The new cosmology challenged religions. It has changed the image of nature.
By Tomás Núñez, ThD
First of all, current science warns us that it has declared obsolete the traditional concept of “matter” as something petrified, sterile, passive… The scum of reality. That matter does not exist. Real matter is something else.
Matter is energy. And matter and energy are convertible. Matter does not exist, it is energy, in one of its states. Matter is very subtle energy, which spontaneously tends to complexity, to self-organization, to sensitivity, to consciousness, to spirit. It only needs the necessary conditions to be met… – We are not therefore mounted on a flying rock, wandering through space… Neither is this world a collection of “things”, nor are material things the extensive rei of Descartes…
Nature is rather a systemic reality, a system of systems, the whole related to everything in all its parts. – We can no longer accept the existence of a higher, supernatural “second floor” where the gods and the forces that govern this world would reside… nor a “lower” floor where the spirits of evil would be confined… or where we would even go after death to pay for our sins. What our ancestors wanted to express with those symbols cannot be something different, nor separate, nor located on a higher second floor, but “on this same single floor” of reality. There is no «ontological metaphysics» (science has led us to a post-metaphysical culture), although we do not need to fall into the crass reductionist materialist vision. – A negative a priori religious qualification of matter (as «sinful») and of everything related to it (flesh, instinct, sex, pleasure, body, worldliness…) is no longer acceptable. – We can no longer accept that mythological assumption of a primordial «original sin» that would have ancestrally contaminated all humanity and even all cosmic reality… At the origin of everything there cannot be an original sin, but an original grace.
This life cannot be just a passing illusion, a simple “moral test” in relation to another life, the true and definitive one, the one beyond death, to which a Creator would have destined us on the condition of first passing a moral test in this temporal life… The scheme of this “great explanatory saving story” seems admirable to us, for its genius, but at the same time, incredible, unsustainable in itself.
The religions of “eternal salvation” urgently need to give an account of themselves again in the context of the current vision, or perhaps reinvent themselves. – In the light of what science tells us, today we can no longer think of nature (the Earth and the entire Cosmos) as a mere “stage for human history”, as religions told us: God would have created all this simply to build a stage in which the drama of the history of salvation (human) could unfold, which would be the only important thing that would be happening on the planet and even in the cosmos…
The current scientific vision no longer gives us reason to think that we are the reason for the existence of the cosmos, or that the human historical drama is what supposedly motivated God to “create the world”, or that humans are “the measure of all things”, human and divine. Today, in light of the broad vision that current science makes possible for us, our natural, spontaneous and almost inevitable “anthropocentrism” makes us blush…: it must be overcome and eradicated, because it is not only false, but it also harms us and the planet.
Be the first to comment