Toward a new Creation Story (IV)

Standing on the Summit of Meaningful Science

(This is my fourth post in my New Florence Substack series about views of the natural world that include both consciousness and the Zero Point Field.)

Across centuries, the modern physical and life sciences have culled their distinct insights into nature.  Thoughtful people in each field have kept climbing up, building their perspective with painstaking care, fact by fact, step by step.

As if hiking up a mountain, leading researchers and theorists in each field have stopped along the way, recording their view, eager to share their wiser image of reality.  In our time, these hiking parties have arrived on the peaks of each of their regions, only to discover that they’ve all arrived on the same summit.

Now we can stand on the summit with them and share in the astonishing view.

Now we can see the epic panorama of the cosmos and of life on Earth, unfolding in all its fullness. 

And we can integrate a new Creation Story into our lives.

In my second and third posts in this series, I shared what I think are the most meaningful milestones in the history of science.

Next weekend I’ll share the best Creation Story that I can come up with that can be shared by all people regardless of faith or spiritual beliefs. 

The weekend after that I’ll share the best Creation Story that I can come up with that can be shared by all theists – by people who believe in Deity.   (Deity can be one or more Divine Beings, although I’ll write it as if there’s one.)

I encourage you, if you think having a Creation Story is important, to customize.  Pull whatever you find true and meaningful from these two Creation Stories, add in things you believe and find meaningful, and create your own Creation Story.

In this fourth post -- a transitional post between those milestones and the Creation Stories -- I’ll share just a few more of my most essential thoughts about the history of science and philosophy.

Only since the 1700s have most literate people understood that there are natural forces at work in the universe, and that observations and experiments guided by the scientific method enable us to understand these forces.

It has only been two centuries since the peak of the Enlightenment.  The Enlightenment enhanced people’s respect for intellect, reason, analysis, science, and empirical knowledge from our senses.

The early Enlightenment held a sense of the harmonious, holistic, interwoven order in nature and the cosmos. 

Tragically, the later Enlightenment plunged into pure Scientism, with is sense-only empirical objectivity, and scrubbed away the interiors of everything, leaving us with only sensory surfaces.

At its core, Scientism has assumed that matter is primary and that life, consciousness, and intelligence are accidental byproducts of matter.  Scientism has assumed that nature is dominated by randomness and blind chance, and that nature is void of purpose.

For two centuries, most people who pushed back against Scientism were called Romantics.  William Wordsworth and generations of Romantics knew that our subjective experience matters deeply. And they saw beauty and goodness in both the nature around us and the nature with in us.

Not until the 20^th Century was the Old Scientism invalidated in physics, and most biology today is still stuck in it. 

Fortunately, in our time, a powerful new paradigm in science is available to each of us.

At the summit, science is no longer fragmented the way it was for three centuries.  At the summit, we understand the integrated nature of the physical universe.  And at the summit, we think about the Zero Point Field, energy, information, matter, life, and consciousness in an integrated way.

I’ll close with a quote from my mentor, the journalist and author Marilyn Ferguson (1937-2008), whose 1980 book about consciousness, science, and personal and social transformation sold 1.6 million copies worldwide:

“For those willing to listen, science is telling thrilling, open-ended mystery stories about a world rich beyond our imagining.”