16 February 1991
By
John Habgood
On Purpose by Charles Birch, New South Wales University Press,
‘Fallacies of the modern world view have to do with the conception of
the world as substance or machinery, mistaking abstractions for reality,
confusing origins and truth, failing to attribute feeling to things that
feel, recognising ethics as exclusively anthropocentric, thinking a posteriori,
objectifying facts as separated from values, reducing the complex to the
simple and dividing knowledge into distinct disciplines that produce experts
who are often wrong.’
In their place, Charles Birch would like a philosophy and religion ‘that
makes room for purpose as an effective casual agent in the universe’. This
would entail a view of nature as organic and ecological, rather than mechanistic;
an interpretation of lower forms of organisation in terms of higher ones,
as well as vice versa; an acknowledgment of sentience much further down
the organisational ladder than is at present commonly imagined; a biocentric
ethic; and a holistic approach to knowledge.
Strong stuff. It amounts to a call for a revolution in ways of thinking
to break out of the constraints that a falsely mechanistic interpretation
of science has imposed on ourselves and our world. As a good biologist,
Birch begins with life, with what we directly know of feeling, living, purposing
and choosing. His post-Cartesian starting point is: ‘I feel, therefore I
am.’
Read more:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12917566-200-review-gods-aims/#ixzz6jR0WNcVr