The Sacred Depths of Nature (Ursula Goodenough)

OVERVIEW

Ursula Goodenough thinks that religion has always addressed two fundamental human concerns: “How Things Are” and “Which Things Matter.” The first of these is our “cosmology,” our story – where we came from and how we fit in. The second has been codified as “morality” or ethics. The role of religion has always been to integrate responses to these two concerns into a rich and compelling narrative that orients and inspires us. But as we move toward a more secular world anchored in a scientific understanding of the cosmos, what has replaced the answers religion used to give us? What Goodenough sets out to do in The Sacred Depths of Nature is articulate “Our Story,” a poetic cosmology grounded in naturalism, and outline the foundation for a naturalized planetary ethos.

In doing this, she’s giving us a religious naturalism that can provide a suitable alternative to supernatural dogma – she’s giving us a natural account of “How Things Are” and “Which Things Matter.”

Our Story (How Things Are)

13.8 billion years ago, everything in the universe was condensed down to an area the size of a pin head, unimaginably hot and dense. The Big Bang sent all matter and energy in this singularity hurtling outward, creating time and the cosmos. The high energy physics of this rapid expansion created protons, neutrons, and electrons. As things cooled down, hydrogen nuclei acquired electron shells and became stable atoms, which fell into dark matter halos that formed the first stars. The gravitational fields of these stars pulled their hydrogen atoms so close that the resulting heat stripped them of their electrons and created nuclear reactions. The birth and death of these stars created other atoms – light elements like oxygen and nitrogen, and heavier elements like iron and magnesium. These living and dying stars clustered together into galaxies. Today, our universe contains hundreds of billions of galaxies, each populated by billions of stars. One of those galaxies is an enormous pinwheel called the Milky Way, and within one of its arms, our Sun. As the Sun was forming, surrounding material merged into comets, moons, and planets; one of the planets was Earth, with its iron core, liquid mantle, and thin silicone-based crust. Gases released by Earth’s interior were trapped by gravity and formed our early atmosphere. After one billion years of consolidation, life emerged.

The building blocks of life (e.g., water, carbon dioxide, methane) combined to produce simple carbon-based molecules. These molecules formed in deep-sea hydrothermal vents, but it’s also probable that they traveled to earth on interstellar dust… flecks of matter floating through space, soaking up bits of stellar explosions, heating and cooling as they drifted, and eventually being delivered to earth by comets and meteors. Some of these early molecules were catalysts that could bring together other molecules, forming autocatalytic cycles. Eventually, these cycles became contained within self-assembling capsules. This gave rise to the first self-replicating autogens. Scientists hypothesize that autogens became early organisms when instructions for self-organization and replication became encoded (probably in RNA). These early lifeforms, like us, were little selves… they had an embodied teleology, a goal orientation. They moved along chemical gradients, broke down substrates, and divided. Life has always come with its own inherent, built-in purpose: more life.

These simple lifeforms did not stay simple. Eventually, single-celled organisms began synthesizing macromolecules. The instructions got more complex, as did the substrates and products. Over in the world of biophysics, positively charged ions that were moving across cell membranes created chemical and electrical energy potentials. ATP, the molecule all living cells use to power themselves, was formed. These ATP-powered unicellular organisms formed multicellular organisms (even now, the 30 trillion human cells that make up our bodies were all daughters of a single zygote). Evolution crafted an incredible array of morphologies – crafted feathers, and feet, and petals, and pinecones, and bark, and eyes, and fins, and flippers… created ancient algae and mosses, trees, termites, mammoths, parrots, and people. All from the same stuff, all from ancient sea and space.

And out of this marvel of biological diversity came a planet “shimmering with awareness.”

“We have throughout the ages sought, and found, religious fellowship with one another. And now we realize that we are connected to all creatures. Not just in food chains and ecological equilibria. We share common ancestry. We share genes for receptors and ion pumps and signal transduction cascades. We share evolutionary constraints and possibilities. We share the same basic aims and purpose. We are connected all the way down.”

This cosmology gives us a unifying narrative of life, but it also gives us a story (and meaning) to death. As it happens, most living things on Earth are single-celled bacteria and archaea called prokaryotes; they are small and simple. Eukaryotes, on the other hand, have cells that are larger and more complex. But, even still, the vast majority of eukaryotic species are unicellular. One advantage of being a unicellular prokaryote or eukaryote is the chance to be immortal. That is to say, bacteria and amoeba and algae like chlorella are not programmed to die – it’s not a necessary feature of their biology. Sure, they can boil and starve and be eaten, but put them in a laboratory Petri dish and feed them well and they can divide indefinitely.

But then there are, occupying the smallest niche in the biosphere, the multicellular organisms… the ones with petals and shells and fur and fangs and consciousness. And the price we pay for this array of breathtaking complexity and diversity is our immortality. All modern multicellular lineages come from sexual reproduction, which outsources immortality to the germline cells, those that carry our genes to the next generation. The rest of the cells become the soma (the body), and it’s the job of the somatic cells to protect the germline and navigate the niche – to eat and dive and fly and feel and think. The somatic cells become the fuzzy parachutes of dandelion fluff, the wings of butterflies, the long probing trunks of African elephants. In animals, some of these somatic cells become the brain. In intelligent creatures like the octopus, consciousness is distributed throughout the skin and tentacles. In humans, it’s confined to the 86 billion neurons in our head. So, the ability to love and ponder and perceive and wonder is afforded to us because we will die. Our marvelous human consciousness is possible only because our species, like all other multicellular species, sacrificed its somatic immortality.

“We can now stand back and appreciate the beauty of this arrangement. The dichotomy between the germ-line cells and the remaining somatic (body) cells effectively parcels out the job of being alive. . . . Death is the price paid to have oaks and clams and geese and grasshoppers, and death is the price paid to have human-style consciousness. . . .” It was because your cells and neurons “were not committed to the future that they could specialize and cooperate in the construction of this most extraordinary, and most here-and-now, center [of] perception and feelings. So our brains, and hence our minds, are destined to die with the rest of the soma. And it is here that we arrive at one of the central ironies of human existence, which is that our sentient brains are capable of experiencing deep regret and sorrow and fear at the prospect of our own deaths, yet it was the invention of death, the invention of the germ/soma dichotomy, that make possible the existence of our brains.”

You can have immortality, yes, but only at the expense of truly being alive. The fate of the soma is to die, the fate of you is to die, but not before you reap the incredible experience of sentience. If ever we needed a meaning for death, this is as good as any.

Our Planetary Ethics (Which Things Matter)

How can this story, Our Story, inspire a planetary ethos and morality? The first step is acknowledging the truth, that we are people but also critters… critters but also interstellar dust. Our story is the same story as jellyfish, zebras, dragonflies, and cranes… the stuff of exploding stars fashioned into bodies that can perceive the cosmos that crafted them. Our Story is Everybody’s Story.

As pro-social primates we have implicit moral sensibilities that developed into explicit moral codes. We are built for morality. Our evolutionary history afforded us incredible intelligence, so much so that we can control and conquer beyond a sustainable carrying capacity. We can be intensely self-interested, but we are also social animals that yearn for coherence and community. And so now, what’s required is an eco-morality… an expansion of our pro-social sentiments to a larger moral vision. What’s required is the best of us – not just caring about the well-being of our village and tribe, but the rest of the natural world too. Living things imbue the world with value; something is valuable to an organism if it helps that organism achieve its goals and purposes. Surely, then, the goal of all life is the continuation of life, which makes protecting our fragile planetary matrix the highest and most essential good, the most valuable thing because valuing anything at all is contingent upon it.  

If sacredness is taken to be what’s most fundamental, most worthy of reverence and care and commitment, then surely nature is sacred. Surely the continuation and connectedness of the natural world is our most sacred obligation.

“For me, the existence of all this biological complexity and awareness and intent and beauty and relationship, embedded in its wondrous planetary matrix, 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 superordinate Meaning, no Purpose other than that the continuation continue until the Earth collapses into the sun or the final meteor collides.”

We have our grand and compelling cosmology that can engage our hearts and minds and imaginations without resorting to supernaturalism. This is not just Our Story, but Everybody’s Story, a story that tells us how things came to be, where we fit, and why it matters. This is the religious naturalist’s orientation – a sweeping cosmic narrative that explains life, death, and meaning, a spiritual readiness for wonder, awe, and reverence, all rooted in a moral commitment to compassion and community. Religious naturalism asks us not to seek transcendence above the world, but transcendence into the world – not to aspire to some higher immaterial plane, but rather to revere this natural reality. Religious naturalism is to believe, whole-heartedly, that nature is sacred and that the natural world is enough.

IN SUM:

Is this book entirely secular? Yes.

If I had to describe the book in one sentence? Why a natural cosmology and evolutionary biology can and does offer a satisfying narrative of How Things Are and Which Things Matter.

Who should read this book? Any atheist, non-theist, or skeptic who suspects sacredness can exist without supernaturality.