“Great Story” new paradigm, Rise of Creatheists

I think this article is interesting as it documents a beginning paradigm shift integrating religion and science, which I support.

This new movement, stimulated by Thomas Berry, is geo-centered and has a model of concentric creation (“nested eggs”), which dumps the Big Daddy God concept.

Nested eggs and natural simultaneous process is also how i interpret the Taoist cosmology and One Clouds 7 formulas.

But I don’t buy the fundamental premise of this new Great Story, which takes modern scientific empiricism as it process, rather than the principles of the Life Force as governing the process. So from my view point, their Great Story is only half the story. They have one eye open, the eye of external alchemical process.

Modern Scientism is really the current ruling religous paradigm, so natural to use it to get people to buy into a new paradigm. I see Chia is doing it on his website, reframing everything in language of quantum physics. I think it obscures direct relationship with the Life Force, and will have to be ulitmately unwrapped/deconstructed as well to see the underlying forces of inner alchemy process in Nature more clearly.

And I doubt “Eco-zoic” is the right languaging for the mainstream…
michael

WELCOME TO THE ECOZOIC ERA

A NEW VISION OF REALITY, EVOLUTION, AND THE DIVINE

By Amy Hassinger
Contributing editor Kimberly French contributed to this article
UU World Magazine Spring 2006 / 2.15.06

http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/thewonderofevolution2679.shtml

Michael Dowd, tall and a bit gray around the temples, was pacing the
sanctuary of my church with the athleticism of a twenty-year-old, gesturing
wildly, even leaping off the dais. Our Western culture, he was saying, has
historically thought of the universe as a mechanical thing, a clock created
and set into motion by a clockmaker, who stood apart from it. But — and
here Dowd¹s voice quickened — there is no clockmaker hovering anxiously
over his creation or, worse, having abandoned it. And there is no clock.

I had come to the Unitarian Universalist Church of Greater Lansing,
Michigan, that Sunday morning expecting our usual low-key lay-led summer
service. But on that day Dowd was our guest speaker, along with science
writer Connie Barlow, who was delivering a similar message to our children.
The Unitarian Universalist husband-and-wife team call themselves
evolutionary evangelists. For the last three years they have been on the
road, telling what they call the Great Story <http://www.thegreatstory.org>,
the 13.7-billion-year story of the evolution of the universe, based on
science yet infused with sacred meaning and awe. They crisscross the country
in a white Dodge van they call ³Angel,² which they live out of day to day.
It contains a bed, bins of books and videos they sell to support themselves,
and all their worldly possessions.

Dowd¹s zealous preaching style reminded me of evangelists I¹d seen only on
television, yet it felt refreshing. And his declaration that there is no
clockmaker was electrifying.

The clockmaker metaphor, which has been around since ancient times and was
debated by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, was popularized in its
modern interpretation by eighteenth-century Anglican priest William Paley.
He argued that just as a pocket watch found in a field implied the existence
of a clockmaker, the complex structures of life also imply the existence of
a God who made them. In recent years proponents of intelligent design have
adopted the metaphor in their argument against Darwinian evolution. Our
Western idea of Cosmos as clock has also served scientists, Dowd explained,
allowing them to pick it apart, examining each part to understand the whole,
a process known as reductionism. But that view has also represented the
universe in itself as devoid of meaning — a view that has set the stage for
staggering human environmental destructiveness.

As Dowd spoke, I realized that the clockmaker and clock metaphor had deeply
influenced not only our culture, but also my own thinking. Having grown up
Christian, I still considered myself a theist. Yet my concept of God had
transmuted over the years to something amorphous and unarticulated. I
believed in God because I wanted to believe in God, but I didn¹t know who my
God was. What I did know was that the universe seemed meaningless without
some concept of a deity, some organizing, benevolent force. I subscribed to
evolution, but it did not inspire me — it seemed a cold-hearted vision of
the universe. Dowd transformed my ideas, offering me a new vision of
reality, evolution, and the divine.

If we are to deepen our understanding of the universe or of God, if we are
to change our collective behavior and our destiny, Dowd and Barlow say, we
need a new story, a story based in scientific discovery, but also reverent
of the awesomeness of the universe. A better metaphor for the universe, they
say, is a set of Russian nesting dolls, made up of levels of what they call
nested creativity: subatomic particles within atoms, within molecules,
within cells, within organisms, and so on. Each level is uniquely creative,
that is, has the power to bring something new into existence. Stars create
atoms; atoms create substances like the oxygen we breathe; human cultures
create art, religions, and technology. The largest nesting doll is God — or
Allah, Adonai, Source of Life, Ultimate Reality, Nature, the Universe,
whatever name describes the divine whole for you, the ultimate creative
reality that includes and transcends all other levels of reality. God is not
outside of creation. God is an integral part of it — in fact, is it.

In this metaphor, we humans are nested within that divine whole. We were not
plunked here by a maker separate from us. Nor is our existence a meaningless
evolutionary fluke. The basic elements that make up our bodies — carbon,
calcium, iron — were forged inside supernovas, dying stars, and are
billions of years old. We are, in fact, made of stardust. We are intimately
related to the universe. As early-twentieth-century British biologist Julian
Huxley put it, ³We are the universe becoming conscious of itself.²

Intrigued, I came back the next night for a workshop presented by both Dowd
and Barlow. Bespectacled and soft spoken, Barlow has a calmer and more
measured style than her husband, yet she is just as passionate about her
subject, which is science. As visual proof of Huxley¹s idea, she often
displays the famous picture of Earth from space, the ³Big Blue Marble² taken
from Apollo 17 in 1972, showing our gorgeous blue and white globe floating
in a sea of black. The picture is a dazzling reminder, she says, that our
billion-year-old Earth has now evolved to the point that it can ³send a
piece of itself out to look back and say, ŒWhoa. This is who I am.¹²

We humans, as the consciousness of the universe, now have an opportunity and
a choice. For thousands of years evolution was a slow biological process.
Now, with all of our technological power, we have become an evolutionary
force in ourselves, rapidly accelerating the speed of change. Few species
evolve solely by natural selection anymore; now the relationship of each
species to humanity may determine its evolutionary course. We have become
engines of evolution. If enough of us acknowledge this power, we can decide
whether to use it as a creative or destructive force and to determine what
will happen to life on our planet. And we can begin to grasp our purpose
here.

That is why Barlow and Dowd left their jobs to become twenty-first-century
itinerant evangelists, preaching and teaching the Great Story at churches
and science centers, at conferences and on university campuses across the
country. Their message embraces both science and religion. It offers a
resolution to the debate over evolution and intelligent design. It draws in
Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and Christians; theists and atheists; scientists
and philosophers.

But nowhere has the Great Story caught fire more than in Unitarian
Universalist churches, which make up the bulk of Barlow and Dowd¹s hectic
speaking schedule. Now members of the Church of the Larger Fellowship, the
UU congregation-by-mail, they have spoken to close to 200 of our
congregations and are scheduled to speak to dozens more this year. Over and
over, wherever they speak, they evoke that ³Whoa² feeling I got at the
Lansing church. The Great Story brings mysticism to humanism. It brings
science to paganism and our historical Transcendentalist roots. Within our
denomination, the Great Story may just be the theological bridge we¹ve long
been searching for in our collective spiritual journey.

…

The Great Story has its roots in the work of several early-twentieth-century
scientists, including Julian Huxley and French paleontologist and
philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Huxley — the grandson of Charles
Darwin¹s ally, Thomas Henry Huxley — was one of several scientists in the
1930s who synthesized Darwin¹s theory of natural selection with Mendelian
genetics. He believed evolution was progressive, that it generated greater
complexity through time, though it could lead to dead ends, such as species
extinction.

Teilhard, who in 1929 participated in the discovery of the Peking Man, was
also a Jesuit priest who strove to reformulate Christian doctrines according
to scientific understanding. He theorized that evolution led from the Alpha
Point — which he considered ³infinite disorder² — to the Omega Point,
which in his view was Christ, the end of evolution¹s progress and the final
nucleus around which all the cosmos would eventually converge. The Vatican
suppressed his writings, which remained unpublished until after his death.

In the late twentieth century, influenced by those earlier scientists,
Passionist priest Father Thomas Berry and mathematical cosmologist Brian
Swimme originated the Great Story concept — merging scientific
understanding with a reverence for the universe. In the 1970s and 1980s, as
director of the Riverdale Center of Religious Research in New York, Berry
gave a series of lectures on spirituality and ecology, which were later
revised and collected into The Dream of the Earth and The Great Work. Dowd
calls them the Great Story movement¹s earliest scripture.

³It¹s all a question of story,² Berry wrote in The Dream of the Earth. ³We
are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in
between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and
how we fit into it, is no longer effective. . . . Our traditional story of
the universe sustained us for a long period of time. It shaped our emotional
attitudes, provided us with life purposes, and energized action. . . . We
need something that will supply in our times what was supplied formerly by
our traditional religious story. If we are to achieve this purpose, we must
begin where everything begins in human affairs — with the basic story, our
narrative of how things came to be, how they came to be as they are, and how
the future can be given some satisfying direction.²

Berry has often been quoted as saying the Bible should be put on the shelf
for twenty years while attention is paid to ³the primary sacrament,² the
Universe itself.

In 1982 Berry met physicist Brian Swimme, and the two began to build a
movement — speaking, writing, and gathering together artists, scientists,
ecologists, religious thinkers, and educators interested in their idea of a
new story. In 1992 they coauthored the movement¹s classic telling of the
Epic of Evolution, called The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring
Forth to the Ecozoic Era.

Berry, now 91, calls himself a geologian rather than a theologian. He
believes we are in the midst of a shift to what he calls the Ecozoic Era.
Scientists typically characterize new eras by a massive change, usually
caused by catastrophic breakdown; for example, the extinction of the
dinosaurs, which scientists call the fifth major mass extinction, brought
about the inception of the current Cenozoic Era. In Berry¹s view, the
ecological disasters happening all around us, including the sixth major mass
extinction, are signs that this deep-time shift is happening again, that a
new era is about to begin — or, in fact, has already begun.

But the Great Story¹s message is ultimately one of hope. Its proponents
believe that if enough people will embrace a new way of looking at the world
and humanity¹s role in it, we can become agents of a creative evolutionary
process and live in a mutually enhancing relationship with all life on
Earth. It is a utopian vision, but not an impossible one, they say.

³[W]e are in the midst of a revelatory experience of the universe that must
be compared in its magnitude with those of the great religious revelations,²
Swimme wrote in an essay in The Reenchantment of Science. ³And we need only
wander about telling this new story to ignite a transformation of humanity.²

That¹s where Barlow and Dowd enter the story.

…

Dowd compares his own spiritual journey to St. Paul¹s experience on the road
to Damascus: falling blind, then seeing a new vision. For years, in his
pre-UU days as a conservative Christian pastor, he had proclaimed evolution
was ³of the devil² and the root of most social problems. He would argue with
anybody who¹d listen, passing out tracts, boycotting classes, and
demonstrating at events where evolution was discussed. Then in 1988, as
pastor of a church in western Massachusetts, he took a class on ³The New
Catholic Mysticism² with poet Albert LaChance, who had studied with Berry
and Swimme.

Dowd has written about hearing the Great Story for the first time: ³I began
to tremble. Goosebumps broke out all over my arms and legs. Then I heard
that unmistakably familiar voice of Great Heart, my Lord, say to me,
Michael, your calling and destiny is to evangelize the world with this good
news. The science-based story of an emerging universe and the Bible are not
in conflict. They are mutually enriching. Show others how this is so, and
live it.² For more than a decade Dowd awaited further instruction,
continuing as a pastor until leaving fellowship with the United Church of
Christ in 1995. In his free time he studied the Great Story, meeting with
Berry and others in the movement.

Then in 2000 he got a second message. A friend had invited him to a
Pentecostal charismatic service near his childhood home in Poughkeepsie, New
York. During the service, he recalls, she said she had ³a word from the Lord
for me: ŒMy son, I have called thee home to reveal thy true mission. Step
out boldly with thy beloved and fear not. For I will bless thy steps and thy
ministry more abundantly than thou canst imagine.¹² While the King James
English amused Dowd, he was intrigued by the phrase ³with thy beloved.² He
thought to himself, ³You¹d better get moving, dude. You don¹t even have a
girlfriend!²

Several months later at a talk given by Swimme in New York City, Dowd met
Connie Barlow, and the pair discovered their shared passion for spreading
the Great Story. In seven months they were married. Like their message, the
couple embodies the marriage of science and religion. The author of Green
Space, Green Time and The Ghosts of Evolution, Barlow calls herself a
classic humanist who operated from her analytical left brain. Then in the
1980s, she came across Huxley¹s Religion Without Revelation, which used a
³language of reverence² to describe the story of the universe. Reading it
was a religious awakening, she says. His ideas — specifically that humans
had a unique evolutionary role to play, that were we to go extinct, all our
collected knowledge about the planet¹s past would go with us — gave her a
new view of humanity¹s purpose.

Then in the early 1990s she, too, met Thomas Berry, whose ideas took
Huxley¹s a step further for her: Human beings were not only gatherers of
knowledge but also celebrants of that knowledge. Though raised UU, she had
always preferred to get out in nature than sit in church. But now she found
her own way to celebrate the story of the universe, by attending pagan
rituals at the Fourth Universalist Society on the Upper West Side of New
York City. Singing, sitting in a circle, and looking into a flame spoke to
her emotional, artistic right brain. ³I was tapping into my evolutionary
heritage,² she says, ³into deep memories of a sense of feeling secure and in
bonded relationship with my early hunting and gathering ancestors.²

In 2001, recently married and living just north of New York City, the couple
was profoundly shaken by the 9/11 terrorist attacks and began to reexamine
what they were on earth to do. In the months following, Dowd quit his job
and Barlow quit her freelance writing work. They gave away all their
possessions, bought a van, and decorated it with symbols of a Jesus fish
kissing a Darwin fish. Michael has a New York driver¹s license, Connie¹s is
from New Mexico, their business license is in Washington, their bank account
is in Oregon, and they vote in Michigan. They expect to be permanent
itinerants.

…

Barlow and Dowd¹s mobile ministry is rapidly moving the Great Story beyond
the circle of Catholic mystical thinkers it grew out of — beginning with
Father Berry and continuing with such educators as Sister Miriam McGillis at
Genesis Farm in Blairstown, New Jersey, and Father John Surette and Sister
Mary Southard of SpiritEarth in LaGrange, Illinois. And it has taken root,
most broadly and organically, among Unitarian Universalists. Some see the
Great Story as the missing link among all of our diverse strains of thought:
transcendentalism, humanism, theism, paganism and the Earth-centered
traditions, and scientists. Barlow and Dowd are giving UUs ³a shared
language,² says the Rev. David Bumbaugh, professor of ministry at
Meadville-Lombard Theological School in Chicago, that allows us to talk
about what we have in common, which is ³an inchoate mystical understanding
of our existence.²

Well before The Origin of Species was published, Ralph Waldo Emerson
declared the need for a religion that reflected the history of our own
experience, which we should find in the natural world. Barlow and Dowd,
Bumbaugh says, ³are refocusing our attention on the spiritual quality of the
world we inhabit.² He finds a ³clear connection² between them ³and what
Emerson was suggesting.²

The Great Story also aligns closely with humanism. In fact, Julian Huxley
coined the term ³evolutionary humanism² to describe his own religious
orientation. The first Humanist Manifesto, in 1933, called for a new
religious understanding, one based in the world, not outside of it. It
declared that human beings were a part of nature, and that the scientific
method could help us deepen our understanding of who we were. To the first
humanists, nature was not a ³created reality,² Bumbaugh explains, ³but a
natural self-evolving process. That¹s very much at the heart of the Universe
Story. It sees the world as emergent rather than created, and human beings
as a product of that world, not created to master the world.²

Like Unitarian Universalism, the Great Story movement embraces both theists
and atheists. Dowd has coined the term ³creatheist,² to describe both
religious orientations within the movement. He pronounces the word
creatheist to refer to himself, a theist who ³knows that the whole of
reality is creative and that humans are an expression of this divine
process.² And he calls Barlow a ³creatheist — an atheist who knows the same
thing.

In some UU congregations the pair has visited, they found that tensions
between theists and humanists had gotten so thick that the humanists had
begun meeting separately on Sunday mornings. At one congregation, after
hearing Dowd invite listeners to think of God as the ³largest nesting doll,²
one of the atheists came up and thanked him for ³making it OK to use God
language here in our church.²

Dowd believes the Great Story can also serve as a bridge between religion
and science, particularly in the current debate over teaching intelligent
design or evolution in the schools. ³The version of evolution that most
people have been exposed to,² he explains, ³isn¹t the Great Story — it¹s
chance, meaningless, mechanistic facts. The popular perception is if you
want meaning and value, you need to go to religion for it.² This, in his
view, is why intelligent design has such appeal in our culture — it imbues
the universe with meaning. But the Great Story finds meaning in the universe
by making science the basis of its religious worldview, rather than by
molding the science to fit a preconceived religious perspective. In the
Great Story, science is theology; it is our newest revelation, our modern
scripture.

Scientists do not agree among themselves on whether evolutionary change is
completely random or has direction, and some have expressed discomfort with
the Great Story¹s implication of directionality. One of those is John
Hooper, a retired chemist and longtime Unitarian Universalist who has been
advocating for better support of science education and policy by our
denomination. ³It¹s true,² Hooper says, ³that there¹s a continuing increase
in complexity. But the reason there appears to be directionality is because
of adaptation.² The problem, Barlow explains, is that when evolution is
presented as moving in a certain direction, people assume that it implies
some design by an outside force. ³Direction doesn¹t have to mean
determined,² she says. For her, a more accurate term is ³evolutionary
emergence,² which she defines as the natural process by which more complex
life forms spring from simpler ones. On the whole, Hooper says, he believes
what Barlow and Dowd are preaching is scientifically sound.

…

In this ministry, the first step is telling the Great Story. The next is to
invite their listeners to find what Father Berry calls our Great Work. ³It¹s
about thinking in new ways,² says the Rev. Erika Hewitt, minister at Live
Oak Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Goleta, California. ³They¹re
inviting us to ask, ŒHow do we understand our place in the universe?¹² As
Barlow puts it, ³How do you act when you become a planetary force?²

According to the Great Story, that¹s what we are: a force that is polluting
the planet and causing mass extinction, but at the same time is a unique and
precious expression of Earth. We are Earth¹s meaning makers, painters,
self-discoverers, storytellers, and bards. We are Earth¹s deep memory. If we
can embrace that as our unique ecological role, if we can learn and
celebrate our Great Story, if we truly can see ourselves as actual cells of
our larger body, Earth, then caring for the environment will feel as urgent
and as natural as caring for ourselves.

If enough people come to think this way within the next fifty years, Dowd
says, then we will begin to transform our current anthropocentric systems —
of medicine, law, politics, government, and economics — into biocentric
systems that honor all life. He finds evidence that the transformation has
already begun: The fact that we have laws in place to protect endangered
species is a sign that we are becoming conscious of our role as evolutionary
agents. We are more interconnected as a species than we ever have been. We
are learning to cooperate on a planetary scale. Scientists from all over the
earth regularly and easily confer with each other. Our technology, most
notably the Internet, allows us to exchange information, energy, and
materials with others around the globe, crossing religious, ethnic, and
social lines that previously divided us.

³The Ecozoic Era is a mythic mindset,² Dowd says. ³It begins for each person
when they choose to have the Ecozoic vision guide their actions in the
world.² It is a utopian vision, but we can make it happen if we choose, Dowd
and Barlow say. Will we? Only time — or evolution — will tell.

————