Not the usual sort of book I would pick up, but I have a wonderful book club who extend me, and this is a case in point. Loved the big issues like evolution and the start of everything and where did life come from and all that. Good choice for a book club as a discussion sparker. So, did Lloyd Geering come up with any answers?
Well, no, not really. But I think that wasn’t the point. He took us through the whole shebang of creation with an evangelical zeal. Things are vast, incredible, extraordinary, mind boggling, breathtaking, unbelievable, amazing. We are asked to consider ‘the grandeur of the cosmos and of the miraculous complexities and designs observable in the biosphere’. I don’t think his readers need all this convincing because the science he offers speaks for itself. But, superlatives aside, he does take us through the theories pretty succinctly and I’ve rarely found a book that writes our big history so well. It’s not dumbed down, but it is accessible for the non-brainiacs among us, a good mix of science and philosophy.
Geering is honest about what we know and don’t. ‘We do not yet know how the first cell came to be formed‘ which is a pity as it’s something I wonder about a lot. ‘Some have supposed that these life forms originated elsewhere and arrived here on a comet… But such a theory does nothing to indicate how life originated in the cosmos; it simply moves that genesis one step further into space.’ That’s a pretty big chunk of the story we’re missing. And the Big Bang? ‘All that we can say with confidence is, “The universe simply is”—’ arrgh!! Where are my answers? Geering reassures us that ‘Philosophers have long discussed the question of the creation of the universe as the issue of why there is something and not nothing. The very character of the Big Bang as a singularity implies that this is a question that has no answer’.
There are interesting theories about globalisation, collective consciousness, and turning points in human evolution, and how over a million years we have diversified into racial and ethnic groups and are now converging again.
Humans have always instinctively filled the gaps in our knowledge with God. Geering goes a step farther, and suggests that we might no longer believe in God as a bearded bloke in the sky (pick your own God symbol here) but if we do need a kind of coherent story to unify everything we know and everything for which we are still searching for answers, we could look at the concept of God as evolution, as the planet. ‘To be sure, we need to be very circumspect when referring to the evolutionary process as God, if only because the traditional understanding of ‘God’ is still widespread. But if we recall that the humanly created concept of God evolved as a way of unifying the unseen powers believed to transcend humanity, then it does make some sense.‘
Geering still does seem desperate to retain something holy in our cosmological theories and physics, determined not to lose God altogether. He seems to be implying that we have discovered a trunk, some ears, toes and a couple of tusks and have theories about all of them. Maybe one day we’ll figure out the jigsaw of all these ‘unseen powers’ and will put them together as an elephant. Remarkable, but not holy. (I think I just called God an elephant. The fires of hell await me).
‘The basis for this embryonic religion of the future is the new Great Story that I have tried to tell in this book. We must not only allow it to replace the biblical story of origins and its counterparts in other traditions, but also use it to inspire us with the sense of awe and holiness that permeated the former religions.‘
Must a unifying story be religious? Geering has told the Great Story here with all its frailties and unknowns. The ‘holiness’ and all that wondrous evangelism will help spread the word of this story, but a new religion will go the way of all religions, where there is one story, one truth, one way, until a faction breaks away and tells it differently. I’d prefer thousands of scientists and philosophers following all their weird hunches and sharing their thoughts and theories so we can combine them to make our own stories. Let’s have lots of gods, and acknowledge that they are all fictional.
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