Product Description

For many of us, the scientific breakthroughs of our times--the Big Bang, evolution, quantum physics, and relativity--denote an existence that is bleak, devoid of meaning, or pointless. But here, eminent biologist Goodenough shows how the scientific worldview need not be a source of despair. Indeed, it can be a wellspring of solace and hope. This eloquent volume reconciles our contemporary scientific understanding of reality with our timeless spiritual yearnings for reverence and continuity. Addressing ideas like evolution, emotions, sexuality, and death, The Sacred Depths of Nature brings rich, uncluttered detail to the workings of nature in general and of living creatures in particular. Goodenough's clear thinking and writing will allow even non-scientists to appreciate that the origins of life and the universe are no less meaningful in light of our scientific understanding of them. At the end of each chapter, her spiritual reflections respond to nature's complexity with a vibrant emotional intensity and sense of reverent wonder.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #192996 in Books
• Published on: 2000-06-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780195136296
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Amazon.com Review
Ursula Goodenough is an internationally recognized cell biologist; she is also an accomplished amateur theologian--an unusual combination of interests in a time when science and religion are widely divided. In The Sacred Depths of Nature, she proposes what she calls a "planetary ethic" drawing on the lessons of both science and metaphysics, celebrating some of the mysteries that are central to both: "the mystery of why there is anything at all, rather than nothing," for one, and "the mystery of why the universe seems so strange," for another. Exploring scientifically based narratives about the creation of the universe and the origins of life, Goodenough forges a kind of religious naturalism that will not be unfamiliar to readers of New Age literature--save that her naturalism has the hard-nosed rigor of a laboratory-trained scholar behind it. Goodenough offers a crash course in the life sciences for her readers, encompassing the basics, for instance, of biochemistry in just a few paragraphs (and getting it right in the bargain), touching on Darwinian biology and population dynamics and even chaos theory to make "an epic of evolution" that has all the hallmarks of an origin myth. Faith and reason, in her view, are not mutually exclusive, and her well-written treatise makes a good argument for bridging the gap between the two. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly
In eloquent prose, Goodenough, a noted molecular biologist, offers a scientist's insight into the dialogue between science and religion. The book's structure is similar to the Daily Devotionals found in some Protestant denominations, but with a decidedly broader approach to the vast ontological questions being pursued. Beginning with an autobiographical sketch, Goodenough moves resolutely through the major questions of being. Her inquiries cut across the boundaries of cosmology, astrophysics, cell biology, evolutionary theory, sexuality and death, moving into the realms of philosophy and theology. The author, while no theist, recognizes the eternal human quest for meaning engendered by the essentially non-quantifiable mystery of consciousness. Displaying open-mindedness to non-scientific approaches in her search for ultimate understanding, she writes with equal respect of Taoism's enigmatic, ironical credo and of 19th-century Transcendentalists' humanistic vision. This spiritual diversity, accompanied by scientific observations drawn from such authorities as Stephen Hawking and Edward O. Wilson, makes for a stirring, enlightening read. In part a reverential memoir by a dedicated scientist, this book provides a meeting place for the revelations of advanced science and technology and the universal, unanswerable questions of humanity. 18 line drawings.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Scientific American
Several years ago I took a day off from research on wild dolphins to walk miles of remote Australian beach. To the west, the meeting of sea and sky was barely discernible; to the east, searing desert extended 2,000 miles. For hours I walked through this exquisite but barren landscape in utter silence, mourning a recent personal loss. Suddenly, with no warning, the hollow feeling within merged with the emptiness all around into a singular, stunning void that engulfed me with dizzying speed. I collapsed to the ground, reduced to a tiny, isolated speck in a vast, impersonal universe. I struggled to a sitting position, blinking in the midday glare, searching for something, anything, to bring me back to my ordinary self. Nothing. Despite the sun's heat, I felt cold and I was afraid. Then, as if from a great distance, I heard a faint, familiar sound that brought immense relief. A few hundred yards away a dozen cormorants were gathering at the sea's edge to dry their wet, oily wings, squawking and scrambling as they settled into their places on the sand. I drew closer, hoping fiercely that they wouldn't rise up in flight, and beheld the luminous surface of their dark feathers. Those birds could have been anywhere, but instead by some miracle they were right there, then, with me. I felt wave upon wave of gratitude for their existence and for the existence of all sentient beings. In The Sacred Depths of Nature, Ursula Goodenough, one of America's leading cell biologists and a professor of biology at Washington University, gives voice to many such moments of communion with nature. The recognition of nature's power to evoke emotions such as awe and gratitude is, of course, not new, as Goodenough acknowledges in her introduction. Two aspects of her approach, however, are novel. First, Goodenough's "nature" encompasses not just our direct experience of the natural world but also our scientific understanding of it. She argues eloquently that such understanding, far from provoking detachment or despair, can be a wellspring of solace and joy. The second novel aspect is Goodenough's definition of religious experience. For her, experience qualifies as religious if it entails emotions like awe, wonder, gratitude or joy, regardless of whether or not the person associates such emotions with traditional religious creeds, deities or supernatural phenomena. Goodenough, who professes no belief in a god, describes a profoundly religious relationship with the cosmos rooted in her detailed understanding of phenomena such as atoms and stars, the complex workings of a cell, and the astonishing evolutionary emergence of a mind capable of inquiring into its own nature. Such understanding can give rise to what she calls "religious naturalism," a scientifically based reverence for every aspect of the natural world, including ourselves. Goodenough aims to "present an accessible account of our scientific understanding of Nature and then suggest ways that this account can call forth appealing and abiding religious responses."She does this by beginning each chapter with a factual description of a phenomenon critical to life, such as how DNA codes for proteins or how natural selection works, and concluding with a briefer section labeled "Reflections,"in which she shares the thoughts and feelings this scientific knowledge stirs in her. I found this format effective. Her separation of the science and the religious emotions gave me the freedom to first absorb the science as fact, without being distracted by her responses. The "Reflections"were unabashedly personal and gently encouraged me to contemplate my own responses. For a book about a new kind of religion, there is a striking absence of preaching. The Scientific and the Sacred Goodenough presents her scientific knowledge as stories, with plot twists and turns that trigger a "what's next?" curiosity. I assigned several chapters of the book to undergraduates with minimal background in biology, and they found them intelligible and informative, so one does not need to know much about science to enjoy this book. For a scientist like myself, Goodenough's elegant narratives provide a refreshing way to encounter familiar material. I was especially impressed with her ability to cut right to the quick, so that within a few short pages the reader is whisked from the big bang to the emergence of our planet and the birth of life on earth. The factual sections of the book are valuable enough to stand on their own as a brief, highly engaging introduction to the epic of evolution. Would that all scientific texts were so carefully conceived and beautifully written. But the "Reflections" are the best and by far the most original part of the book. Goodenough's luminous prose evokes images and feelings more commonly associated with poetry than science, and her meditations on meaning are infused with wonder and joy. She acknowledges, however, that for many people scientific accounts of nature's workings are more likely to evoke alienation than religious awe (see, for example, Melvin Konner's review of Richard Dawkins's Unweaving the Rainbow in the March issue of Scientific American). In the first set of reflections, she shares her own encounter with nihilistic despair when, as an adolescent, she pondered the night sky. She thought about how each star is dying and the fact that "Our sun too will die, frying the Earth to a crisp during its heat-death, spewing its bits and pieces out into the frigid nothingness of curved spacetime."Such thoughts overwhelmed her: "The night sky was ruined. I would never be able to look at it again.... A bleak emptiness overtook me whenever I thought about what was really going on out in the cosmos or deep in the atom. So I did my best not to think about such things." How she came to terms with such feelings reveals the personal foundations of her religious naturalism: But, since then, I have found a way to defeat the nihilism that lurks in the infinite and the infinitesimal. I have come to understand that I can deflect the apparent pointlessness of it all by realizing that I don't have to seek a point. In any of it. Instead, I can see it as the locus of Mystery.... Inherently pointless, inherently shrouded in its own absence of category. The clouds passing across the face of the deity in the stained-glass images of Heaven....The realization that I needn't ... seek answers to the Big Questions has served as an epiphany. I lie on my back under the stars and the unseen galaxies and I let their enormity wash over me. I assimilate the vastness of the distances, the impermanence, the fact of it all. I go all the way out and then I go all the way down, to the fact of photons without mass and gauge bosons that become massless at high temperatures. I take in the abstractions about forces and symmetries and they caress me like Gregorian chants, the meaning of the words not mattering because the words are so haunting. Mystery generates wonder, and wonder generates awe. The gasp can terrify or the gasp can emancipate. Goodenough's emancipation, through what she calls "a covenant with Mystery,"represents her very personal, hard-won experience of the Divine. One prime reason Goodenough's covenant with mystery is so emancipating is that it allows her to revel in, rather than retreat from, the paradoxes she encounters everywhere as both a scientist and a mortal being. Her articulation of one such paradox, in the chapter on "Multicellularity and Death,"offers a striking example: ... it is here that we arrive at one of the central ironies of human existence. Which is that our sentient brains are uniquely capable of experiencing deep regret and sorrow and fear at the prospect of our own death, yet it was the invention of death, the invention of the germ/soma dichotomy, that made possible the existence of our brains.... Does death have any meaning? Well, yes, it does. Sex without death gets you single-celled algae and fungi; sex with a mortal soma gets you the rest of the eukaryotic creatures. Death is the price paid to have trees and clams and birds and grasshoppers, and death is the price paid to have human consciousness, to be aware of all that shimmering awareness and all that love. My somatic life is the wondrous gift wrought by my forthcoming death. Goodenough's religious naturalism is inspired by the scientific account of cosmic evolution, a story that has important things to say about the universe, where we came from and our place in the larger scheme of things. This particular story is brand-new in the timescale of human life on earth, but, as Goodenough points out, all people feel compelled to develop accounts of the cosmos that tell them "how things are" and which things matter. Although we refer to such stories as myths, in a prescientific world these accounts did exactly what science does for us today: they provided a conceptual framework within which people could comprehend and relate to a mysterious universe. But myths were not just helpful stories; they also served to sanctify the cosmos and our place in it, thereby eliciting a direct experience of the sacred. An Inherited Awe Perhaps an imperative to experience our world as numinous lurks deep within us all, a legacy of tens of thousands of years of ancestral religious practice. The Sacred Depths of Nature can thus be viewed as an invitation to bring together aspects of experience only recently rendered separate by the rise of modern science--but to bring them together in a new way, based on an account of reality potentially shared by people everywhere. Although the emergence of a universal religion based on a shared scientific worldview seems like a distant dream, Goodenough might be right that this is our best hope for a desperately needed global ethic dedicated to the preservation of life on earth.

Customer Reviews

A manual for converts
Few voices are as forceful or as eloquent as that of the convert. This account of personal awe in the face of Nature is a passionate example. From the centre of Christian America, Goodenough explains why ideas of divine forces driving Nature must be replaced. Her replacement, trying to mediate between "cold" science and misleading traditional dogma, is called "natural religion". Astonished by the wonders of cosmology and life, Goodenough became a scientist and shed her monotheistic background. What wasn't thrown out with the theology was her sense of wonder. Having once buried her head beneath a pillow out of despair over her inability to comprehend the cosmos, she relates how she emerged to study science. She chose biology, and it's well for us she did. Her description of protein construction is unmatched in science writing.

In this work, she opens at the beginning, explaining how physics underlies everything, including life. She relates how "life from non-life" can and does occur. She moves to a description of the origins and later development of life's processes. Cell mechanisms are portrayed. In this topic, she creates a wonderful idea - the Mozart Metaphor. We listen to a Mozart sonata with a sense of awe and veneration. Those feelings, she urges, aren't diminished by the knowledge that the music is reducible to blobs of ink on a page. Any musician can read those dots and restore the wonder by playing the music. In life, our knowledge of life's processes doesn't diminish the marvel of them. Goodenough translates that feeling into a "Mystery" which she wishes to share. If you need to understand how much of life functions, but fear abandoning "traditional" beliefs, this book is a fine first step.

A second step is one Goodenough regrettably omits. While her "natural religion" comes accompanied by a wealth of poetic, Biblical and other religious messages, the voice of science itself is silent in this book. Charles Darwin's own "grandeur of this view of life" is a serious omission in a book so descriptive of evolution. While some would resist pairing Darwin with Mozart, the evolutionist's reach extends beyond our tiny world. The same is unlikely to be the case for the composer. It's not enough to turn what science has shown us about life into a new "faith". Practitioners of science deserve hearing, especially when an author is speaking in their name. The information she uses has taken many years, much hard work and no little inspiration. Goodenough might have given that foundation a bit more ink. Some fine chapter illustrations grace the text, but the bibliography is limited. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

There is wonder aplenty in nature and science
"But there must be something more" is a common refrain among those who believe that science robs the world of its meaning; those who cannot countenance that we are ultimately elaborate biochemical reactions, that life emerged from non-life, that stars are nuclear furnaces, that the universe began with a Big Bang. Ursula Goodenough answers this refrain with compassion, patience, poetry, and above all, a command of science and a gift for communicating its achievements and its excitement. In "The Sacred Depths of Nature", Ursula Goodenough, a research biologist, presents a series of meditations on the mysteries of nature. She argues passionately that there are mysteries aplenty within us and about us, and that we needn't invent a supernatural realm. How can one contemplate the exquisite workings of a signal transduction cascade within a living cell, or the grandeur of stellar evolution, or the complexity of biological evolution without a sense of awe? As Carl Sagan was fond of pointing out, these stories have far greater richness and beauty than do any religious myths, no matter how richly embellished.

As Ms. Goodenough amply demonstrates in this unique little book, science needn't be devoid of awe; its language needn't be dry and unpoetic; its students needn't be deprived of feeling. In fact, quite the contrary. The intricacy and grandeur or nature, as revealed by science, is every bit as awe-inspiring as the greatest religious myths; indeed, even more so. Ms. Goodenough argues that understanding life is like understanding a Mozart sonata. As she puts it, "The biochemistry and biophysics are the notes of life; they conspire, collectively, to generate the real unit of life, the organism."

Building on this theme, each chapter explores some aspect of biology, embracing the intrinsic beauty of some complex process, never shying away from accurate terminology, and always employing apt metaphors and analogies that make the concepts accessible to virtually anyone. For example, as Ms. Goodenough explains, "Patterns of gene expression are to organisms as melodies and harmonies are to sonatas. It's all about which sets of proteins appear in a cell at the same time (the chords) and which sets come before or after other sets (the themes) and at what rate they appear (the tempos) and how they modulate one another (the developments and transitions)." Each chapter ends with "reflections", in which the author grants herself greater poetic license to interpret the lessons of the chapter in a personal way, and to explore common intuitions about life, even as they have been sanctified in religious rituals. In one such reflection, Ms. Goodenough's declares "I have come to understand that the self, my self, is inherently sacred. By virtue of its own improbability, its own miracle, its own emergence."

Even if the reader does not come away with the same sense of awe at the workings of nature as the author, there is one observation that will surely be impressed upon him/her; that it is indeed possible for a scientist, a reductionist, a non-believer, to be filled with wonder, gratitude, and awe. These things are not antithetical to science; for some, they are integral to science. Those of us who are scientists typically have appreciated this fact in some way since childhood, although perhaps not as poetically or poignantly as Ms. Goodenough. For those who insist that there must be something more, Ms. Goodenough's reflections may begin to persuade you that there is wonder enough within a single cell to rival any liturgy, and any cathedral. How can anyone who even begins to grasp their inner workings ask for more?

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wishes to appreciate the poetry and awe of science. It takes a small but significant step toward bridging a chasm between science, which is too often perceived as suffocatingly impersonal and dispassionate, and the sacred, which is mistaken for the exclusive domain of religion. My hat is off to Ursula Goodenough. I suspect that she will help to bring a good many talented young people into science who may not have otherwise ventured to go there, and just as importantly, help to remove some of the stigma associated with science and its practitioners.

As good as the best of Loren Eiseley.
This book is a gem. Not only are the science passages an exquisite introduction to astronomy, cell biology (Goodenough's field of expertise), and evolution, but her reflections on the meaning she personally derives from such knowledge leave the reader yearning for more. Her passage on the meaning of death--indeed, a celebration of death, for the kind of life and love only it can call forth--is unsurpassed by all the outpourings of those who have ever written on this subject from the standpoint of the humanities. Most poignant are the places in which Goodenough transcends the innate human urge to find (or make) meaning--when she surrenders to the purest of all religious responses: simple assent. Taking science as far as it can go toward understanding the cosmos, life, and consciousness, she is moved by the wonder of it all to demand no more insight. She is fully, intimately, restfully at home in the universe, in her version of divinity: the sacred depths of nature. At these moments of surrender, the words she offers bring tears to this reader's eyes in their spare beauty. And then, able to draw no more from either the science or her own soul, she offers up a poem or psalm from various of the world's wisdom traditions. Some day, some day, this reader hopes--centuries from now, at best--a new wisdom tradition expressed in the time-tested artisty of poems and psalms will have emerged for those, like Goodenough, on the path of religious naturalism. But the words that will be metered will not be limited to those of Lao Tsu or the Hebrew sages. They will be drawn from the revered works of Eiseley, Leopold, and Goodenough.