has opened up between the achievements of objective science and our subjective experience. “For no matter how deeply we probe into the physical structure of neurons and the chemical transactions which occur when they fire, no matter how much objective information we come to acquire, we still seem to be left with something that we cannot explain, namely, why and how such-and-such objective, physical changes, whatever they might be, generate soand-so subjective feeling, or any subjective feeling at all,” writes Michael Tye for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Tye, 2013; see: Chalmers; Clark). Third person explanations simply cannot account for first person experiences.1 And, if transcendental awareness appears primarily in subjective experience, then it is not touched on by empirical explanation. At least to date. How might we bridge the gap? A few insiders to neuroscience and many outsiders rush in to fill the gap prematurely with reductionist and materialist conclusions. Reductionists contend that objective explanations will eventually reduce subjective experience to that of a delusion. Dan Jones writes a virtual obituary for the human mind in the New Scientist. “Neuroscientists increasingly describe our behaviour as the result of a chain of cause and effect, in which one physical brain state or pattern of neural activity inexorably leads to the next, culminating in a particular action or decision. With little space for free choice in 1 “If inwardness is coextensive with life, a purely mechanistic account of life, i.e., one in outward terms alone, cannot be sufficient. The subjective phenomena defy quantification and accordingly cannot even have outward equivalents substituted for them” (Jonas, 58). From Big History to Cosmic History Page 19 Origins: VII 4 Ted Peters this chain of causation, the conscious, deliberating self seems to be a fiction” (Jones 32). Physi