The Universe Story

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The Uni­verse Story: From the Pri­mor­dial Flar­ing Forth to the Eco­zoic Era–A Cel­e­bra­tion of the Unfold­ing of the Cosmos by Brian Swimme & Thomas Berry, Harper San Fran­cisco, 1992.

From the big bang to the present and into the next mil­len­nium, The Uni­verse Story unites sci­ence and the human­i­ties in a dra­matic explo­ration of the unfold­ing of the uni­verse, humanity’s evolv­ing place in the cos­mos, and the bound­less pos­si­bil­i­ties for our future.

Math­e­mat­i­cal cos­mol­o­gist, Brian Swimme and his­to­rian of cul­tures, Thomas Berry present an out­stand­ing vision of our place  in the cos­mos. In Uni­ver­sal­ist Radha-Krishnaism, I say,

Sci­en­tific expla­na­tions of the uni­verse like the big bang the­o­ries and evo­lu­tion con­sti­tute rea­son­able sci­en­tific mod­els and expla­na­tions of how cre­ation came about.… They also engage in cre­at­ing a sort of myth that appeals to the mod­ern imag­i­na­tion and world view.… Reli­gious inter­pre­ta­tion adds mean­ing to sci­ence, and sci­ence adds ground­ing in twenty-first cen­tury cos­mol­ogy to reli­gion. (102)

Although I had not read The Uni­verse Story when I wrote that, it cer­tainly fills the bill on all counts. I did not write much in my book about the nature of the uni­verse we inhabit, since I pre­fer to leave such mat­ters to those who are bet­ter qual­i­fied to write on that sub­ject. I can now refer my read­ers to The Uni­verse Story for a fuller under­stand­ing of a cos­mol­ogy which is extremely com­pat­i­ble with Uni­ver­sal­ist Radha-Krishnaism.

I hope these few brief excerpts which fol­low will inspire you to read the whole book.

Earth seems to be a real­ity that is devel­op­ing with the sim­ple aim of cel­e­brat­ing the joy of exis­tence. (3)

Fif­teen bil­lion years ago, in a great flash, the uni­verse flared forth into being. In each drop of exis­tence a pri­mor­dial energy blazed with an inten­sity never to be equaled again. (7)

This future will be worked out in the ten­sions between those com­mit­ted to the Tech­no­zoic, a future of increased exploita­tion of Earth as resource, all for the ben­e­fit of humans, and those com­mit­ted to the Eco­zoic, a new mode of human-Earth rela­tions, one where the well-being of the entire Earth com­mu­nity is the pri­mary con­cern. (14–15)

The birth of the uni­verse was not an event in time. Time begins simul­ta­ne­ously with the birth of exis­tence. The realm or power that rings forth the uni­verse is not itself an event in time, nor a posi­tion in space, but is rather the very matrix out of which the con­di­tions arise that enable tem­po­ral events to occur in space. Though the orig­i­nat­ing power gave birth to the uni­verse fif­teen bil­lion years ago, this realm of power is not sim­ply located there at that point of time, but is rather a con­di­tion of every moment of the uni­verse, past, present, and to come. (17)

The uni­verse is a coher­ent whole, a seam­less mul­ti­leveled cre­ative event. The grace­ful expan­sion of the orig­i­nal body is the life blood of all future bod­ies in the uni­verse. (18)

Always and every­where, it is the uni­verse that holds all things topgether and is the pri­mary acti­vat­ing power in every activ­ity.… the uni­verse is not a thing, but a mode of being of every­thing. (27)

To tell the full story of a sin­gle par­ti­cle we must tell the story of the uni­verse, for each par­ti­cle is in some way inti­mately present to every other par­ti­cle in the uni­verse. (29)

Just as the uni­verse story has never before been told in this man­ner, so too the senses of mean­ing, even the sense of the sacred, that this story car­ries with it is some­thing new both in its modal­ity and in its order of mag­ni­tude.… The impor­tant thing to appre­ci­ate is that the story as told here is not the story of a mech­a­nis­tic, essen­tially mean­ing­less uni­verse but the story of a uni­verse that has from the begin­ning has its mys­te­ri­ous self-organizing power that, if expe­ri­enced in any seri­ous man­ner, must evoke an even greater sense of awe … Nor is it the case that this story sup­presses the other sto­ries that have over the mil­len­nia guided and ener­gized the human ven­ture. It is rather a case of pro­vid­ing a more com­pre­hen­sive con­text in which all these ear­lier sto­ries dis­cover in them­selves a new valid­ity and a more expan­sive role. (238)

This book is far from dull sci­en­tific read­ing, but rather an excit­ing adven­ture which we are caught up in.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 7th, 2010 at 18:35 and is filed under Our Bookstore and tagged with Brian Swimme, cosmology, The Universe Story, Thomas Berry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.