How To Be An Agnostic
intelligence, and even more surprisingly, self-awareness. The
modern sense of self is, therefore, now changing into what
might be called an ecological self. We’re developing a sense of
being part of the Earth’s systems, and thereby connected to the
cosmos as a whole.
If this kind of talk is not your thing, it is tempting to write
it off – to call it ‘New Age’ pejoratively. Alternatively, it could
be said that it is too tied to the new physics: as the physics
changes, as it will, these New Agers risk having the scientifi c rug
pulled out from under their metaphysical feet. Although Capra
anticipated the problem.
Many concepts we hold today will be replaced by a different
set of concepts tomorrow. But this replacement will occur in
an orderly way, and the basic themes that I use in my com-
parison with mystical traditions will be enforced, I believe,
rather than invalidated.Further, it is part and parcel of the spirituality of the Universe
Story that we are only beginning to understand our connection
with the cosmos, as scientists are only beginning to understand
the nature of the universe. So we should positively expect things
to change and develop.
A deeper criticism is that this approach to the science is picky
about what it makes so much of. It’s an à la carte approach
to physics. For example, adherents dislike the notion of fi ne-
tuning, unlike with the emergent option of Paul Davies, because
it seems too anthropocentric. A similar reaction is provoked
when the notion of emergence is suggested to imply that
human consciousness exists at the top of a hierarchy of being.
Conversely, the New Age reading doesn’t take much notice of
another striking feature of the subatomic world: it’s colossal
destructiveness.
In general, it does seem as if these movements are more
swayed by what they take from ancient mystical traditions
than from modern science, reading the former into the latter.