Welcome to the Ecozoic Era

Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow offer a new vision of reality, evolution, and the divine.

By Amy Hassinger

Spring 2006 2.15.06

Some quotes:

If we are to deepen our understanding of the universe or of God, if we are to change our collective behavior and our destiny, Dowd and Barlow say, we need a new story, a story based in scientific discovery, but also reverent of the awesomeness of the universe. A better metaphor for the universe, they say, is a set of Russian nesting dolls, made up of levels of what they call nested creativity: subatomic particles within atoms, within molecules, within cells, within organisms, and so on. Each level is uniquely creative, that is, has the power to bring something new into existence. Stars create atoms; atoms create substances like the oxygen we breathe; human cultures create art, religions, and technology. The largest nesting doll is God—or Allah, Adonai, Source of Life, Ultimate Reality, Nature, the Universe, whatever name describes the divine whole for you, the ultimate creative reality that includes and transcends all other levels of reality. God is not outside of creation. God is an integral part of it—in fact, is it.

In this metaphor, we humans are nested within that divine whole. We were not plunked here by a maker separate from us. Nor is our existence a meaningless evolutionary fluke. The basic elements that make up our bodies—carbon, calcium, iron—were forged inside supernovas, dying stars, and are billions of years old. We are, in fact, made of stardust. We are intimately related to the universe. As early-twentieth-century British biologist Julian Huxley put it, “We are the universe becoming conscious of itself.”

Intrigued, I came back the next night for a workshop presented by both Dowd and Barlow. Bespectacled and soft spoken, Barlow has a calmer and more measured style than her husband, yet she is just as passionate about her subject, which is science. As visual proof of Huxley’s idea, she often displays the famous picture of Earth from space, the “Big Blue Marble” taken from Apollo 17 in 1972, showing our gorgeous blue and white globe floating in a sea of black. The picture is a dazzling reminder, she says, that our billion-year-old Earth has now evolved to the point that it can “send a piece of itself out to look back and say, ‘Whoa. This is who I am.’”

Full article here:

http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/thewonderofevolution2679.shtml