Cosmic Religiona refl ection of the personhood that might run through the
cosmos. In short, and as with physics, it is possible to develop a
full-blown evolutionary theology.
Conway Morris is not the only biologist exploring such ideas.
Stuart Kauffman is another. He’s developed a complex argument
in his book Reinventing the Sacred, writing, ‘So the unfolding of
the universe – biotic, and perhaps abiotic too – appears to be
partially beyond natural law.’ The world is, instead, a place of
ceaseless and genuine ‘creativity’. He’s not a theist, like Conway
Morris, though he is happy to take the natural creativity he
believes he’s identifi ed in evolution as a reinvention of notions
of God. He believes biology can resacralise life and the planet.
And yet, for all the allure of such speculations for the spirituality
inclined, the biological routes to an apparently scientifi c spiritual-
ity fall foul of the same problems we found with the physics. In
particular, different biologists will look at the same evidence and
come to radically different metaphysical conclusions – including
those who fi nd support for their materialistic and atheistic con-
victions. It will inevitably be that way because science’s success is
linked to the modesty of its ambition, namely to study the natural
world, not the spiritual. Sacred and secular conclusions alike can
be read analogously from it, and mythologically into it, but not,
strictly speaking, empirically out of it. What we must do, then, is
take account of what the limits of science might be.
The limits of science
This is hard to do. If you read a newspaper, or many of the
popular books written about science, you could be forgiven for
thinking that scientifi c knowledge is effectively limitless and
straightforwardly cumulative. Like doing a jigsaw, that may take
time and involve taking pieces out as well as putting them in
place, they tend to describe science as a process of assembling a
picture of the world that grows and will one day, all being well,
be complete. Such a marvellous achievement is laid at the feet
of the scientifi c method. It rests on induction: scientists collate