Words&Dirt

“The picture of reality emerging from cosmology, evolutionary biology, and ecology focuses on relations and community, not on individuals and objects. According to this picture, everything in the universe has emerged from a Big Bang 15 billion years ago when a tiny bit of matter exploded and over billions of years became the galaxies and stars and––about 4 billion years ago on our planet––life itself. All life grew from one cell into millions of species, into the rich, diverse, and infinitely interesting forms we know––from mushrooms and mice to wheat and giant cedars, from fungi and frogs to chimpanzees and human beings. We are all related; we all came from the same beginning. There never has been a grander, more awe-inspiring creation story, and it is available to Christianity and to other religious traditions as a way to reimagine God the Creator in twenty-first-century terms.

This story also provides us with a new model of human life, one that is based on the best science of our day––in other words, on reality as presently understood. In this story, human beings are not individuals with the power to use nature in whatever ways we wish. Rather, we are dependent on nature and responsible for it. In a sharp reversal, we do not control nature, but rely utterly on it. In this picture, human beings are products of nature and depend on it for our every breath and bit of food. We cannot live for more than a few minutes without air, a few days without water, a few weeks without food. The rest of nature does not, however, depend on us.”

––Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, “A Manifesto to North American Middle-Class Christians,” by Sallie McFague, pg. 246-7