One of the reasons why cosmic models interest me is because the starting point for everything, for me, is to build up a big picture as rapidly as possible. Whenever in the past we’ve moved into a new area, I’ve always wasted a lot of gas getting a feel for the whole metro area, quickly and hands on, of course. Look and see. Long before I knew my own neighborhood even reasonably well just north of Detroit, I’d driven the whole length of Interstates 94, 696, 275, 75, 96 and the Lodge Freeway and knew what they were trying to do. I start with a map and then try to fill in the details, the big chunks first. In the process you discover that some freeways aren’t finished yet, that Outer Drives are broken, that beltways aren’t buckled, etc.
When it comes to border zones, particularly the regions beyond the border at the entrance of which barriers bar the way, the difficulties are much greater, but not insurmountable. Some people claim to have been over there. You can read reports and study ancient maps. In this process geographies of the beyond are possible—but they do resemble the strange things medieval authors produced, all from hearsay, just sitting someplace in a monastery. Foolish of me to be one of these monks, but the itch is irresistible.
A certain discipline helps in building or judging models. That discipline is to subject models to a test of comprehensiveness. Let me illustrate this. Despite my very strong conviction that the human mind, the soul, or consciousness (I tend to use these words interchangeably) is radically different from matter, a difference in kind, not merely of degree, I’m very resistant to cosmic models that make humanity the center of reality or of a divine project. Why? Because the visible universe is incomprehensively vast. It’s incommensurable with the human. Now, mind you, I’ve no problem crediting that an invisible, subtle, spiritual cosmos may coexist with the physical—indeed that the two may be meaningfully related. Such a hypothesis seems reasonable to me. But I’m forced to conclude that the human phenomenon itself (even extended to include all life) is most decidedly a minor something—even if I assume, as I actually do, that it is part of a greater spiritual reality. I see us as temporarily marooned, as it were, marooned in matter. That we should take ourselves seriously is good and proper. We have our own legitimacy. I merely object to making human fate central—because we are so incredibly small.
Another aspect of applying a test of comprehensiveness is to see if a model accommodates the whole range of reasonably discoverable experiences reported by humanity. Where dogmatic elements in some cosmology deny such experiences ex cathedra I see a problem. Two examples are Christian denial of the possibility of reincarnation and materialists’ denial of miracles. I also have problems with the way most faith systems explain miracles. But I have no difficulty accepting Thomas Aquinas’ definition in Summa Contra Gentiles: “Those things are properly called miracles which are done by divine agency beyond the order commonly observed in nature.”* My inclination, to be sure, is to understand “divine agency” in my own way, thus not in a manner that narrows the agency to the usual, narrow human conception.
A final comment on cosmologies derived from revelation as this word is usually understood in the Judeo-Christian and Muslim faiths. I accept the notion of revelation much in the same way as I accept miracles, thus as something that reaches us from a higher order. But revelation is acquired by means of the human consciousness and is therefore subject to filtering by existing knowledge, culture, and understanding. Genuine truth reaches us, but the interpretation of it as the literal word of God is, when subjected to a test of comprehensiveness, contradicted by the contents of these scriptures themselves. A real stumbling block, for me, for instance, is the concept of a chosen people.
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*I found this quote in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Miracles,” here.
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