All religions must be reconsidered in light of the cosmic evolutionary paradigm

One Cosmos Under God Robert W. Godwin

All exteriors have an interior, however attenuated. Consciousness is the interior of the cosmos. It has been evolving along with the exterior for the past 13.7 billion years. One Western philosopher who emphasized this is Alfred North Whitehead. Although his magnum opus Process and Reality will be a bit much for most readers, his Science and the Modern World is quite accessible.

No, it is not possible to be "fully conscious," because our self-consciousness lives in the dialectical, generative space between the nonlocal, noumenal ground of consciousness-as-such and our evolved nervous system. Consciousness is refracted through the lens of this nervous system, and is as boundless and inexhaustible as our dream life. It generates constant novelty. In fact, consciousness is the reason why there is so much beautiful and meaningful novelty instead of mere chaos and ugliness. As you may have heard somewhere, all things were made through it, and without it nothing was made that was made. It shines in the dark, but the dorks don't comprehend it...

The main point I would emphasize is that all religions, in my view, must be reconsidered in light of the sort of cosmic evolutionary paradigm outlined in my book or by people like Ken Wilber. With regard to the East, this has been most ably and exhaustively enunciated by Sri Aurobindo, who had the benefit of a Cambridge education and integrated Vedanta with the modern world. In the West, virtually the identical task was achieved by Teilhard de Chardin, whose Phenomenon of Man situated Christianity within a cosmic evolutionary scheme.

Both Aurobindo and Teilhard were pioneers and cosmic omsteaders who necessarily painted their symphonies with a somewhat broad brush. Aurobindo wrote his most important works in the nineteen-teens (before all of the implications of the quantum revolution had even been worked out), while Teilhard had most of his important insights in the 1920's, even though they were not published until after he died in 1959 because of church politics...posted by Gagdad Bob at 1/23/2006 08:35:00 AM