The mission of H.O.P.E. is to turn the prow of our entropyship, the Earth, back upstream so that Earth's evolving consciousness may explore the headwaters of the Universe for billions of years to come. The work of H.O.P.E. is to make visible the larger relationships we live within - relationships that inspire visions of wonder and works of hope.

Chrysalis went on a camping trip to the ocean. I had a wonderful time with 10 students crawling through the beach dunes towards the beach. We followed beetle tracks. We found worm tracks and followed them until we found the worms beneath the sand. We blew sand, seeing how it moved differently in the open than in the buffering dune grasses. We read the stories of what ripples reveal about the wind and how depressions "trap" wind-blown organic debris. A phrase we teachers have often used rose to center stage and took on great power: "The world is full of stories and we can learn to read those stories."

As I worked with this theme, and as the kids excitedly explored the dunes, my spirit was shouting "Yes. This is how to teach science. Science is humans learning to read the stories that fill the world." This gives a more personal touch to the history of science. Part of the "scientific revolution" is that everything in the universe is possibly a story that we can learn to read for ourselves. By learning to read for ourselves, we might read stories quite different from those some authority might have thought the world was proclaiming.

This liberating idea is so powerful that it has created an ironic paradox. Thanks to peer-reviewed journals, research grants and multi-million dollar pieces of equipment, the forefront (and therefore the public image) of science has moved into areas inaccessible to the general public. As we walk through this world, we don't see gamma ray bursts from distant galaxies or DNA fragments. Therefore the stories we hear coming from "science" are not the stories we ourselves can read in the world right around us. This discontinuity serves as an unconscious barrier to experiencing the delight of reading stories for ourselves. Our scientific profession, collectively, has read far more of the stories than any other culture in history. And yet, the experience of reading for ourselves the stories of the natural world is probably far better known to the general public of indigenous cultures than it is known to the general public of our culture. People who track animals or gather seeds when they are ripe learn to see the world in a meaningful way that most of us never even practice. Crawling through the dunes and watching kids ignite with the joy of reading the world directly for themselves resolved this paradox. The experience felt both deeply scientific and deeply tribal.

I bring this up because of an intriguing tension of our times is that this invention of science is digesting and transforming every culture it comes in contact with. At the level of power to explain (to make sense of the material world), it is demonstrably superior to other approaches. But it has nowhere near the power (at least yet) to inspire human behavior in a way that creates a sustainable culture. Just as science has made it impossible for Christians to go back to a pre-Copernican sense of people at the center of a tiny universe, so science also threatens the mythic explanations that form the foundations of other cultures. The power within human cultures to inspire human decency is wisdom and science is digesting it along with non-scientific mythic explanations.

This is a great danger. The indigenous cultures might not have been aware of galaxies and plate tectonics. On the other hand, they intimately experienced the feedback loops between their actions and the local land. Human history has been a great series of trial and error experiments. Cultures whose collective behaviors were not sustainable were weeded out. Those that survived accumulated a great body of informal science within their ethical foundations. There is wisdom in the practices of an indigenous culture in the same way there is wisdom in the timing of oaks leafing out or salmon selecting where to lay their eggs. But because this wisdom has accumulated over many generations, the conclusions are easier to express mythically than as the conclusion of any particular experiment. The conclusions also inspire behavior more when expressed this way.

Now one could make a strong argument that the power to inspire people in this way is more important to us than to explain what was happening on Earth four billion years ago. Nevertheless, science will swallow this power because photos from space conclusively prove that the world does not rest on the back of an elephant, a turtle, or whatever and creation stories based on such views lose their power to explain, inspire, and restrain the moment a child sees a picture of the Earth hanging in space. We will lose all this collective wisdom unless...unless a marriage can somehow be made between the evolved cultural wisdoms that lie within those mythic traditions and the story-reading, myth-destroying power of science.
 
 

Let me illustrate this idea by sharing my personal viewpoint of the Garden of Eden story. Our culture tends to see this story as either a divinely-revealed truth or as a myth/metaphor with no basis in fact. I believe there is a third interpretation--that the Garden of Eden story describes a real event that was so important that it was essential to pass it on from one generation to another. However, the event was so diffused in time and so hard to understand that it could only be passed on in mythic shorthand.

My trips into the wilderness and my erosion control work convinces me that we have seen a tremendous depletion of topsoil and ground water in human times. There was a time when the natural world was far greener than we presently see. Lebanon, for example, had forests of cedars. Nutrient flows were richer. More sunlight was absorbed into life cycles. This greener world was the world our pre-conscious ancestors lived in for tens of thousands of years.

And then human consciousness developed. I have no idea whether this event took tens of thousands of years or mere centuries. But as it happened, human behavior changed. We learned to domesticate animals, for example. This practice created a snowballing feedback loop. Those with herds of animals obtained a secure, abundant food supply with less exertion or risk. Increased reproductive success increases the size and influence of this group and they gradually overwhelm other groups. Animals become a source of wealth and status which influences how many children a man can have. A cultural pressure to increase herd size develops. At some point, relative balances start to shift. The herd sizes grow too large. The juicy, tasty vegetation is overgrazed and decreases in abundance. Thorny plants increase in numbers. Pounded soil starts to erode. Water tables start to drop. Tribes grow more territorial and defensive with their declining resources. But at the same time, complex language and the evolution of an oral tradition are developing. And hundreds or thousands of years later, the oral tradition developing within a specific herding culture makes those people aware of a profound problem.

The oral tradition refers to the past as a garden where we lived in relative abundance and innocence for a long time. And now we don't. It's hard to understand just what happened but our actions definitely had something to do with it. It has something to do with a profound change in the way we are in the world. The story beautifully points to this change when it talks about Adam giving names to everything and later the eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. This change has something to do with increased head size (women shall bring forth in pain). It has something to do with sex (the increase in reproductive potential). And the consequence is us now working by the sweat of our brow in a land that brings forth thorns. And the harder we try to make life easier for ourselves (by increasing our individual herds), the harder life for everyone becomes. And so there appears to be no way back to the Garden.

How did we get into this situation? Answering this question is of fundamental importance, but the process is diffused through the actions of many thousands of herds spread out over many hundreds or thousands of years. The garden lies back in a time when the garden was both taken for granted and when we had a different state of consciousness. So part of the story is the profound development of human consciousness during the story--something impossible to communicate. There is no way such a story can probably be understood, let alone passed on, in its full complexity. The only way to pass it on is to express it in mythic terms. But it's based on a true story. It really did happen. The Garden of Eden is a "first-hand" account of the development of modern consciousness and the consequent shift in ecological flows. No wonder that story is at the front of our culture's holy book. And how will we bring the power of modern human consciousness into resonance with God and the flows and cycles of nature?
 
 

For me, the Garden of Eden story is not a choice between history and myth but is mythically expressed history to distill and transmit a huge body of informal science. I don't want science to digest and eliminate this body of wisdom. Is there some way to combine the power of science with this wisdom? Contemplating this question leads into the limits of science. Can science reveal moral and ethical "shoulds". Can science answer "why" questions? An important part of the answer to this question is that there are several levels to the answer.

For example, if we were asked "Why do things fall?", most of us would say "gravity" in a tone of voice that implied that this was a sufficient answer and that we felt mentally comfortable that we had a sufficient understanding of the question and answer. In truth, the answer "gravity" says very little; for most of us, it is an example of circular reasoning. Because if we were then asked, "what is gravity?" we would answer something like "the tendency for things to fall to the ground". In other words, for most of us, when we are asked why things fall to the ground, our answer is "because there is a tendency for things to fall to the ground." This circularity doesn't say much and yet the scientifically-sanctioned term "gravity" makes us unaware that our working understanding is little better than that of people thousands of years ago. Instead of invoking spirits, we invoke terms but the real understanding is at about the same level.

Part of the great genius of Galileo was transforming the question, "Why do things fall?", into the question, "How do things fall?". This question led him to "slow down" the rate of falling by rolling balls down gentle slopes. In this way he learned that the balls accelerated in proportion to the amount of time squared. He learned that the velocity and acceleration of these balls was independent of their mass. He worked out many of the main characteristics of gravitational fields. Newton added more and Einstein took the explanation of what causes gravity to a whole new level. But Galileo began a body of understanding that accumulated such a tremendous power to predict (both the existence of previously undetected planets and the trajectory of cannon shells) that it has acquired a label (gravity) known, accepted, and passed on by all adults within our culture.

A scientist might say that all of our understanding still does not explain "why there is gravity (or why the time-space continuum has the characteristics that it does)?" But that level of understanding does answer the "why" question at the level most people ask it, at the level of the ten thousand daily decisions that shape our actions and our relationship with the world. Therefore, the answer to whether science can answer the "why" questions depends on what level of why you are looking for. Are you looking for final causes or intermediate causes?
 
 

The concept of final causes leads us into another phrase our culture has developed to describe the relationship between science and religion. It goes something like "the domain of final causes lies beyond the field of science". Just like the concept of "gravity", this concept can become a label that ends thinking rather than an idea that extends it. This concept of "there is a limit beyond which science can not go" slides into the statement that science can explain the mechanical workings of universe but it can't shed light on moral "laws" or divine "truth"; that there is a realm we call the religious which, by its very nature, is inaccessible to science.

Though there is a certain truth to this, I believe it is misunderstood by our culture and this misunderstanding hampers the effort to wed scientific understanding with the inspired self-restraint of religion. I can understand why this misunderstanding came into being. I see this misunderstanding as a cultural legacy of the Scientific Revolution's explosion within medieval Europe's religious world view. We must always remember that the Church ruled European thought when Galileo did his work. We must always remember that the Church found Galileo's discoveries (of things like sunspots) troubling to their authority and threatened him with torture and put him under house arrest for the rest of his life. Revealed religion held the power at that time. Scientists (and religious people who were coming around to accept that the Sun had spots and Jupiter had moons, etc.) needed to come up with an explanation to diffuse perception of science as a threat - either to help them escape persecution or to psychologically combine two deeply satisfying ways of knowing the nature of the universe.

And so this compact was reached - there is a self-imposed limit on the reach of science. Science can not invoke final causes, must remain in the realm of the testable and replicable. This is understood by many as meaning there is a realm of "knowing" which, by mutual agreement, science can not enter. The realm of the Prime Mover. This concept is a lubricant to minimize friction at the sliding contact between an expanding body of scientific knowledge pushing into new areas and a body of religious revelation and mythic explanation that was threatened by that expansion. This interpretation allows the two to co-exist...until every few centuries someone like Darwin comes along. Then the religious people feel betrayed, feel that science violated its end of the bargain for co-existence.

What is misunderstood by our culture is that the "limit" science self-imposes upon itself is a limit on methodology, not on subject matter. Science limits itself to those domains that can be investigated with objective, replicable results. Because of this, there might be certain areas of existence that can't be investigated with science's current technology. But that doesn't make that area permanently removed from the scope of science. In fact, the self-imposed limit of science is, from an ardent scientist's point of view, a challenge. How could I learn about an area which, up until now, has been thought unexploreable? How could I learn about what stars are made of? How could I learn how people began? How could I learn how mountains are raised? Though science imposes a limit on how it can proceed, it accepts no limits on what topics are subject to future investigations.

To illuminate this distinction, let me cast this misunderstood concept back 500 years ago when many people believed that the stars circled the earth because angels pushed upon and made turn the encircling celestial sphere. A person holding the misunderstood concept of the limit of science might have said that the topic of why the stars circle the Earth was off limits to science because it involved the workings and orders of God through His angels. But science, taking a totally different approach, shattered the celestial sphere and eliminated the need for an angelic explanation.

So similarly, people today might map out certain topics that they believe are off limits to science. But all it takes is someone to see things in a different way or the development of a new technology and after a few pieces of objective, replicable evidence come in, science will quickly colonize a new realm for investigation. So no realm of possible knowledge is ruled off limits. All that is ruled out is certain ways of proceeding into that knowledge.
 
 

Now, to bring this around full circle. Many people believe that science can not answer the "why" questions. But, most of these people will accept "because of gravity" as an answer to "why do things fall?". So, though science might not be able to precisely answer "why are we put here on Earth?", it can explore the question, "how did we come to be here on Earth?" and "what ecological actions will allow this evolving human consciousness to hang around in this amazing universe for a few more billion years?". In the course of answering those question, we will probably develop a profound enough pool of information that, for most people, the "why" question will be answered.

The gap we maintain between science's explanatory powers and religion's inspiring wisdom creates a schizoid culture in which it is difficult to match ethical responsibility with the increasing power to profoundly alter the world. We need to wed scientific demonstrability with religious imperatives. I have no fear of science pushing into the deepest areas of religion. If the religious truths are really truths, scientific investigation will threaten them no more than scientific investigations threaten the laws of gravity. It will confirm and deepen the power of the core truths of religion. (This is why I come back again and again to contemplating the ethical implications of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.)

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