Search

Science has created a new cosmogony. In ancient origin myths and in pre-modern natural philosophy the cosmos had meaning that was instructive for human morality. Since the nineteenth century, however, these views have been largely considered irrelevant or even detrimental to the scientific quest. In the twentieth century scientists discovered how much older and larger the universe is compared to the age and domain of humanity. We have come to realize that there is a large gap in time and space between the age and size of the universe and human existence. At the same time ethics is tied to the emergence of humans and through it to the evolutionary history of the cosmos. An appreciation of morality as aspect of the cosmos as understood today has to be different from its historic predecessors. First, it has to start from the acknowledgment that humans are part of the universe and the result of evolutionary processes within it. Second, moral principles have to be publicly stateable and capable of being debated in a pluralistic society. Third, the theory of emergent properties provides us with a new understanding of how natural and moral law are related and are tied to the morality of the individual actor. Fourth, how these aspects are stated must allow us to identify when and how things go wrong in a moral sense. These requirements can be fulfilled by starting from a theist viewpoint of the ‘goodness of creation,’ but only if the resulting precepts do not claim a privileged insight into the mind of God. Alternatively, a non-theist version of ‘natural goodness’ can arrive at similar moral conclusions.

The discovery of ubiquitous planets around other stars, some of them Earth-like, has brought renewed attention to the question of whether humans are the only intelligent species in the galaxy or one of many. So far we have no indication that other intelligent beings (ETI) exist. Even if they do, huge astronomical distances together with the finite speed of light makes it much more likely that, if we encounter them at all, it will be by long-distance contact rather than meeting in person. Our hope that such a signal might be received is based on the expectation that at least some ETI will develop human-like technology. Whether extraterrestrial evolution should be expected to converge on this kind of techno-intelligence or diverge in ways we cannot now imagine is an open question. Not only may we never receive a signal, we may also never know why. This uncertainty also cautions us against theological speculations about the nature of aliens. Astrotheology is ultimately about us humans; about aliens we can only learn, if at all, through their own free self-disclosure.

Emotions are a central and indispensable part of our cognitive equipment by which we apprehend the world. But until fairly recently Western philosophical thinking about emotions was dominated by a model of adversarial relationship with rationality. This is particularly a heritage of Enlightenment philosophy, but has antecedents in Stoicism. Classical Stoics regarded emotions as judgments, but thought they were invariably wrong or misleading. With regard to Christianity an ‘intellectualization’ of God, making him the seat of purified, emotionless rationality, has also contributed to the problem. But for the sake of personal integration we cannot have components of our mind at permanent war with each other, whatever occasional conflicts may arise. Emotions could not be the product of evolution if they were always misleading. Healthy moral and spiritual development of the whole person needs to take both emotions and intellect seriously. This development has often been described as spiritual ascent, but this metaphor brings with it the danger of looking down on our un-ascended fellow humans. There are resources for integrating human emotions in moral and spiritual development, not just from contemporary psychology, philosophy, etc., but also from past spiritual writers in the Christian tradition.

The Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth century replaced a holistic view of nature with one that became increasingly reductionist. This has made it difficult to find a rational basis for apprehending the objects of moral reasoning, like humans or other organisms in general, as more than the sum of their elementary parts. But the previous world view, here labeled substantialism, cannot be recreated against the evidence of modern science. Substantialism has been replaced by atomism and its ontological consequences. Splitting the world into atomistic science and substantialist philosophy can only be attained by an intolerable ontological relativism. Trying to derive moral principles from a forced amalgamation of the two world views is self-defeating and can have destructive consequences. Theory change in science can suggest patterns whereby solutions that we want to retain can be reconstructed “from the ground up” with a new ontology. However, we should not expect to reconstruct a static theory of moral certitudes in a world that is dynamic and evolutionary.