The New Story has the advantage over other stories that, unlike most creation myths and religious accounts of how things came to be, there is a great deal of evidence in favour of it being literally true. And because of that, this story has proved acceptable to Time for a New Story?
Victor Anderson recommends the Universe Story as not only grand but true. people from a very wide range of cultural backgrounds.
SOF contributors have put forward many sophisticated arguments in the course of looking for some truth in ‘stories’ which they no longer believe are literally true. Maybe there is some nonliteral sense in which they are true, some symbolism that works, some usefulness to these stories which can still provide a Big Picture in which our lives, choices, and actions have meaning.
This has been a fruitful line of exploration, especially where the story in question has been the Christian story. And yet it seems to me that an even more fruitful place to search might be into stories that we actually do believe are true, in a literal sense.
One such story which provides a Big Picture context, in many respects bigger than the story which runs from Genesis to Revelations, has been called ‘the Universe Story’, or simply ‘The New Story’. This is the story of the whole development starting from the Big Bang, through the formation of matter, stars, the Earth, the evolution of life, and human history. The term The Universe Story was used as the title of a book by Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, both very much influenced by the thinking of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Teilhard de Chardin was a devout (though in many ways heretical) Roman Catholic, and so it could be said that ‘the New Story’ is in fact an offshoot of an old story, the story of Catholic Christianity.
What Teilhard de Chardin did, however, was to set out – most famously in his book The Phenomenon of Man – a vision based on science as well as religion, drawing on cosmology and palaeontology, the study of prehistoric life. In the 70 years since the book was first written, that story has been updated and reworked in the light of new discoveries. Different versions of the story have been produced, most of them taking out the Catholicism but keeping his basic picture of longrun evolution. a great deal of evidence in favour of the New Story being literally true Writers who have put forward different versions of this story include, along with Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, Elisabet Sahtouris, Peter Russell, and Ursula King, and we can put in a similar category the theories of Ken Wilber and even GWF Hegel. In all of them there is the basic idea that things have moved in a particular general direction, and that the evolution of consciousness to greater degrees of awareness and depth is a key part of that general direction of development.
Of course there have been setbacks, most notably in the mass extinction crises which have taken place at various points in evolution, but each time life has picked itself up again and resumed this progress of consciousness.
Like other creation stories, it has the advantage of setting our lives in the context of a Big Picture, and it heightens the significance of the present moment through reminding us of what is at stake now. It shows that the loss of human consciousness through ecological devastation and/or nuclear war would represent a setback measured in terms of geological time, not just the timescales of human history.
The New Story therefore has a great deal in its favour. However, I think it is now time to ask the question: why hasn’t it caught on? I ask this not because I want to abandon the whole idea of making the true story the basis for the narratives we tell about our lives, but because I want to see these difficulties addressed. This is only a brief article, so I will simply outline the difficulties: 1. The story is a very complicated one. In order to understand cosmology, we need to understand quantum theory. In order to understand evolution, we need to understand genetics. This makes the whole thing very difficult to grasp. 2. The story keeps on changing. Scientists are now increasingly often saying that the Universe Story is not the whole story: our universe is just a bubble within a larger Multiverse, consisting of a multiplicity of universes, each with their own different laws of nature and sets of dimensions. Ours is just one of them.
Similarly, many new fossil and archaeological finds make it necessary to adjust and update the Story, again and again. 3. Perhaps the story is just too big. Maybe we should talk about the Earth Story rather than the Universe Story. That would feel more relevant, and not as complicated. 4. There is a tendency by people to reinterpret and understand the New Story in terms of the stories they already know, so for example, evolution comes to be reinterpreted as being about Intelligent Design. 5. The Story is not – yet – encoded in ritual, song, and the other sorts of practices which religions have developed to enable people to identify emotionally with their doctrines and stories.
The Universe Story remains, for the most part, in science and history textbooks. There have, however, been ‘universe walks’ held, in which each centimetre represents a particular period of time, and by walking out a route marked with the major events, we can get a sense of how things have developed, and particularly how they have speeded up as we have got nearer the present. 6. Another problem, of course, is the rise of scepticism about all Big Pictures and grand narratives. This has been articulated particularly by Postmodernist philosophers.
The problems with the other narratives – such as Christianity, Marxism, and Liberal/ Enlightenment ‘Progress’ – have rubbed off on the New Story, and are almost bound to do so on any new stories, making it difficult for any at all to be established. 7. In view of all these difficulties, it is tempting to fall back on the old stories we already know and perhaps love. But wouldn’t it be good, one day, to adopt as our story a narrative we actually believe, in a straightforward and literal sense, is true?
This article is based on the talk given by Victor Anderson to the Oxford SOF Day Conference in September 2009.
Victor Anderson is a freelance researcher/consultant on environmental issues.
The Universe Story was written by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry and published by Penguin in 1994. The Phenomenon of Man by Teilhard de Chardin was published in English by Collins in 1959.
This article is based on the talk given by Victor Anderson to the Oxford SOF Day Conference in September 2009.