As director of New Visions of Nature, Science and Religion, a program launched in 2003 at the University of California Santa Barbara and funded by the John Templeton Foundation, Jim Proctor likes to ponder pachyderms. Specifically, he often muses upon the fable of blind men standing by an elephant, arguing over what they have encountered.

“One man grabs the tail and draws his conclusions; another devises theories based on touching the trunk. The problem is that of substituting a part for the whole, and of saying ‘this small niche is my domain,’” Proctor said. “I don’t think this is allowable. To understand something bigger, we have to realize the finiteness of our particular field.”

Proctor is fond of this elephantine metaphor because it provides a clear analogy for the divergent ways scientists and theologians approach life’s largest questions. A natural wonder, the elephant is also an appropriate image because nature has been at the heart of theories of science and religion from the days of Thomas Aquinas and Isaac Newton, right up to contemporary thinkers like Ian Barbour, John Polkinghorne and Holmes Rolston.

“Nature is the mother of all nexus. And, whereas in the recent history of language, nature is defined as birds and trees, an older use goes back to the notion of human nature,” Proctor explained, while describing the New Visions program. “We want to capture all the ways nature is understood and deployed, then look at the assumptions we make. We can’t build a new vision, unless we know what we are building on.”

To organize New Vision’s variety of activities, nature is defined in five different ways: evolutionary nature; emergent nature, meaning from the scientific perspective of complex systems; malleable nature, which examines such phenomena as biotechnology; nature as sacred; and nature as culture.

In October of 2004, sixteen participants — anthropologists, historians, geographers, and mathematicians among them — met in Santa Barbara, California to commence a two-year research program that will explore these divergent understandings of nature. Underlying their conversations, Proctor said, is a theory that certain aspects of spirituality may be as empirically verifiable as are discoveries in science.

This core group is now interacting on-line via a closed forum website, with a plan to reassemble in October 2005. At that time, participants will present early versions of essays based on their research, with the intention of publishing a book in spring of 2006.

Other facets of the New Visions program are running simultaneously. The Dialogues in Nature, Science and Religion lecture series was launched in January of this year when the distinguished scholars Evelyn Fox Keller, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Simon Levin spoke on the topic of “Ecology, Complexity and Metaphor.”

“Theology, for me, should be the equivalent of trying to stretch science beyond the things it can address. It should be a mode of questioning rather than taking everything on faith,” said Dr. Levin, who is the George M. Moffett Professor of Biology at Princeton University, where he is also the Director of the Center for Biocomplexity. “Great religious philosophers of all religions have always confronted these questions.”

The “Dialogues” continued in February when Evan Thompson, the Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Science and the Embodied Mind in the Department of Philosophy at York University, and Frans de Waal discussed “Primates, Monks, and the Mind.”

“In my work with monkeys and apes, I have found many cases of one individual coming to another’s rescue, putting an arm around a victim of attack, or having other emotional responses to the distress of others. More complex forms of empathy occur as well, indicating that primates can take the perspective of the other,” said Dr. Waal, C. H. Candler Professor of Primate Behavior in the Department of Psychology at Emory University.

Concurrently, New Visions is offering an on-line course of study that is open to UCSB students as well as the general public. This curriculum includes lectures, readings and discussion forums that feature a wide range of scholarly perspectives on biophysical and human nature.

“We feel one of the biggest impacts we can have is on students,” Proctor elaborated. “We are also constantly on the look-out for dynamite proposals that address the intersection of nature, science and religion.” This inclusive philosophy enables New Visions to cast a wide net when searching for such research proposals.

Lisa Swanstrom, for example, is a doctoral student in comparative literature at UCSB. She received a grant from New Visions to study the representation of technology in science fiction. This genre intrigues her, she said, because it provides a “hypothetical space” in which people of divergent viewpoints can find common ground.

“People read into technology with their own suppositions, so sometimes it’s all grim and dark, like the idea of robots taking over the world,” Swanstrom suggested. “Whereas, I believe technology can advance our human-ness, even our spirituality.”

Another intriguing topic is the ways in which nature is physically zoned apart from metropolitan areas. This is currently being researched by Evan Berry, a doctoral student in the Religious Studies Department at UCSB, who’s also the recipient of a New Visions research grant.

“When we talk about nature, it is always as something out there, beyond a city’s limits. Yet, there are interesting things behind how this dividing line is established, such as specific methods of landscape architecture, that signal the boundary between urban and rural,” said Berry. “Such techniques force us all to agree, at an important level, what nature is, and how one gets to it. These methods, though, ask questions that are part of a broader framework in the fields of nature and ecology.”

Science fiction and landscape design may sound rather far a field from the debate between science and religion. Yet, that’s exactly the point, according to Jim Proctor. He wants to delay any premature synthesis of ideas, and forestall the impulse — so popular within at least the European tradition — to feel that all scholarship must arrive at a “big conclusive moment when everything comes together.”

“There is a huge amount of beautiful diversity,” he continued. “If we go a few levels below large notions of nature, science and religion, and look at things in a more pluralistic sense, we may find notions that are easier to support than a single, grand, synthetic vision.”

That leads Proctor from pachyderms to the symbolism of a dodecahedron, which is the graphic icon for the New Visions program. This geometric structure, each of whose twelve sides is a pentagon, has intrigued mystics and mathematicians from Pythagoras to Johannes Kepler, and Leonardo Da Vinci for the last 2,000 years. It is thought to represent the “fifth element” (after earth, air, fire and water), and to be a perfect mediation of things infinite and finite. Contemplating the dodecahedron, some believe, is to meditate upon the Divine.

“In the end, my challenge is to ask how we can bring things together. Can we come up with something new? We can’t promise any scientifically proven verification of spirituality. We don’t know what we will find,” concluded Proctor. “But we are going to try. I don’t want the academy to hide behind complexities.”

Links of Interest
New Visions of Nature, Science and Religion website

Stephen Henderson is a freelance writer based in New York and a frequent contributor to the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun and Religion News Service.

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