The California Collection/TheCaliforniaCollection.cdr/his075/natural.lzh/NATURAL.TXT

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CUL:The Naturalist and God  by James W. Sire

   Naturalism: Belief that the final reality is strictly matter and
energy. One for whom all gods are dead, for whom all meaning and
purpose are human in origin, ungrounded in either nature itself or in
the transcendent.

   Panthiest: A person for whom the final reality is really divine. One
for whom the dance of the atoms is the ultimate dance of the spirit.

   Naturalism and pantheism seem to be polar opposites, yet a door has
been opening between them. The so-called "New Age physics" of Fritjof
Capra, Gary Zukav, and Michael Talbot tries to link material science
with Eastern pantheism, the most spiritual of world views.

   We can see one scientist stepping through that door to pantheism in
the popular writings of Lewis Thomas. Thomas, chancellor of
Sloan-Kettering Memorial Cancer Center in New York City, received his
M.D. from Harvard in 1937 and has had a productive career in medical
research. A collection of his essays first published in the New England
Journal of Medicine became a best seller, The lives of a cell: Notes of
a biology watcher (1973). That was followed by another collection, The
Medusa and the snail (1979), and The Youngest Science (1983).

   In his Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Oration, "On the Uncertainty of
Science" (Given June 1980; published in Harvard Magazine, Sept-Oct
1980), Thomas struggles to make sense out of the whole of reality. What
is the universe like? What does it mean? Who are we? Why are we here?
He accepts two basic tenets of naturalism: (1) That nature is ultimate
all there is (There is no creator God who brought the world into
being); and (2) that human beings evolved out of nature alone (There is
no super-added soul). But Thomas refuses to accept the typical
naturalistic implications. He rejects the "intellectually fashionable
view of man's place in nature," the nihilist conclusion that it "makes
no sense at all" (Page 20), that the universe is "meaningless for human
beings." And he rejects the existialist conclusion that humankind's
meaning is merely human, merely our own imagined values. Instead,
Thomas affirms that nature itself is meaningless.

   Throughout that lecture Thomas uses personal language for nature's
ways. Human language, he says, is a mysterious "gift" (page 20). He
calls the symbiotic character of nature the "urge" to form
"partnerships" (page 21), The "invention" of the DNA molecule was the
greatest achievement of nature. "Nature has exhibited such restraint
and good taste in evolution" (page 21), and "nature has been kind to
us" (page 21). Even the mechanism of evolution - natural selection - is
given a personal twist. Like a naturalist, he agrees that error
(accident, randomness) is the driving force in evolution, but he points
out that the word "error" comes from an Indo-European root meaning, "to
wander about, looking for something" (page 21).

   Surely, we think, a scientist does not take such language literally.
He must be using it metaphorically, to put some "life" into a popular
lecture. Or perhaps the words are what Francis Schaffer calls semantic
mysticism, language used by naturalist to ease the burden of seeing
ourselves alone in the universe. Its nice to feel that nature cares.

   No, Thomas is serious. He confesses: "I cannot make my peace with
the randomness doctrine: I cannot abide in the notion of
purposelessness and blind chance in nature. And yet I do not know what
to put in its place for the quieting of my mind. It is absurd to say
that a place like this place is absurd, when it contains, in front of
your eyes, so many billions of different forms of life, each one in its
own way absolutely perfect, all linked together to form what would
surely seem to an outsider a hugh spherical organism (page 21).

   Christians would say, "Of course, Dr. Thomas. You've just recognized
the truth of Psalm 19:1 "The heavens are telling the glory of God; and
the firmament proclaims His handiwork."

   But, we read on: "We talk ... about the absurdity of the human
situation, but we do this because we do not know how we fit in, or what
we are for. The stories we used to make up to explain ourselves do not
make sense any more, and we have run out of new stories for the moment"
(page 21). Thomas rejects all traditional religious explanations of
human meaning - including the Christian one.

   But Thomas refuses to give up hope. His works are imbued with a
strong spirit of optimism, of luck, his word for humankind's natural
history so far. He endows the word with almost divine attributes: "We
are . . . the most impossible of all earth's creatures, and maybe it is
not beyond hope that we are also endowed with improbable luck" (The
Youngest Science, page 248).

   Thomas asks, "What I would like to know most about the developing
earth is: Does it already have a mind? Or will it someday gain a mind,
and are we part of that? Are we a tissue for the earth's awareness?"
(page 21). And he speculates, "I would like to think that we are on our
way to becoming an embryonic central nervous system for the whole
system" (page 22).

   In lives of a cell Thomas suggested that at death perhaps human
consciousness is "somehow separated off at the filaments of its
attachment, and drawn like an easy breath back into the membrane of its
origin, a fresh memory for a biospherical nervous system . . ." Then he
added, "but I have no data on the matter" (page 61)< realizing that his
speculations might be hubris or false hope. We could just as well be a
"transient tissue, replaceable, . . . on our way down under the hill,
interesting fossils for contemplation by some other creature>" Yet,
Thomas wanted to end his 1980 lecture on a note of hope.

   We see in Thomas the pilgrimage of a truly modern man, raised as a
dues-paying naturalist, beginning to play at the edges of pantheism.
Note the sequence of his thought:

   1) Naturalism poses a purposeless, meaningless cosmos. Human beings
are the result of random accidents of the evolutionary process
channeled only by survival of the fittest.

   2) But the universe is obviously not absurd. It's too orderly, too
beautiful, and, with the coming of humankind, too personal. nature
belies a naturalistic metaphysic.

   3) Therefore, nature must be intrinsically meaningful, intrinsically
personal or, with the rise of humankind, "becoming" personal.

   For Thomas, the Judeo-Christian concept of a personal Creator is one
of those stories considered no longer credible. But which is more
credible: (1) a universe that is developing personhood, requiring
something (the personal) to COME FROM NOTHING (the non-personal); (2) a
universe that's always been personal and thus, via its own nature,
DESIGNED the DNA template; or (3) a universe that has God as its
infinite, personal Creator? In his writings Thomas vacillates between
the first two views - both forms of pantheism.

   Lewis Thomas stands as a symbol of the modern dilemma. Without God
he cries for meaning, and he has to take it where he can get it.

   (Written by James W. Sire)