The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (63 page)

The mind will always create morality, religion and mythology, he believed. Science is a myth because its truths can never be proved conclusively. Nonetheless, the scientific ethos is superior to religion: its repeated triumphs in “explaining and controlling” the physical world, its self-correcting nature and the possibility of explaining religion in an evolutionary sense, all means that “the evolutionary epic is probably the best myth we will ever have. . . . Our spiritual goal is the enrichment of the evolutionary epic.”
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THE BIOPHILIA REVOLUTION

In 1984, Wilson coined “biophilia,” an idea that grew out of his conviction as a biologist that the most important issue facing mankind—as the population increases, as technology proliferates, as more and more urban environments are created—is the loss of biodiversity. In his book of that title, published in 1988, he described many of the ecosystems of the world, in particular the rainforests, showing that many different species of animals and plants inhabit even relatively small areas, that they are interdependent, that it takes a long time for even a simple ecosystem to emerge and, most important, that once an ecosystem is destroyed it is almost impossible for it to recover. Wilson thought that we were destroying the natural world at a more catastrophic rate than we know, with consequences that we cannot predict. He calculated that we may be making extinct as many as six species an hour, one thousand to ten thousand times more than in prehistoric times. Yet he characterized biodiversity as the modern creation story, which was now at risk, following the five previous mass extinctions of the past 550 million years. “More organization and complexity exist in a handful of soil than on the surface of all the other planets combined.”

But he did not feel that all was lost, thanks to biophilia, which he regarded as a basic aspect of our own human nature that is not fully acknowledged and which he defined as the “tendency to focus on life and life-like processes.” Our human inclination to affiliate with life is innate, part of the evolutionary story, and it is “likely to increase the possibility for achieving individual meaning and personal fulfillment.”
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Wilson’s ideas struck a chord with many biologists. A number of experiments were carried out to test them, and reported on at a conference held in 1992 at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. Studies showed, for example, that not only did hospital patients prefer wards with a view of trees and parkland rather than buildings or brick walls, but also needed fewer treatments and got better faster in those conditions. Much the same applied to inmates in prisons. Research also showed that young children appear to have a natural preference for land
scapes and water scenes, and almost everyone prefers an urban landscape where trees are present to those where trees are absent.

David Orr, editor of the journal
Conservation Biology
, went so far as to say that a “biophilia revolution” is under way; he perceived “a love of life based on a knowledge and conviction that in our deepest affiliation with nature is the key to our species’ most fundamental yearnings for a meaningful life and fulfilling existence.” Michael E. Soulé, onetime president of the Society for Conservation Biology, added that the psychological benefits of outdoor activity “appear to be a sense of well-being” not far removed from religious experience—grace, connectedness with nature. He concluded: “If biophilia is destined to become a powerful force for conservation, then it must become a religion-like movement. The social womb for such ‘biophilism’ could be bioregional communities that recapture tribal-hunter-gatherer-pagan wisdom, integrating it with relevant science, appropriate technology, family planning, and sustainable land-use practices. Such communities already exist in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.”
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Not content with giving us “sociobiology,” “biodiversity” and “biophilia,” in 1998, Wilson came up with “consilience.” In
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
, he tells us: “The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and will always be the attempted linkage of the sciences and the humanities.” This is the definition of “consilience,” the aim of which, in this new age of synthesis, is agreement on a common body of abstract principles that bring together four all-important strands of thought—ethics, social science, environmental policy and biology. Signs are beginning to appear, he argues, of a fundamental order in the natural world, as different spheres are found to conform to similar algorithms—so that, for example, archaeology, genetics and linguistics are starting to overlap, to the extent that they tell the same story viewed from different vantage points, as do plate tectonics, evolutionary history and climate research.
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And this leads him to believe that an important convergence is now going on between cognitive neuroscience, human behavioral genetics, evolutionary biology and environmental science, which will expand our understanding of the social sciences and the humanities in ways not envisaged before. The biological origin of the arts shows itself, he says, in
the fact that Hollywood plays well in Singapore and that the Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to Africans and Asians as well as Europeans. But, he says, the arts also nourish our cravings for the mystical, which is a subconscious hangover from the Paleolithic environment in which the brain evolved. “In our emotions, I believe, we are still there.”
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Which brings him to moral behavior, which he says is everywhere “consilient” with natural science. And here he, too, eschews the “transcendental” position, that moral values exist in some independent, metaphysical realm; instead, they are empirically grounded in our evolutionary history—they are adaptations. “On religion I lean towards deism but consider the proof largely a problem in astrophysics. The existence of a cosmological God who created the universe (as envisioned by deism) is possible, and may eventually be settled, perhaps by forms of material evidence not yet imagined. Or the matter may be forever beyond human reach. In contrast, and of far greater importance to humanity, the existence of a biological God, who directs organic evolution and intervenes in human affairs (as envisioned by theism), is increasingly contravened by biology and the brain sciences. The same evidence, I believe, favors a purely material origin of ethics.”

He goes on to point out that, out of the estimated one hundred thousand belief systems that have existed in history, many have fostered ethnic and tribal conflict, which means that every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures—“none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.” He notes that the most dangerous of beliefs is the one endemic in Christianity: I was not born to be of this world. “With a second life waiting, suffering can be endured—especially in other people. The natural environment can be used up. Enemies of the faith can be savaged.” Ethical and religious beliefs are created from the bottom up, from people to their culture, not from the top down.

We are still easily God-struck, says Wilson, and that is because, although our ethics are practical adaptations to the everyday world we live in, we also need something more, something he describes as “the poetry of affirmation,” and the craving for authority. And this is one of the reasons religions work: “Recognize that when introits and invocations prickle the skin we are in the presence of poetry, and the soul of the tribe.”

But that is as far as it goes. “We can be proud as a species because, having discovered that we are alone, we owe the gods very little. Humility is better shown to our fellow humans and the rest of life on this planet, on whom all hope really depends.” Communion is the key, and the idea of mystical union, either with nature or with the cosmos, “is an authentic part of the human spirit.”
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People need a sacred narrative, he says, but it cannot be in the form of a religious cosmology: “[I]t will be taken from the material history of the universe and the human species. That trend is in no way debasing. The true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic. . . . The eventual result of the competition between the two world views, I believe, will be the secularization of the human spirit and of religion itself.”
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A MODERN SCIENCE OF THE SOUL

Although, as mentioned above, Theodore Roszak became famous for coining the term “counterculture” and for writing its history, he preferred to be known for inventing what he described as a new specialty that met the needs of the time. This specialty, which he named “ecopsychology,” was in a sense another form of biophilia. Ecology had been gathering momentum as a major concern—ever since Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring
in 1962 and the first intimations of global warming, which had pinpointed for many the all too finite quality of the earth’s resources. Roszak, always alert to our spiritual travails, saw early on that our responsibility to “the nonhuman world” offered a morally acceptable way to “span the gap between the personal and the planetary,” giving a sense of purpose and wholeness not available elsewhere.

Roszak saw ecopsychology as a healthy way of leading people out of the “self-cloistering” of the therapeutic ethic, a step forward from the counterculture, a way in which people might capture the sense of “oceanic unity” that Freud had spoken of in relation to religion. Roszak went so far as to suggest that it could become a modern science of the soul, but based on more than sex, family and social bonds. He found some sense in
Jung’s writings, feeling that the Swiss had in effect collected together from among the myths and religious symbols of other cultures across the world a “reservoir of salvation teachings.” These showed that there had been four elements integral to, or relating to, the psyche that had been repressed in modern man—nature, animals, primitive man and creative fantasy. “Underlying, or cradling the mind, he envisioned a nonmaterial collective unconscious that contains the compounded wisdom of the human race.” Roszak saw Jung’s work as “an effort to heal the urban neurosis of atheism,” agreeing with him that in our time the natural world had been surrendered to “desacralized science . . . deepening the rift between the physical and the spiritual.”
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Here, then, was the beginning of an ethic, of a transactional bond between the human and the natural, founded in a belief that something has been lost in our separation from the natural world—“a loss of experience, a loss of sensibility, a loss of communion, above all perhaps a loss of harmony that once existed between precivilized people and their habitat.” In helping this distance between nature and humans to grow, Roszak argued, science has left us “underdimensioned.” And, he thought, a mutual concern for the environment had the best chance of uniting us—both as one people with one overriding common problem, and as our individual selves, each playing our part in an environmental campaign, giving us a feeling of wholeness.

THE PLENITUDE AESTHETIC

The next step was Gaia. The Gaia theory is the work of the British scientist James Lovelock and the American microbiologist Lynn Margulis. The theory holds that all species in the planetary biomass act symbiotically to enhance the total life-giving potential of the planet. For example, the earth has remained a comfortable place to live for the entire 3.5 billion years since life began, despite, as Lovelock puts it, a 25 percent increase in the output of heat from the sun. Somehow, living organisms have kept their planet “fit for life.” The importance of this view is that it relegates natural selection—Darwin’s overriding principle—to a position less impor
tant than the overall integration of living things within a symbiotic global network. “The basic unit of evolutionary survival becomes the biomass as a whole, which may select species for their capacity to enhance the liveability of the planet.”
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There have been many arguments as to whether Gaia is a metaphor or something more. Lovelock, though he does not see Gaia as “sentient,” does admit to finding it “satisfying” that his theory has found a spiritual as well as a scientific reading. The very latest research casts doubt on the phenomenon itself.
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Whether we accept Gaia as something more than a metaphor, Roszak’s main point is that the ordered complexity of which it and chaos theory and the ubiquitous success of mathematics are examples, are essentially a new form of Deism, that we are witnessing the birth of a form of scientific aesthetics, a plenitude feeling that is as close to a spiritual experience as we are presently capable of. Roszak proposed that the “core of the mind is the ecological unconscious”: thus, the essential purpose of life is to “awaken the inherent sense of environmental reciprocity”—in some ways a reprise of Heidegger’s plea for us to care for the planet (see chapter 11).

EVOLUTION AS A RELIGION, SCIENCE AS SALVATION

The meaning offered by evolutionary science has been roundly attacked by Mary Midgley, former senior philosophy lecturer at the University of Newcastle. She has taken on the subject of evolution as a religion, and science as salvation.

In
Evolution as a Religion
, she proposes that Marxism and evolution are the two great secular faiths of our day. Each displays several features reminiscent of religion: they are large-scale ideologies with ambitious systems of thought designed to articulate, defend and justify their ideas; both aim essentially at the spiritual nourishment and salvation of the human race.
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And they raise—and seek to answer—questions of human purpose. They do this, she says, by creating, as did traditional religions, a sense of “having one’s place within a whole greater than oneself”—a whole “whose larger aims so enclose one’s own and give them point that sacrifice for it
may be entirely proper.” Both Marxism and evolution, she says, call for a new set of expectations about the future.

The theory of evolution is her main target. It is ironic, she says, that while for many people one of the prime aims of science is to get rid of religion, evolution has many features suggesting it is itself such an entity.