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Historian: The World Needs A New Origins Story Based On Science

This article is more than 8 years old.

Over at The Edge, John Brockman features British historian David Christian on the need to come up with a new origin story that can serve the global community.

Christian, the author of This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity, started his career as a professor of Russian history, and over the years as he refined his lectures on the Cold War, he realized...

...I was giving the subliminal message that humans are divided, at a fundamental level, into competing tribes. Having lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, I remember it vividly. I was a schoolboy in England where this tribalism threatened to blow us all up. That was a very vivid experience for me. I thought, for historians to keep teaching this subliminal message—that we're divided by tribes—is not a good thing.

So Christian began a program to teach 'big history'--the story of the whole world, from the Big Bang up to the present day. The goal: to help transcend the tribalisms perpetuated by narrower ethnic and religious histories.

But he soon discovered he needed to offer students something more than a universal story. He also had to place it in context so that students could derive a meaningful sense of place, of purpose. Science in the broad sense had the tools to provide it--but in practice it was more complicated.

One of the things we asked ourselves, as we were trying to put together this story and trying to put together a coherent story that linked what we think of as the natural sciences and the humanities, was what sort of story would emerge at the end of this? In the past, say in the Christian tradition, or in fact, in all cultural traditions, you have unifying stories. We don't seem to have one in the modern world. I'm talking about the natural sciences here. Many scientists are so worried that a concern for meaning, or story, or significance, or purpose will somehow warp the mapping process that scientists are engaged in. At the methodological level, that's true. You don't let your preconceptions warp what you're doing. But at an ontological level, I don't think that is true.

In modern science, according to Christian, and that includes scholarship across all academic disciplines--people have gotten used to the idea that science doesn't offer meaning in the way that institutional religions did in the past. Modernity puts us in a world without meaning, the story goes, and this need not be the case. "We may be living in an intellectual building site, where a new story is being constructed," he added. "It's vastly more powerful than the previous stories because it's the first one that is global. It's not anchored in a particular culture or a particular society. This is an origin story that works for humans in Beijing as well as in Buenos Aires."

In Christian's view, the world religions can't provide the big history--the coherent story--that humanity needs now. But Science can.

It turns out, as we tell it at least, there is a coherent story. There may be various ways of doing it, but the way we do it is very much a story about increasing complexity, and it's a story that's very relevant for humans. The early universe, say, half a million years after the Big Bang, was very simple. You have clouds of hydrogen and helium, you don't have any other elements—smatterings of lithium and beryllium. And they're very homogenous, roughly the same density, roughly the same temperature everywhere. Gradually, over 13.8 billion years more complex things appear, but they only appear where the Goldilocks Conditions are just right. That's the story we tell.

There's something familiar about this, I find. And a little ironic, because it turns out, over a decade ago, a few people at the Vatican were fretting over the very same problems. They, too, were interested in putting together a 'big history'. It's not a document that gets much press--but it can be found at the Vatican's online labyrinth. Communion and Stewardship. It was published in 2004 by the International Theological Commission, which serves as a sort of theological advisory board to the pope.

While the report was intended for Catholics, it adopts the same approach to the broader sciences precisely to craft the same kind of origins story that Christian is talking about. Here's one section that is striking.

According to the widely accepted scientific account, the universe erupted 15 billion years ago in an explosion called the “Big Bang” and has been expanding and cooling ever since. Later there gradually emerged the conditions necessary for the formation of atoms, still later the condensation of galaxies and stars, and about 10 billion years later the formation of planets. In our own solar system and on earth (formed about 4.5 billion years ago), the conditions have been favorable to the emergence of life. While there is little consensus among scientists about how the origin of this first microscopic life is to be explained, there is general agreement among them that the first organism dwelt on this planet about 3.5-4 billion years ago. Since it has been demonstrated that all living organisms on earth are genetically related, it is virtually certain that all living organisms have descended from this first organism. Converging evidence from many studies in the physical and biological sciences furnishes mounting support for some theory of evolution to account for the development and diversification of life on earth, while controversy continues over the pace and mechanisms of evolution. While the story of human origins is complex and subject to revision, physical anthropology and molecular biology combine to make a convincing case for the origin of the human species in Africa about 150,000 years ago in a humanoid population of common genetic lineage. However it is to be explained, the decisive factor in human origins was a continually increasing brain size, culminating in that of homo sapiens. With the development of the human brain, the nature and rate of evolution were permanently altered: with the introduction of the uniquely human factors of consciousness, intentionality, freedom and creativity, biological evolution was recast as social and cultural evolution.

This is a nice summary of the 'show so far' --although there's a little hedging in avoiding reference to 'Darwin's' theory of evolution in favor of 'some' theory of evolution--whatever that's supposed to mean.

Now, this section is embedded in the larger context of a document focused upon the age-old notion of mankind being created in the image of God.

In Christian's view, this would not be a necessary component. Within modern science there is a story that's even bigger than those of the institutionalized religions. "It's not deistic," he said. "It's about a universe without teleology, without a conscious creator. But, as Dan Dennett explains beautifully in his book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, it's a universe which can blindly create interesting and complex things. That's the story."

The problem with this story is it overlooks one of the most crucial distinctive traits about the human animal, which, unwittingly perhaps, Christian himself acknowledges.

I've floated the idea that what I call collective learning may be what makes us different: in other words, the capacity of humans to share information with such precision and in such volume that information at the cultural level increases from generation to generation. That's a fundamental threshold; it's what defines us. It explains why communities are so various, because each community accumulates information in slightly different ways. It explains why when communities meet the synergies are so powerful. It's the source of technology. It's the source of science. It's the source of civilization. It's what makes everything that’s human.

Well, yes. It's also the source of... religion. And culture. And what one finds universally from all the human civilizations going back to the agricultural revolution...is that--for good or ill--the human animal is not a being easily placated with the notion that material reality is all there is.

Any new origins story that doesn't acknowledge that crucial aspect of the species--and incorporate it into the big picture--isn't going to have a very long shelf life.

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