One of the biggest casualties of Western subject-based knowledge is the separation between Science and Humanities. Because of this rift, Science became abstracted from human affairs and Humanities disconnected from the natural world. This did not happen by accident but came as a result from the combination of specialization and human limitation. As each field expanded, it became humanly impossible to learn about it in conjunction with others. Yet, what specialization added by uncovering complexity it hurt by promoting fragmentation. If academia is to serve society again, then it must find ways to train holistic scholars who are both competent in their fields while also able to relate their field of knowledge to other areas.
A recent attempt to integrate the two is an effort called Big History. This teaching philosophy, idealized by historian David Christian and recently funded by the Gates Foundation, seeks to connect Humanities with Science by looking at history in its totality. That is, from the beginning of the cosmos to the emergence of human history. The field of History would most often limit itself to human civilization having little interest in what preceded it. That was left to natural sciences with little connection between the two.
While I applaud such integrative effort, I must point out that David Christian is not he first one to attempt such holistic view. Religious texts have been doing that for centuries. The Hebrew Bible, for example, wades into natural history territory in its first chapters of Genesis. Other religious texts of the time also contained creation stories that meant to explain the perennial question of how it all began. Certainly, scientific discoveries of the recent centuries have complicated these narratives. Yet, the main point here is to locate an attempt such as Big History in the persisting human need for a holistic story. We long for an integrated view of the world separating into different subjects will not help us get there.
Where Did We Come From?
For centuries we looked at Cosmic History through a religious lens. Cultures developed their own view of the origins of the world. This was not only a way to understand beginnings but also its meaning and implications for how to live together in society, functioning as a regulating standard for all members of that society.
In the West, this perspective began to be challenged by the the theory of evolution and with the rise of modern natural sciences. While this approach uncovered new findings, it abstracted the question of meaning from the quest for knowledge. The scientific endeavor became obsessed with tracing the origins of existing natural processes with little regard for questions of “why?” and “what for?”.
Such predicament forced us to operate with hybrid brains. For questions of how, we turn to science (often associated with the left side of the brain), for questions of meaning we turn to religion, art and philosophy (often associated with the right side). As long as no attempt to relate the two were made, life could go on.
In religion, and more specifically in Western Christianity, the dominant religious response was rejecting evolution and its implications. This response did not entail in a wholesale rejection of science, but removing it from the areas that contradicted traditional religious views. This solution was made possible by a separation between the natural and the supernatural. The natural, the realm of humanity, could still be run by the pre-suppositions of science and technology. Yet, in the realm of the supernatural, where ultimate meaning lies for believers, religious worldview ran unchallenged.
In science, the reigning philosophy is naturalism. That is, we can only understand and trace back the processes that gave way to the world we live in. This “objective” quest has no room for questions of meaning. The universe simply is and the only knowledge that matters is the one that can be quantified or verified by scientific experimentation. In essence, the naturalist view does not dispute the natural and supernatural divide. It is simply not interested in the latter.
Clearly these responses have run into tremendous difficulties in a multi-cultural world. Its main loss, however, was the original unified view of reality that pre-modern creation stories provided.
A New Path For Cosmic History
In The New Cosmic History, Theologian John Haught forges a path aiming to transcends the natural vs supernatural divide by looking at cosmic history as a way to engage and also challenge both science and religion. Informed by scientific discovery that describe an evolving universe and holding tight to the religious yearning for justice, the theologian proposes an anticipatory view of Cosmic history. It incorporates the development of life through billions of year but it gives it a future goal. Haught sees the emergence of religion in the axial age (800-300 BC) as a precursor of what is to come. By doing so, John Haugth flips the natural-supernatural divide into a time continuum. God is not out there in a supernatural realm but in the future. Religion, birthed as hope in the human consciousness, points to a reality that evolution will eventually leads us to.
Haught calls this view of Cosmic history, anticipatory. It moves the locus of meaning away from quantifiable natural processes and from supernatural conceptions and places it in time dimension. The yearning for rightness present in all religious is not simply a hope but the very direction of Cosmic History. In a sense, religion is the universe whispering to us: “everything will be ok at the end.”
While heavily influenced by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s natural theology, this perspective also shows echoes of Molmann’s hope theology and Pannenberg revelation as history view. Yet, it adds to these thinkers by presenting it within the context of a science-informed Cosmic History. By doing so, it emphasizes that the development of religion was indeed a revolutionary step in the history of the cosmos, not only of humanity. It is so, not because of what it is but to the future that it points to. In a Christian perspective, Haught’s view reinforces that idea that truth is eschatological – an unfolding that will only be fully understood at the end when God renews the earth.
Implications for Technology
For the purpose of this blog, I want to correlate Haught’s anticipatory view of Cosmic History to an understanding of technology. First, it is important to note that discussions of technology tend to fall in into discipline-based mode of knowledge of natural sciences most often done with little correlation to human experience. The fragmented foundation in which current technology was developed yields a byproduct misaligned with human flourishing. Hence re-visiting this foundation and replacing with a holistic view of reality can go along way to repair this disconnection.
Second, Haught’s dispelling of the natural/supernatural divide also helps address another divide in the topic of technology. That is, the natural/artificial divide. The same dualistic thinking that encouraged the natural/supernatural divide is also behind our tendency to divide the natural from the artificial. Usually, the connotation is that natural is pristine and superior to the artificial which is often seen as a poor approximation of nature. An alternative view would place technology in a continuum with nature as opposed to another category of its own. This would not only help humanity back to nature but also allow technology find its purpose in flourishing.
These two insights opens the path for a new way of re-imagining our relationship with technology and in shaping its future. Can technology be part of the renewal of the earth prophesied by religion? If so, then we have a lot of work to do for certainly what we see today is underwhelming, only an evolutionary stage in the way of becoming something beautiful and true.