The New Cosmic Story: Inside our Awakening Universe by John F. Haught (review)

No one has written more insistently and beautifully than John Haught about the need for theology to pay greater attention to modern science. This book brings together themes that Haught has been exploring to this end for over thirty years. In it he argues for what he calls an "anticipatory approach" for understanding religion within the scope of the 13.8 billion year history of the cosmos, as well as for understanding the cosmos in the light of religion. He proposes this as a more adequate understanding than two other approaches. The first he names the archaeonomic approach, which maps roughly onto various kinds of reductive materialism that frame their study (or rejection) of religion in terms of modern science, including the New Atheism. The second he calls the analogical approach, which, when it comes to Christianity, corresponds to those strands of the tradition that have been heavily influenced by Neoplatonism. In other words, the vast majority of the history of Christian spirituality would fall within what Haught names the analogical approach.

The archaeonomic approach, on Haught's reading, reduces the full range of possible being in the cosmos to that which is already given in its beginnings by the initial components and the natural laws that constituted the universe at the moment of its first emergence. The archaeonomic approach is, he argues, therefore necessarily pessimistic or even nihilistic, since it cannot ground any real sense of meaning and value in human life, to the extent that they are only epiphenomenal, indeed, ultimately illusory, on archaeonomic terms. It is also no surprise that it will reject the sense of wonder, purpose, beauty, and "rightness" that religion discerns emerging in the history of the cosmos. Using one of the principal metaphors that govern his text, he argues that the archaeonomic approach sees only the "outside" of the story of the cosmos, whereas his preferred anticipatory approach sees the "inside" of the story, with the emergence over time of new levels and depths of rightness.

The analogical approach places the fullness of "rightness" in a transcendent realm outside of time and history, and sees the cosmos and its components as imperfect or limited (a difference in adjective that Haught glosses over too quickly) manifestations or reflections of this fullness. While the analogical approach resists thereby an anthropocentrism that instrumentalizes nature, it cannot, according to Haught, appreciate that there is something at stake in the history of cosmic becoming, but rather focuses its spiritual energies and aspirations on eventually leaving that history in order to enjoy beatitude outside of it. This is why, on Haught's reading, religious believers (including Christians) in the analogical approach generally do not pay much attention to science or appreciate that it has something vital to contribute to their spiritual quest.

The anticipatory approach that Haught recommends places the fullness of rightness in the future, and its actualization is not the result of an irruption from a transcendent realm outside of history, or found in an escape from that history, but is the outcome of the gradual becoming of the cosmos itself. This becoming has seen at least three major epochs—matter, life, and mind—in which a great fullness and rightness has progressively emerged, with further novel emergences likely, or even certain. With "mind" comes religion, in which the cosmos becomes aware of this drama, and senses that fullness of rightness that lies only in the future. This awareness can also be driven by present absence of rightness, or "wrongness": suffering, meaninglessness, death. These are all only evidences, however, that the universe (including religion) is still becoming. What is required is patience—indeed, Haught virtually identifies faith with patience (39).

The bulk of Haught's argument is the presentation of twelves themes—dawning, awakening, transformation, interiority, indestructibility, transcendence, symbolism, obligation, purpose, wrongness, happiness, prayerfulness—that he takes to be representative of religions since the axial age (Jaspers is an important source for his understanding of...