The Empirical Explosion

Europe was never truly homogeneous. The Europeans, our cultural and possibly genetic ancestors, were a restless lot. They fought with each other. They fought with the heathen. They built magnificent buildings, and then turned to inventing the machines with which to pull them down. They invented the sublime spiritual edifice of intellectual Christendom, and then rebelled against its inherent constraints.

To view this as unique in the history of the race would miss an important point, that humans tend to shed their cultural commitments almost as frequently as crustaceans do their carapaces, but with this critical difference: what emerges may not be just a larger, new and glistening edition of the former state, but may be a totally new phenomenon. Following Greek thought from the writing down of the Homeric poems in 900 B.C. to the dawn of the Christian era is an equally dizzying experience, but the stakes had become higher.

The Renaissance saw great and revolutionary minds. In the early 16th century, the religious solidarity of Europe foundered in the Reformation. Throughout that century and into the next, astronomers were looking at the physical universe with fresh eyes. Conflict between the old and the new exemplifies with portent thunder in the persecution of Galileo, who, as a loyal son of the Church accepted ecclesiastical censure. He is reported, however, as he capitulated to an avowal of geocentricity, to have muttered under his breath, “eppur si muove.” Nonetheless, the earth moves.

Between then and now, our understanding of the material world has hurtled forward at breathtaking speed. This movement has laid the ax to many of the supposed roots of our spiritual tradition. Earth is not at the center of things. Though it is rich and beautiful, and we like it a good deal as our home, it is objectively a middle size planet circling a middle size star in a middle size galaxy in a thoroughly nondescript part of the universe. Holy Scripture, the Bible, is an important foundation in our religious tradition, but scarcely an authoritative souce of historical fact for the entire race. In the beginning turns out to be billions of years ago rather than thousands. The origin of the human race itself courses through primate ancestry and the marvels of genetic coding, over many hundreds of thousands of years. Religion may be the most consistent conduit for the expression of human spirituality, but not a reliable arbiter of cosmic truth. The uniqueness of spiritual authority needs to be understood in the broader context of religion as an aspect of human culture wherever it occurs.

We have broken open the material world through the processes of incremental discovery. It proves to be a much more marvelous place than we imagined. And, it continues to be intelligible, though not as medieval theologians supposed it to be.

The process continues. How far will it go? And what of God? And the human spirit? And the ultimate destiny of man? Today is the threshhold for tomorrow. We may be peeking at reality only through a small crack. How many of these sweeping cultural convulsions lie ahead? Stay tuned.