The Good in Nature and Humanity: Connecting Science, Religion, and Spirituality with the Natural World - Softcover

Kellert, Stephen R.; Farnham, Timothy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1597267937 ISBN 13: 9781597267939

Verlag: Island Press, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

Scientists, theologians, and the spiritually inclined, as well as all those concerned with humanity's increasingly widespread environmental impact, are beginning to recognize that our ongoing abuse of the earth diminishes our moral as well as our material condition. Many people are coming to believe that strengthening the bonds among spirituality, science, and the natural world offers an important key to addressing the pervasive environmental problems we face.

The Good in Nature and Humanity brings together 20 leading thinkers and writers -- including Ursula Goodenough, Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan, Carl Safina, David Petersen, Wendell Berry, Terry Tempest Williams, and Barry Lopez -- to examine the divide between faith and reason, and to seek a means for developing an environmental ethic that will help us confront two of our most imperiling crises: global environmental destruction and an impoverished spirituality. The book explores the ways in which science, spirit, and religion can guide the experience and understanding of our ongoing relationship with the natural world and examines how the integration of science and spirituality can equip us to make wiser choices in using and managing the natural environment. The book also provides compelling stories that offer a narrative understanding of the relations among science, spirit, and nature.

Grounded in the premise that neither science nor religion can by itself resolve the prevailing malaise of environmental and moral decline, contributors seek viable approaches to averting environmental catastrophe and, more positively, to achieving a more harmonious relationship with the natural world. By bridging the gap between the rational and the religious through the concern of each for understanding the human relation to creation, The Good in Nature and Humanity offers an important means for pursuing the quest for a more secure and meaningful world.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stephen R. Kellert is the Tweedy Ordway Professor of Social Ecology at the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, author of Kinship to Mastery (Island Press, 1997) and The Value of Life (Island Press, 1996), and coeditor, with Edward O. Wilson, of The Biophilia Hypothesis (Island Press, 1993).

Timothy J. Farnham is a doctoral candidate at the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

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The Good in Nature and Humanity

Connecting Science, Religion, and Spirituality with the Natural World

By Stephen R. Kellert, Timothy J. Farnham

ISLAND PRESS

Copyright © 2002 Island Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-59726-793-9

Contents

About Island Press, 
Title Page, 
Copyright Page, 
Dedication, 
Preface, 
Acknowledgments, 
Chapter 1 - Building the Bridge: Connecting Science, Religion, and Spirituality with the Natural World, 
Part I - Scientific and Spiritual Perspectives of Nature and Humanity, 
Introduction to Part I - Ethics and the Good in Nature and Humanity, 
Chapter 2 - The Contribution of Scientific Understandings of Nature to Moral, Spiritual, and Religious Wholeness and Well-Being, 
Chapter 3 - Spiritual and Religious Perspectives of Creation and Scientific Understanding of Nature, 
Chapter 4 - Values, Ethics, and Spiritual and Scientific Relations to Nature, 
Chapter 5 - Religion and Ecology: The Interaction of Cosmology and Cultivation, 
Chapter 6 - Gaia and the Ethical Abyss: A Natural Ethic Is a G[o]od Thing, 
Chapter 7 - Religious Meanings for Nature and Humanity, 
Chapter 8 - A Livable Future: Linking Geology and Theology, 
Chapter 9 - Alma De'atei, "The World That Is Coming": Reflections on Power, Knowledge, Wisdom, and Progress, 
Part II - Linking Spiritual and Scientific Perspectives with an Environmental Ethic, 
Introduction to Part II - The Search for Harmony, 
Chapter 10 - Work, Worship, and the Natural World: A Challenge for the Land Use Professions, 
Chapter 11 - Leopold's Darwin: Climbing Mountains, Developing Land, 
Chapter 12 - A Rising Tide for Ethics, 
Chapter 13 - Hunting for Spirituality: An Oxymoron?, 
Chapter 14 - The Idea of a Local Economy, 
Part III - From the Perspective of the Storyteller, 
Chapter 15 - The Garden of Delights: A Reading from Leap, 
Chapter 16 - The Mappist, 
Notes, 
About the Contributors, 
Index, 
Island Press Board of Directors, 

CHAPTER 1

Building the Bridge: Connecting Science, Religion, and Spirituality with the Natural World

TIMOTHY J. FARNHAM AND STEPHEN R. KELLERT

There is a perception in modern society, as reflected in many of the chapters that follow, that a significant divide exists between science and religion. These two modes of inquiry—the empirical and the faith-based—represent ways we search for answers to questions both practical and timeless. Yet in Western culture the two are often envisioned as occupying different realms of thinking and practice. The goal of this collection is to find connections, through humanity's relation to the natural world, that help bridge the chasm separating the scientific from the spiritual and religious.

But as often occurs when two entities have grown apart, there exist fundamental language and communication problems that obstruct a possible reconciliation. The words themselves impede what could be fruitful exchanges between science and religion concerning the human ethical relationship with nature and creation. As William H. Meadows comments in his introduction to part II of this book, "we are still in search of the right language, the comfortable language." George W. Fisher similarly declares in chapter 8 that a significant language problem exists when we converse outside the familiar confines of a faith or a discipline. David Petersen, in his essay on hunting and spirituality (chapter 13), further notes the need for a "lexicon" that allows discussions of spirituality and nature to move freely between secular and religious worldviews. In short, we need a common vocabulary, a language that allows thoughtful people to cross over safely and share ideas about science, religion, spirituality, and the natural world.

Definitions, of course, are the basis of any language, especially one seeking to bring together separated constituents. While the words science and religion obviously have complex, multilayered meanings, we can propose relatively simple characterizations that partially reveal how contemporary culture often understands each term. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary observes that the modern notion of science has become "restricted to those branches of study that relate to the phenomena of the material universe and their laws," whereas in past centuries the term science often enjoyed a broader usage indicative of the search for knowledge in a wide variety of fields. In contemporary times, the practice of science typically involves specialized instruments that measure quantities and qualities in the context of experiments or carefully controlled studies specifically designed to test hypotheses. This activity derives from and results in theories that seek to explain the workings of the natural world through physical causation alone. Investigators who use the scientific method generally ask questions that can be answered only by experimental or controlled testing procedures, and the answers must meet certain levels or standards of proof. Science implies the use of reason and the pursuit of empirical "facts" to increase our understanding of how the universe functions.

By contrast, again quoting the Oxford English Dictionary, religion represents the "recognition on the part of man of some higher unseen power" and the beliefs, traditions, and ceremonies that formally represent this understanding and recognition. Often, this "unseen power" is considered responsible for the origin of life and may even be regarded as continuing to exercise a measure of control over present and future human activities and other aspects of creation. Whatever the specific details, religion and spirituality require some degree of belief in, reverence for, and worship of a higher power. Moreover, because this power typically is believed to possess qualities existing beyond the known material world (hence the term metaphysical), religious and spiritual thought incorporates a significant element of mystery and questions whose answers cannot be demonstrated or proven by scientific and empirical examination alone. In apparent opposition to science and reason, spirituality and religion depend on faith, the human recognition of and deference to the unknowable, and the related realization that answers to some of life's most profound questions can exist beyond complete human understanding.

Using these broad definitions as a foundation, we recognize that the pursuits of both science and religion can have their extremes, and perhaps here is where the divide between the two becomes most evident. For example, as Ursula Goodenough notes in chapter 2, something exists deep within humans that resists scientific explanation because of "a fear of reductionism." This fear involves the view that science entails an impulse toward continuous analysis, a dissection (and, by implication, destruction) of the whole in search of the mechanism. Science is seen as neglecting the larger emergent and holistic qualities of nature that humans intuitively experience without the aid of a microscope. These reductive practices represent what biologist Edward O. Wilson calls "scientism" or "science run rampant." In an effort to describe the fear that science often elicits, Wilson quotes scientist and social critic C. P. Snow, who expresses well the frequent protest of science's analytic ways:

Science reduces and oversimplifies
Condenses and abstracts, drives toward generality
Presumes to break the insoluble
Forgets...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Island Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1597267937
• ISBN 13: 9781597267939
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 296
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland