For centuries, religious thinkers saw science as a great enemy, yet ecotheologians find that the accomplishments of modern science do not purge the world of God, but confirm Her presence. The history of the universe and accounts of the detailed interconnections of ecosystems can serve a religious function. That is, they have become “mythic”: accounts of the world that provide meaning and morality, frames through which our lives are understood and our actions directed.
Thomas Berry, one of the earliest and most influential ecotheologians, believes that to face the horrors of the environmental crisis, we desperately need a new “universe story” that can help us understand where we have come from and surmount our “autism” in regard to the rest of life. For Berry, the preferred version of this story is not the poetry of Genesis, but the reigning scientific account. It begins with the Big Bang and traces 14 billion years in which the galaxies formed, our solar system emerged, life appeared, and humans evolved. Cosmic and biological evolution has led toward increasingly complex life forms, marvelously interdependent ecosystems, increasing intelligence, and subjective experience.
This story as a whole, Berry believes, reveals that the universe itself is for us the “primary mode of God’s presence.” Drawing on Thomas Aquinas, Berry makes it clear that the unit of value here is the whole, not just humans. Divine goodness, wrote Aquinas, “could not be adequately represented by one creature alone, He produced many and diverse creatures. For goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided; and hence the whole universe together participates in the divine goodness more perfectly and represents it better than any single creature whatever.” Ultimately, if every natural being is a revelation of some aspect of God, if God’s presence is known through the complexity, interdependence, and increasing self-consciousness of what is manifest in the universe, then the more life we destroy, the less we are able to know—and to worship—God.
Berry’s perspective may remind us of natural theology’s use of the scope and complexity of the universe as evidence of a Transcendent Designer. Yet the cultural contexts of natural theology and of ecotheology are very different. The former sought to defend religion from being seen as irrational in comparison to science and necessarily stressed how much grander the universe was than anything humans could create. Now ecotheologians seek to invest religion with a scientific understanding of—and hence a reverence for— nature. Ironically, this reversal seems called for not only because of our vastly increased knowledge, but also because of what we now know about the fragility of nature itself. It is just because humans can exterminate species and destabilize the climate that we need to think of nature in a dramatically different way.
Yet, despite science’s contribution to ecology, it cannot stand alone. The deep flaw in Western religions and Western secular culture both, Berry argues, is the failure to appreciate the wonder of this universe story. Treating nature cavalierly, religions, particularly his own, have reserved reverence for books, buildings, people, and human institutions. Similarly, much of the scientific establishment and an even more scientistic culture have seized on the “facts” but left out a sense of awe and mystery. Neither religion nor science has been seriously “concerned with the integral functioning of the earth community,” and thus neither has been an adequate resource to resist the environmental crisis.
Ecotheological Enlightenment and Religious Sense of Nature
