On Nature and God
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Just a quick post. I?ve been doing some reading today for my dissertation research and stumbled on something interesting.
I?m working on a dissertation which basically ties in religion and architecture, and nature with both.
Reading Charles Jencks? Architecture of a Jumping Universe, in which Jencks touches on some religious apologetics, I came upon this passage
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There is yet another sense in which we are becoming much more deeply embedded in nature by the Post-Modern sciences of complexity. The atomic world is taking over the role ?which used to be given to our bodies. The Ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras formulated the old standard of measurement which lasted for 2,500 years ?man is the measure of all things?. This maxim was taken to heart, particularly in the Renaissance when many buildings, and their details, were derived through human proportions. Legal definitions of the foot and inch were derived from our variable frame, which was averaged out and then set at an arbitrary dimension. Even as recently as I960, Le Corbusier based his measurement sequence, known as the Modulor, on a six-foot high Englishman, because, in his reading of crime fiction, the British detective is always that height.
In 1875, the Treaty of the Meter tried to put a bit of common order and sense into variable measures, and established the international standard units for the second, the kilogram and the meter (fixing the inch at 2.54 centimeters, exactly). The platinum and iridium prototype meter is kept in a temperature-controlled strong room, which can only be opened by the simultaneous use of three different keys turned by trusted officials.
Now things have changed. All fundamental measures, except the kilogram, have been put on a much more exact and universal basis as they are redefined in cosmic terms. Instead of measuring days, hours, minutes and seconds by the wobbly, erratic turns of the earth, it has been put on the more regular atomic standard. A caesium clock has, since 1967, redefined the basic measure of the second as the duration of 9,192,631,770 cycles of atomic radiation. Since 1983, the meter has been redefined by international agreement as the distance that light travels through a vacuum, ie, in l/299,792,?8 of a second. Thus the ultimate unit of space is derived from an atomic unit of time ? a convergence of space- time universality ? and some day soon weight will also fall to the quantum standard. As the physicist Hans Christian von Baeyer states ?In the twenty-first century the atom will replace man as the measure of all things.? The cosmos will be the standard for us, and all the rest of nature.
Thus we are going cosmic not just because the earth is in crisis and pollution is forcing us to do so, but because our culture is now adopting the standards of the universe. Here we are close to what Stephen Hawking believes is ?seeing the mind of God?. As Paul Davies put it in The Mind of God, the laws of nature turn out to have most of the attributes of a Christian God they are universal (apply everywhere in the universe), absolute (do not depend on anything else), eternal (do not change with time), omnipotent (all-powerful), and creative of the universe (cosmogenic).
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Has anyone read any books on the relationship between nature and religion? I've been looking into Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis lately as well, which is also pretty interesting.
But I'm curious if there have been any scientific / psychological studies done into this topic. Nature, as we know, is replete in the Quran as well as in the Bible (Garden of Eden, Janna, et al).
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Has anyone read any books on the relationship between nature and religion? I've been looking into Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis lately as well, which is also pretty interesting.
But I'm curious if there have been any scientific / psychological studies done into this topic. Nature, as we know, is replete in the Quran as well as in the Bible (Garden of Eden, Janna, et al).
I was expecting a bit more from Lovelocke's Gaia to be honest, though my thoughts have evolved over time into realizing that consciousness pervades a lot more than we think, including the planet. That it is the ground of all being.
When you say 'nature and religion,' what kinds of books are you looking for exactly? Let me know and I'll see what I have and can recommend once I get home from work.
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I was expecting a bit more from Lovelocke's Gaia to be honest
Really? How so?
When you say 'nature and religion,' what kinds of books are you looking for exactly? Let me know and I'll see what I have and can recommend once I get home from work.
Well I'm looking for any studies of the extent to which nature is intertwined with religion, as well as any psychological study of how societies view nature. I stumbled upon a quote from the same book, paraphrasing John Ruskin calling for "a theology without God", and I believe that we are headed in that direction, with nature replacing God.
So I'm interested also in how this philosophy has developed. It is my understanding that many old earth religions, pre-Abrahamic, were based on nature, or Gaia, and I'm curious to know if anyone has mapped out this theology, its decline during the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic ages, and its resurfacing during the 60s and 70s.
On a more personal note, I'm curious as to the relationship between nature and God in the Quran. They seem to have an extremely strong connection and I'm pretty certain some Sufi orders of the past have delved deep into this subject before.
Thanks!
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Really? How so?
Well I'm looking for any studies of the extent to which nature is intertwined with religion, as well as any psychological study of how societies view nature. I stumbled upon a quote from the same book, paraphrasing John Ruskin calling for "a theology without God", and I believe that we are headed in that direction, with nature replacing God.
So I'm interested also in how this philosophy has developed. It is my understanding that many old earth religions, pre-Abrahamic, were based on nature, or Gaia, and I'm curious to know if anyone has mapped out this theology, its decline during the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic ages, and its resurfacing during the 60s and 70s.
On a more personal note, I'm curious as to the relationship between nature and God in the Quran. They seem to have an extremely strong connection and I'm pretty certain some Sufi orders of the past have delved deep into this subject before.
Thanks!
Interesting topic. I'm not sure I've read a lot specifically about how nature is intertwined with religion. I have read several books that may be on the margins of that topic, though. You can look them up on Amazon and see if they appeal to you.
The Conscious Universe by Dean Radin
The Self-Aware Universe by Amit Goswami
The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Gifts of Unknown Things by Lyall Watson
The Mind of God by Paul Davies
The Presence of the Past by Rupert Sheldrake
Supernatural by Graham Hancock
Food of the Gods by Terence McKenna
The Archaic Revival by Terence McKenna
I can recommend all those books, though most of them probably aren't totally pertinent to what you're looking for.
I just did a google search and yielded this result. It's a list of books more related to what you're looking for http//www.savingtheearth.net/spirituality.htm
