Ursula Goodenough

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The epic (of evolution) is a fantastic myth that happens to be true of the material Universe.

Ursula Goodenough (born 1943-03-16) is a professor of Biology and a leading proponent of Religious Naturalism and the epic of evolution.

Contents

[edit] Sourced

  • We do have something of a story here, a true story (epic of evolution), that we can work with religiously should we elect to do so.
    • Epic, Story, Narrative (1998) [1]
  • The epic is a fantastic myth that happens to be true of the material Universe.
    • How Grand a Narrative (1999) [2]
  • I profess my Faith. For me, the existence of all this complexity and awareness and intent and beauty, and my ability to apprehend it, serves as the ultimate meaning and the ultimate value. The continuation of life reaches around, grabs its own tail, and forms a sacred circle that requires no further justification, no Creator, no super-ordinate meaning of meaning, no purpose other than that the continuation continue until the sun collapses or the final meteor collides. I confess a credo of continuation. And in so doing, I confess as well a credo of human continuation.
  • Sex without death gets you single-celled algae and fungi: sex with a mortal soma gets you the rest of the … creatures. Death is the price paid to have trees, and clams and birds and grasshoppers, and death is the price paid to have human consciousness, to be aware of all that shimmering awareness and all that love.
    • Chet Raymo - When God is Gone, Everything is Holy, page 130, 2008

[edit] The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998)

  • The Big Bang, the formation of stars and planets, the origin and evolution of life on this planet, the advent of human consciousness and the resultant evolution of cultures—this is the story, the one story, that has the potential to unite us, because it happens to be true.
  • The religious naturalist is provisioned with tales of natural emergence that are, to my mind, far more magical than traditional miracles. Emergence is inherent in everything that is alive, allowing our yearning for supernatural miracles to be subsumed by our joy in the countless miracles that surround us.
  • I have come to understand that the self, my self, is inherently sacred. By virtue of its own improbability, its own miracle, its own emergence... And so I lift up my head, and I bear my own witness, with affection and tenderness and respect. And in so doing, I sanctify myself with my own grace.
  • We arrived but a moment ago, and found [Earth] to be perfect for us in every way. And then we came to understand that it is perfect because we arose from it and are a part of it.
  • The epic of evolution is our warp, destined to endure, commanding our universal gratitude and reverence and commitment... The Epic of Evolution is such a story, beautifully suited to anchor our search for planetary consensus, telling us of our nature, our place, our context. Moreover, responses to this story—what we are calling religious naturalism—can yield deep and abiding spiritual experiences. And then, after that, we need other stories as well, human-centered stories, a mythos that embodies our ideals and our passions.
  • The role of religion is to integrate the Cosmology and the Morality, to render the cosmological narrative so rich and compelling that it elicits our allegiance and our commitment to its emergent moral understandings. As each culture evolves, a unique Cosmos and Ethos appear in its co-evolving religions.
  • For me, and probably for all of us, the concept of a personal, interested god can be appealing, often deeply so. In times of sorrow or despair, I often wonder what it would be like to be able to pray to God or Allah or Jehovah or Mary and believe that I was heard, believe that my petition might be answered… But in the end, such faith is simply not available to me. I can’t do it. I lack the resources to render my capacity for love and my need to be loved to supernatural Beings. And so I have no choice but to pour these capacities and needs into earthly relationships, fragile and mortal and difficult as they often are.
  • When the responses elicited by the Epic of Evolution are gathered together several religious principles emerge that I can believe, serve as a framework for a global Ethos
  • The biochemistry and biophysics are the notes of life; they conspire, collectively, to generate the real unit of life, the organism
  • Patterns of gene expression are to organisms as melodies and harmonies are to sonatas. It's all about which sets of proteins appear in a cell at the same time (the chords) and which sets come before or after other sets (the themes) and at what rate they appear (the tempos) and how they modulate one another (the developments and transitions)
  • The Sacred Depths of Nature, Oxford University Press, June 15, 2000, ISBN-10: 0195136292

[edit] Meaning of Life interview

Interview with Robert Wright, Slate; retrieved 2009-02-12

  • Naturalism has been defined by many people. It's just a world view that does not include the supernatural so it's everything else.
  • God answers of course come in every flavor imaginable these days.
  • I do go ahead and consider myself a religious person.

[edit] Beliefnet Interview

Interview with Ursula Goodenough by Jill Neimark

  • There are two flavors of God people: those whose God is natural and those whose God is supernatural. Certainly there are a lot of people within religious naturalism who have no problem with God language--God as love, God as evolution, God as process. People see God as part of nature and give God-attributes to the part of nature that they find most sacred. I encounter people like that all the time.
  • One can start from the perspective of a religious naturalist or from the perspective of the world religions and arrive at the same place: a moral imperative that this Earth and its creatures be respected and cherished.
  • All life has a kind of seamlessness
  • I don't have any problem accessing experiences of unity. I feel completely part of the universe and all that's going on … a belonging to the universe, an overflow of astonishment and wonder and peace and tranquility.
  • I like the Buddhist concept of beginning-less-ness, that the universe has always been going on
  • The good stuff of most religions turns out to be a golden rule that defines a morality which allows humans to flourish in community
  • Perhaps we should all settle down and think about what's good in the world and what we want to do here. If we find this planet and its history and its story to be sacred, let's preserve and nourish it, and then we can go home at night and say whatever prayers we choose.
  • We all eat or are eaten. That's the way life works, it's a greater rhythm. And that's why science and the understandings it has uncovered can be a source of joy.

[edit] External links

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