| In this post: In order for Religion to become a useful path to knowledge, it must change. Religion must embrace a theology that acknowledges the entire Kosmos and an ongoing creation. |
In this post I return to a number of themes that have previously appeared in this blog, specifically:
• Both Science and Religion are essential paths to knowledge;
• Science and Religion are not antithetical and should, ideally, each inform the other;
• Science leads logically not to atheism, but to a theism that sees in the Big Bang scenario a purposeful creation by a rational creator;
• Changes are required in the way we do Religion and the way we do Science (Post 15 and Post 16) if we are to achieve what we were created for;
• Religion has many components, one of which is theology. (Post 7). Theology is the critical part of religion that affects our interaction with science.
I believe that the theology most religions embrace — and atheists reject — must change radically. Our concepts of God and miracles and Messiahs no longer fit that which we know from the experience of life and the findings of Science. Our focus must change from our single, very small world, to the unspeakably immense entirety of creation, and our understanding of creation from something that happened once to some that is happening continually. Both Science and Religion must adopt “Kosmos theology.”
So, what is Kosmos theology, and where does the term come from? Let’s start by reviewing some ideas that have appeared in previous posts. For much of human history, “Universe” (of Latin origin) has been defined as “everything that exists, everything that has existed, and everything that will exist.” (Wikipedia) The word “Cosmos” (from Greek) has meant essentially the same thing and the two words have been used interchangeably. This changed when our theories of the Universe’s emergence changed.
The prevalent theory holds that the Universe is finite (at least in time), the result of something called a singularity suddenly exploding. But before the explosion that resulted in the Universe, the singularity must have existed, and it must have existed somewhere.
Something created the singularity and ignited it, whether it was some form of purposeful agency or something that “just happened.” Whatever that causality was, it could not have happened inside the Universe, since there was no Universe before it happened.
These observations point to something both predating and containing the singularity that caused the Universe — and that is something I call the Kosmos.
I introduced the Kosmos in Post 7, with the nonstandard spelling “Kosmos” to emphasize that I am using the word in its newer meaning (the entity that contains both our Universe and anything outside of it), rather than as a synonym for “Universe.”
If some agency (or god) created us, this creator/creative force is in the Kosmos, perhaps busy creating more Universes or perhaps brooding about why it created one in the first place. Any truly functional religion must acknowledge not just our world, not just the Universe, but the entire Kosmos.
As a starting point for what a Kosmos theology might be like, it’s instructive to consider the thoughts of Albert Einstein, arguably the greatest scientific thinker of the modern era. Few people really know whether he was theist or atheist. I consider his response when he was asked this question to be an emphatic theist statement in a Kosmos theological framework:
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we can perceive with our frail and feeble mind.He elaborated on that somewhat, when in 1929 he wrote to a rabbi he knew:
I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the harmony of all being, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men.In these two brief, almost poetic statements are some of the basic elements of Kosmos theology.
- There is a creator that pervades the Kosmos and that embodies order.
- This creator does not engage on a personal level.
- Creation — the Kosmos — inspires awe in the human species. Seeking to explore and understand the Kosmos, we should do so with humility, knowing that our ability to perceive, measure, test, and understand it is limited.
I believe there are other principles embedded in this approach that can be uncovered by the study of Science and the application of reason. In the list below, I set out some of my provisional conclusions. For purposes of discussion, I have been calling the creative entity yotzer, Hebrew for “creator.” (More of my thoughts about yotzer are laid out in Post 13.)
- The human species was not created directly. Rather, yotzer created life, and homo sapiens was one of the species that evolved. We have every reason to believe that humankind has been the most successful earthly species to emerge through our as yet incomplete evolution. There probably are, or will be, other species on other planets, of equal or superior intelligence.
- Yotzer is rational and had a reason for creating life.
- Yotzer’s reason for creating life probably involves the evolution of a species that can be of importance to it.
- The process we call creation, started by yotzer about 14 billion years ago, has not been completed.
- The human species is still a long way from being useful to yotzer, but it will eventually learn how it can become so. At least one of the requirements for reaching this goal is the containment of human evil.
A key element of Kosmos Theology, to be examined in greater depth in the second half of this double posting, is the concept of Reality. Religions have for millennia slowed the advance of human knowledge concerning our Kosmos by confusing myth, Biblical scripture, and ethical teachings with history and science. At the same time, Science is retreating from its original adherence to scientific method, and confusing theory with reality and maths. Kosmos Theology demands of both religion and science a more rigorous approach.
This discussion began in prior posts with some thoughts on how Religion (and its constituent, theology) could evolve to be a meaningful part of humanity’s search for its role in the Kosmos. From there it went to the introduction of Kosmos theology. Of course, theology is only part of Religion — and in truth, it’s the part that many adherents pay the least attention to. In a future post, I will look at Rational Religion, an approach that is compatible with Kosmos Theology, while allowing full participation in the religious communities, values and traditions that we traditionally embraced.
