I'm sorry to hear that the expert take is discouraging, since your purpose sounded excellent and promising. If the reality check indicates proper directions for improvement, you still may end up playing a great role in rescuing us all.Robert Tulip wrote: I have been working rather ambitiously on a scientific article with the title Large Scale Ocean Based Algae Production: A Personal Research Journey. I just received comments from an ocean scientist politely explaining why many of my assumptions and suggestions are not feasible. Although that is disappointing, and means my ambitious ideas are not immediately realistic, I am happy to have this reality check.
Still, it might be a signal to you that market incentives are likely to make a bigger difference than heroic imagination. Many scientists and engineers cooperating are likely to solve problems that a few cannot defeat.Robert Tulip wrote: Trying to engage directly in scientific fields where I lack expertise is obviously a hard ask. But it has been an interesting way of thinking for me. The philosophical ground is where I can defend my views more adequately, looking at big picture policy implications. Even so, a fertile creative imagination can help open productive conversations to liberate discussion about practical priorities and alternatives. My genre is more utopia than dystopia, using utopian imagination about the boundaries of the possible to open people’s minds and create hope in rather bleak circumstances.
In particular, theology strives for a unity of values, a perspective that allows all of our simple motivations and all of our fundamental tasks in life to be integrated into an overall relationship. The Good. Such a perspective, or at least the learning on the way to it, can shed considerable light on our relationship to our values, where reason and instinct are often at odds. A functional theology has to let ideals thrown up by reason give way at times to practical considerations, but without simply abandoning "the Good" and the quest for it. As a simple example, "there is neither male nor female" according to St. Paul, but that ideal has to be modulated appropriately to reject the status difference while permitting the biological differences.Robert Tulip wrote:Your phrase “functional theology” will seem out of place to many in a discussion of the melting Arctic. “Functional theology” is not only out of place at first sight, scientists would often see it as an oxymoron, self-contradictory, since theology is generally seen as lacking any practical function due to its pervasive fantasy assumptions. Yet perhaps these big mythological stories from religion can help us to step back from the immediacy of science and politics to place the urgent ethical issues of allowing our planet to collapse around our ears in some sort of strategic context.Harry Marks wrote:It is directly relevant to the on-going reassessment within Christianity. The whole idea of transcendence is having to be integrated with a more functional theology.
Some values and their instantiations, such as modes of relationship, can transcend others. We all understand how the value of good health transcends the signals provided by discomfort and even pain of exercise. Imagery of a "transcendent reality" (like, say, whoever set the key physical constants in the universe) can serve as a consistent evocation of the transcendence of morality when it conflicts with esthetics. But our stories meant to convey that process are breaking down under the weight of implausibility. The biggest reassessment in theology is to import the cruciform relationship of Jesus to history into the narratives about God's nature. First Jesus became God, and now God is becoming Jesus.Robert Tulip wrote:Language about “transcendence” is exactly the metaphysical mentality that scientists traditionally find hardest to engage with, due to its associations with escaping reality into comforting fantasy. I like your idea of exploring a functional theory of transcendence as a way to reassess Christianity. For example, in terms of Arctic collapse, we can see the previous long-lasting orderly natural stability of the ice over the last few million years as existing under the grace of God, while the sudden current death spiral of polar ice results from the depraved state of corruption that humanity has inflicted upon the planet. The practical ecological function of theology can be to work out how to transform a state of corruption into a state of grace.
It is difficult to maintain plausibility for a narrative of God as creator, though many find it unproblematic. Setting that aside, we still have a relationship of awe, dependence and a sense of the holy with "Creation", i.e. nature. That natural relationship is a vital element of a sustainable relationship with life itself, as we are coming to realize. We are now finding that we got the whole relationship of freedom wrong, by demanding an external material freedom at the expense of our moral and relational freedom.
The trauma we have inflicted, and continue to inflict, on our physical environment is a reflection of the trauma inflicted by Europeans upon "primitive" people, who were allowed to be only a means to Eurocentric ends. Not that Europeans bear some particular guilt - it was just the extension of the craving to sit atop domination systems, to put the necks of "other people" under our knee. And virtually every culture has had some version of domination systems: it is an unreflective extension of our will to seek our goals unhindered by the needs of others.
Which brings us to your proposal to rise from a state of corruption to a state of grace. I find it useful to think of grace as one of my ministers explained it, in my youth. There is no fundamental difference between the grace we admire in an accomplished dancer and the grace of God shedding unmerited favor on people. If we can sufficiently balance our urges for comfort and security with the needs for grace created by living in competition and community, we can achieve a common life that is graceful. But it must be choreographed by visions of possible harmony and beauty replacing violence and domination. And if we can do that with other people, we can learn to draw the circle wide enough to include other species and all of nature.
Too bad we start in the face of such a world-historical crisis, but maybe that has the potential to lend a sacred status to our efforts to live in harmony with nature. As we know from "Tribe" and some of the other recent readings here, the survival of the civilization can give a transcendent sense of meaning to what steps we take for its sake.
I agree that nature's stable order conveys a sense of grace, and led us into some of the most human endeavors. It was the effort to solve calendar problems created by the disjunction of lunar and solar years, permitting forecasts of the calendar, that gave us much of the basis of mathematics. I don't think wildness per se is a useful image of that order, but it is a doorway back to the needed humility and awe that can put our cravings and ambitions into a needed perspective. We have the guns to shoot all the rhinoceroses in nature, but we do not have the means to bring them back if we do so. A certain kind of relationship with ourselves and each other is crucial to solving the problems created by our material masteries.Robert Tulip wrote:I find this sense of natural transcendence seen in stable planetary order the most meaningful and coherent way to interpret metaphysical language about grace. Strong Biblical support for this line of thinking comes from the line in Revelation 11:18 which says the wrath of God is against those who destroy the earth. Enlisting theology to explain why we should not destroy the earth is entirely functional, as a way to mitigate wrath, interpreted in terms of natural collapse.