![]() Above this stratum lay the more elusive levels of plants, then animals, and finally humans with their capacity for reflective self-awareness, free choice, ethical aspiration, and religious longing. At the lowest level were inanimate things such as minerals. Traditional faiths, originating as they did before scientific discovery of deep cosmic time (a fourteen-billion-year-old universe), usually arranged their pictures of the world in a hierarchical way. Contemporary efforts to live a life of justice or compassion – even where consciousness has become fully secularised – are connected, at least remotely, to ancient religious traditions that assumed the universe exists for a reason. Today, whenever people surrender to the demands of virtue, regardless of how much this propensity may have been fashioned by evolutionary factors, we can assume it has been amplified and moulded by religious cultures of the past that attributed meaning to the whole universe. The ideals that shape the ethical sensitivity of most humans today, including that of sceptics, still draw their authority from the moral heroism of our religious predecessors, most of whom believed they lived in a meaningful world. They felt that the cosmos pulsed with meaning, and this intuition gave them a sound reason for ethical aspiration. Most of our ancestors considered the universe and our lives to be timelessly grounded in a transcendent principle of ‘rightness’ ( Dharma, Rta, Tao) or ultimate Meaning ( Brahman, Yahweh, Allah, etc.). This belief gave human lives a sense of belonging to something of great importance. Traditionally, most religions led us to believe that the universe is inherently meaningful. I shall argue here that, with the help of such scientifically enlightened religious thinkers as Michael Polanyi, Teilhard de Chardin, and Alfred North Whitehead, we may plausibly view the discoveries of natural science as a springboard toward a wider, more vibrant sense of an ultimately meaningful universe. The question, however, is whether we can we embrace such a sweeping idea without contradicting the discoveries of science, especially evolutionary biology. The future of religion is deeply tied to the plausibility of the idea that the universe is here for a reason. ![]() ![]() Today, we need to recapture freshly the religious sense of a purposeful universe. has a definite meaning and follows a definite purpose.’ I agree that if we fail to trust that the cosmos is, at heart, the unfolding of a transcending purpose, our ethical aspirations and zest for life will eventually wither on the vine. Vaclav Havel, president of the Czech Republic, stated that ‘the crisis of the much-needed global responsibility is in principle due to the fact that we have lost the certainty that the Universe.
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