27 Apr REV.PAT BAILEY: EVOLVING LANDSCAPES, “SEAMLESSNESS”
Editor’s note: Rev. Pat Bailey, pastor of Telluride’s Christ Presbyterian Church, takes a developmental and evolutionary view of faith, spirituality, and religious community. Join him for his weekly blog as he explores the ever-changing landscapes of perspectives and consciousness and discusses both the challenges and promise of trying to make meaning in our evolving social context. Rev. Bailey holds a Master of Divinity from Columbia Seminary, a Master of Theology in comparative religion from Emory University, and will receive his Doctor of Ministry from San Francisco Theological Seminary in May.
Pastor Pat Bailey
In preparation for a class I will be teaching this summer in our community, I have been reviewing the work of Brian Swimme. Swimme holds a Phd in mathematics and has focused much of his study on geological evolution, gravitation, and cosmology. He is now a professor of cosmology at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
In his series “The Powers of the Universe,” Swimme begins by talking about what he calls “seamlessness.” What he is trying to get at is that which connects the natural order as a whole, what is sometimes referred to as the implicate order or the ground of being. So, Swimme argues from quantum theory first that on the atomic level the universe is connected in ways that transcend space and time, that is, that the universe is a “widely dispersed unitary event.” From that perspective Swimme then proposes that the nature of the universe is “pure generativity.” Everything that comes into being, then, emerges out of this seamlessness.
I find it interesting how similar Swimme’s cosmology is to the views of ancient Chinese Taoists. For them, Absence was that out of which Presence, or the ten thousand things, arises and then returns (see David Hinton’s wonderful treatment of these themes in his book Hunger Mountain). Chi in the ancient system is the universal breath force, a hunger giving form and life to the ten thousand things and driving their perpetual transformations. The universe, then, is a single tissue infused with Chi.
The great philosophical question of today is no longer, “Does God exist?” Traditionally that question has involved trying to prove or disprove the existence of a supernatural being separate from Nature. The deeper question for today is the relationship between the many and the whole, or the nature of the universe beyond the reductionist categories of both supernaturalism and materialism. In the classic sense of our language about God being an attempt to name the unnamable, to say something provisional about the greater mystery of our existence, ours is a rich inheritance of wisdom in the musings of past, present, and future.
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