The Reenchantment Of Science

This book describes the move from modern, mechanistic science to a post-modern, organismic science. David Ray Griffin gives voice to a revisionary postmodernism, based on the work of Whitehead and Hartshorne that contrasts with the relativistic, nihilistic postmodernism of Heidegger, Derrida, and Wittgenstein. The book brings together some of today’s most creative thinking about science. Griffin’s introductory essay summarizes the way in which the mechanistic view led to the disenchantment of science and the various reasons for the reversal of this process in our time. The essays on physics, cosmology, biology, ecology, psychosomatic medicine and parapsychology bring out the various dimensions of the reenchantment of science: the replacement of modern dualism and reductionism with an ecological, organismic paradigm; the priority of internal relations to external; the casal power of experience; the presence of experience, purpose, and intrinsic value throughout nature; influence at a distance; the laws of nature as habits; the presence of a divine whole in all the parts; and the history of the universe as a self-creative, meaningful story. This book gives a powerful voice to this emerging movement’s proposals for a postmodern science, spirituality, and world order.

Presents a revolutionary new theory that bridges the divide between science and spirituality • Discloses the ramifications of non-localized consciousness and how the physical world and spiritual experience are two aspects of the same reality • Includes contributions from Jane Goodall, Ed Mitchell, Stanislav Grof, Ralph Abraham, and Christian de Quincy, among others What scientists are now finding at the outermost frontiers of every field is overturning all the basic premises concerning the nature of matter and reality. The universe is not a world of separate things and events but is a cosmos that is connected, coherent, and bears a profound resemblance to the visions held in the earliest spiritual traditions in which the physical world and spiritual experience were both aspects of the same reality and man and the universe were one. The findings that justify this new vision of the underlying logic of the universe come from almost all of the empirical sciences: physics, cosmology, the life sciences, and consciousness research. They explain how interactions lead to interconnections that produce instantaneous and multifaceted coherence--what happens to one part also happens to the other parts, and hence to the system as a whole. The sense of sacred oneness experienced by our ancestors that was displaced by the unyielding material presumptions of modern science can be restored, and humanity can once again feel at home in the universe.

By the 1920s in Central Europe, it had become a truism among intellectuals that natural science had "disenchanted" the world, and in particular had reduced humans to mere mechanisms, devoid of higher purpose. But could a new science of "wholeness" heal what the old science of the "machine" had wrought? Some contemporary scientists thought it could. These years saw the spread of a new, "holistic" science designed to nourish the heart as well as the head, to "reenchant" even as it explained. Critics since have linked this holism to a German irrationalism that is supposed to have paved the way to Nazism. In a penetrating analysis of this science, Anne Harrington shows that in fact the story of holism in Germany is a politically heterogeneous story with multiple endings. Its alliances with Nazism were not inevitable, but resulted from reorganizational processes that ultimately brought commitments to wholeness and race, healing and death into a common framework. Before 1933, holistic science was a uniquely authoritative voice in cultural debates on the costs of modernization. It attracted not only scientists with Nazi sympathies but also moderates and leftists, some of whom left enduring humanistic legacies. Neither a "reduction" of science to its politics, nor a vision in which the sociocultural environment is a backdrop to the "internal" work of science, this story instead emphasizes how metaphor and imagery allow science to engage "real" phenomena of the laboratory in ways that are richly generative of human meanings and porous to the social and political imperatives of the hour.

The Reenchantment of the World is a perceptive study of our scientific consciousness and a cogent and forceful challenge to its supremacy. Focusing on the rise of the mechanistic idea that we can know the natural world only by distancing ourselves from it, Berman shows how science acquired its controlling position in the consciousness of the West. He analyzes the holistic, animistic tradition--destroyed in the wake of Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--which viewed man as a participant in the cosmos, not as an isolated observer. Arguing that the holistic world view must be revived in some credible form before we destroy our society and our environment, he explores the possibilities for a consciousness appropriate to the modern era. Ecological rather than animistic, this new world view would be grounded in the real and intimate connection between man and nature.

In this provocative assessment of the world's current ecological crisis, the author of the critically acclaimed In the Beginning exposes the false assumptions underlying the conflicts between science and religion, and proposes an innovative approach to saving the planet. Traditionally, science and religion have been thought of as two distinct and irreconcilable ways of looking at the world, and scientists have often chastised the world's religions for keeping their eyes on the heavens and paying scant attention to the destruction of Earth's precious resources and its natural wonders. In The Reenchantment of Nature, Alister McGrath, who holds doctorates in both molecular biology and divinity, challenges this long-held and dangerously misguided dichotomy. Arguing that Christianity and other great religions have always respected and revered the bounty and beauty of the earth, McGrath calls for a radical shift in perspective. He shows that by defining the world in the narrowest of scientific terms and viewing it as a collection of atoms and molecules governed by unchanging laws and forces, we have lost our ability to appreciate nature's enchantments. In order to address the threats to our environment, he maintains, it is essential to reawaken our sense of awe and look at the world as a glorious creation, an irreplaceable gift of God. In setting forth a new framework for the debate between science and religion on ecological theory, The Reenchantment of Nature points the way to integrating two different traditions in a sane and productive effort to rescue the natural world from its present environmental decline.

The process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne has made many distinctive contributions to the philosophy of religion. David Ray Griffin now offers the first full-scale philosophy of religion written from this perspective, discussing such topics as the relationship between science and religion, the validity of religious experience, the nature and existence of God, religious pluralism, creation and evolution, and the problem of evil. Griffin's clear and comprehensive book also serves as a valuable introduction to process philosophy itself.In his vigorous defense of a worldview that is fully naturalistic and fully religious, Griffin shows not only how this position reconciles naturalism with freedom, genuine religious experience, and even life after death, but also how its naturalistic theism "reenchants" the world in the sense of providing cosmic support for moral values.Highly original and sometimes controversial, Griffin's book develops its stance in conversation with influential proponents of other philosophical positions, including William P. Alston, Jürgen Habermas, John Hick, Colin McGinn, Alvin Plantinga, Hilary Putnam, Willard Quine, Ninian Smart, Jeffrey Stout, and Bernard Williams.

Not all charms fly at the touch of cold philosophy. Vital Reenchantments examines so-called cold philosophy, or science, that does precisely the opposite - rather than mercilessly emptying out and unweaving, it operates as a philosophy that animates. More specifically, Greyson closely examines how a specific group of "poet-in-scientists" of the late 1970s and 1980s directed attention to the "wondrous" unfolding of life, at a time when the counter-culture in particular had made the institution of science synonymous with technologies of alienation and destruction. In this vein, Vital Reenchantments takes up E.O. Wilson's Biophilia (1984), James Lovelock's Gaia (1979), and Carl Sagan's Cosmos (1980), in order to show how each work fleshes out scientific concepts with a unique attention to "affective wonder," understood as the experience of and attunement to novel effects. What is so unique about these works is that they reenchant the scientific world without pandering to what Richard Dawkins will later term "cosmic sentimentality." Carl Sagan may have said "We are made of starstuff," but he would never insist, as Joni Mitchell did in 1969, that "we've got to get ourselves back to the garden." Instead, they insist on a third way that does not rely on the idea of an ecological Eden - a vigorously vital materialism in which the affective trumps the sentimental. Further, the historical emergence of these works, all published within 5 years of each other, was no accident: each book responded to an ever deepening sense of environmental crisis, certainly, but along with it they responded to, perhaps more than marginally related, narratives of the large-scale disenchantment brought on by modernity or science, and more often than not a mixture of the two. Greyson argues that the persistence of these works and their affectively-charged scientific concepts in contemporary popular culture and ecological thought is no accident. As such, these works deserve recognition as far more than "popular science" and can be seen as essential contributions to more contemporary vital materialist thought and ecological theory. No doubt this talk of enchantment and wonder, so tied to immediate experience, can seem trivial in the face of any number of environmental crises (global warming first among these) that do not just appear ominously on the horizon, but loom as never before. The first task of this book thus to pose the same question that Jane Bennett does at the end of her own work on enchantment: "How can someone write a book about enchantment in such a world?" Does this approach really provide, as Latour phrases it, "a way to bridge the distance between the scale of the phenomena we hear about and the tiny Umwelt inside which we witness, as if it were a fish inside its bowl, an ocean of catastrophes that are supposed to unfold"? Ultimately, Vital Reenchantments argues that affective ecologies, properly attended to, point toward an open present, one that broadens the horizons of the "fish bowl" and allows us to imagine engendering futures that are neither naively hopeful nor hopelessly apocalyptic.

Based in the riches of Christian worship and tradition, this brief, eloquently written introduction to Christian thinking and worldview helps readers put back together again faith and reason, truth and beauty, and the fragmented academic disciplines. By reclaiming the classic liberal arts and viewing disciplines such as science and mathematics through a poetic lens, the author explains that unity is present within diversity. Now repackaged with a new foreword by Ken Myers, this book will continue to benefit parents, homeschoolers, lifelong learners, Christian students, and readers interested in the history of ideas.