In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

135 Chapter Seven Toward Intimate Symbols of Ultimacy Whereas issues of scale, idolatry, explanation, and experience put pressure on religious thinking to develop increasingly transcendent symbols, something parallel exerts an opposite pressure to develop increasingly intimate symbols, symbols proximate to the exigencies of life. These are the issues that in summary fashion can be called, respectively, the intension of nature within us, the uncanny, meaningfulness, and the correction of meaning. I. Nature’s Depths The “intension” of nature stands in parallel contrast with the “extension” of nature discussed in the previous chapter under the rubric of scale. Nature is vast in its extension beyond anything the ancient traditions imagined. Symbols of ultimacy regarding the radical contingency of the cosmos need to be scaled to that immensity. Similarly, nature here and now consists of a depth of layers of physical organization that is seemingly infinite in its intensity, or intension. The elementary particles and forces that sorted themselves out in the first minutes after the Big Bang have instances with existential location within the atoms that make up our bodies. Those atoms exist within the molecules of our bodies that transform one another through biochemical processes. These molecules exist within us carrying the history of evolution whereby they are formed into organic environments for themselves. This evolutionary history has resulted in layer upon layer of inorganic and organic organization that constitutes the existential location for us as bodies. Part of our nature is to be on a planet with the approximate gravity of Earth, within certain limits of tolerance of air pressure and atmospheric chemical composition. In order to have any existential location, we need to be a certain distance from a heat source such as the sun, which itself has to be of a certain temperature; that relation to the sun would be intolerable for our existence if there were 136 v Ultimates not atmospheric protections from harmful solar radiation: The ozone layer is bone of my bone. What is my body? Is it the organization of cells that carry my DNA? Yes, but more. My cells are organic but contain, indeed require, all sorts of inorganic substances, “minerals” of the sort listed under that head on the vitamin bottle. Many of the particular particles of these inorganic substances began eons ago and will continue for eons after my organic body is no more. Even the highly evolved and complicated organs of my body, which interact intensively on so many levels to keep me alive as a whole, are themselves involved in metabolic chains that extend far beyond my body. Within me are the nourishing chemicals from my breakfast banana, flown to me on an airplane made of metals formed in the Earth’s core and powered by gasoline that once was dinosaurs, from the tropical rain forest whose ecology is vastly different from my neighborhood ecology that won’t grow bananas, which provided it with a banana DNA that gathers light generated by the sun: my body right now is being renewed with banana-reconstituted sunshine. Internal to the existential location of my body, bounded by my skin, are elements whose own existential location consists of systems of systems of causal interactions, each as intensionally deep as what is “within” me.” What is “within” me, however, is not only the material organized according to my DNA. Uncounted numbers of microbes live within me, in my mouth and gut, within my organs, and on my skin.1 My organs could not function if it were not for some of these microbes, and my body is the living environment for them. These and other microbes provided the environment within which my species evolved, and they are crucial for my continued existence. When I die, much of my body will be returned to its microbial elements. Of course, I am not only my body, its sustaining causal environment, and the elements to which it is host. My DNA is possible and composes me because of my parents and their lineages, all of which depend on social organization. For the last several scores of million years that social organization has been vertebrate, and then mammal; for the last several scores of thousand years that social organization has been human, structured by communication through semiotic codes. I bear within me now, not only the past history that led up to the present, but the layers of social structure embodied in me. By and large the social organizing principles of high civilization provide top–down...

Share