Whether Michael Dowd will succeed in reconciling the ways of the ancient religions to the facts of postmodern science, and in doing so, transform our lives by ending the dangerous contention existing between and among the various claims to "the way, the truth, and the life," remains to be seen. He is aiming for nothing less than the complete consilience of science and religion, a merging that, if successful, will be of inestimable value to humankind. I greatly admire the wisdom and intelligence and learning that Dowd brings to this very difficult task. I am amazed at his creativity and his temerity. His idea reminds me of something relatively simple, yet earth-shaking, something that might come from an Einstein or a Gandhi. I am not exaggerating.
The idea is this: we can accept as public truth and as "daytime" knowledge the facts about our world and ourselves as revealed through physics, cosmology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, geology, etc., while maintaining our faith in our religious heritage. We can still believe in Jesus Christ as our savior and be guided by the wisdom in the Bible while knowing that the earth really is four and a half billion years old and that, yes, we did indeed evolve from a long extinct ape-like creature.
It might be that Dowd is inventing a discipline. Call it Evolutionary Theology. Because we are educated we know that evolution is a fact; and because we believe in a God who cares and is intimately involved in this world, we therefore must see evolution as God's way of working in this world. But can the denotative words of the Bible be reconciled with such an understanding? Dowd's way around this conundrum is to understand that the Bible, inspired by God, was written in a way comprehendible to the people at the time, using words and images and ideas consistent with their world view. To write in the way of the modern world with the modern understanding would be unintelligible to those people and counterproductive.
This is a nice dodge (if I may) with some plausibility. I am satisfied with just saying that where the Bible is denotatively wrong, it is agreeable to interpret it symbolically. Dowd shies away from this direct approach because it would not help him with his consilience since evangelicals and others who believe in the literal truth of the Bible are sworn enemies of symbolic interpretations.
Dowd wants to celebrate evolution as our "cherished creation story." (p. 37) He sees facts as "God's native tongue." (p. 68) He makes a distinction between the "day language" of fact and the "night language" of meaning, between public revelation and private revelation, between reason and reverence (see especially p. 104). In this way differing utterances and experiences can be reconciled. I was especially enthralled because a friend of mine had the most intense dreams and visions in which she saw truths about the "other side" that she wanted so much for us all to accept. My way of accepting her views without compromising my own beliefs and experiences, was to refer to "public truths" and "private truths." No one can deny your experience. It is "true," but it is a private truth. Of course some people want more than that. They want their truth to be the public truth, and therein lies a problem of immense force: think of the differences between Christianity and Islam, between both of them and, say, Buddhism.
Dowd defines God as "the Ultimate Whole of Reality" (p. 77) and a wonderful definition it is! How tiny, how petty, how insignificant and sadly anthropomorphic seem the lesser gods! Dowd writes, "God cannot be limited to the world we humans can sense, measure, and comprehend: Ultimate Reality transcends and includes all that we can possibly know, experience, and even imagine." (p. 109) He goes on to reveal that the God he believes in is like the God of the Vedas, Ineffable and indescribable: "Any 'God' that can be believed in or not believed in is a trivialized notion of the divine." (p. 109)
Dowd calls the Big Bang of cosmology the "Great Radiance," and again what a way with words and ideas he has. He involves us all personally with the cosmic act of creation by reminding us that we are star dust, that we are the universe becoming conscious of itself. This identification with all of creation is a marvelous thing. Instead of narrowing identifying with only our group or nation or religion how much better it is to identify with the entire cosmos. There is great sense of freedom and wonder in doing so, and how petty seem these worldly conflicts when measured against the stars.
One of Dowd's most compelling and wondrous ideas is to recognize that the entire universe is evolving. He writes, quoting physicist Brian Swimme, "Earth, once molten rock, now sings opera." (p. 121) And we are an integral part of that evolution. Instead of being alone in a vast, uncaring, mindless universe, we are "a mode of being...an expression of the Universe. We didn't come into the world; we grew out from it, like a peach grows out of a peach tree." (pp. 120-121)
In short, what Michael Dowd has done in this remarkable book is to reconcile science with the tenets of the ancient religions, especially the Christianity he was born into. In a sense this a distinction between what he calls "flat-earth" Christianity and "evolutionary" Christianity. Throughout Dowd demonstrates a strikingly thorough understanding of evolutionary psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience, not to mention cosmology and even some physics. I say "strikingly" because it is so rare for someone formally trained in theology to have such a broad education. After this book achieves the kind of currency I expect it to achieve, perhaps the clergy will be respected (as they once were) as truly knowledgeable people.
