Our Common Story: Quotes

“History as a discipline traditionally begins with written records from about 5,500 years ago...  We need to extend our story backward, for the five thousand years of recorded history tells only a millionth of the lifetime of the Earth.  To understand the kind of world we live in and the kind of creature we are, we must look beyond the written record... Within the last fifty years the scientific community has established a verifiable, and largely verified, account of the origins of our universe – of where we came from, how we got here, and where we may be going.  This is a creation story for our time – for a world built on the discoveries of modern science, a world of jet travel, heart transplants, and the worldwide Internet.”
– Cynthia Stokes Brown.

Brown, Cynthia Stokes. Big History : From the Big Bang to the Present. New York: New Press : Distributed by W.W. Norton, 2007. (p. xi)

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"For philosophers, the most important discovery of modern science has been the history of Nature."
 – Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker

von Weizsäcker, Carl Friedrich. in Forward to Bernd-Olaf Küppers, Der Ursprung biologischer Information (Munich: R. Piper and Co., 1986); Information and the Origin of Life, trans. By Paul Wooley (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), p. xi.

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 “Creation myths are powerful because they speak to our deep spiritual, psychic, and social need for a sense of place and a sense of belonging.  Because they provide so fundamental a sense of orientation, they are often integrated into religious thinking at the deepest levels...  It is one of the many odd features of modern society that despite having access to more hard information than any earlier society, those in modern educational systems do not normally teach such a story.  Instead, from schools to universities to research institutes, we teach about origins in disconnected fragments.  We seem incapable of offering a unified account of how things came to be the way they are.” 
– David Christian

Christian, David (2004). Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley, University of California Press. (p. 2)

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“Metanarratives exist, they are powerful, and they are potent.  We may be able to domesticate them; but we will never eradicate them.  Besides, while grand narratives are powerful, subliminal grand narratives can be even more powerful.  Yet a ‘modern creation myth’ already exists just below the surface of modern knowledge.  It exists in the dangerous form of poorly articulated and poorly understood fragments of modern knowledge that have undermined traditional accounts of reality without being integrated into a new vision of reality.  Only when a modern creation myth has been teased out into a coherent story will it really be possible to take the next step: of criticizing it, deconstructing it, and perhaps improving it.  In history as in building, construction must precede deconstruction.  We must see the modern creation myth before we can criticize it.  And we must articulate it before we can see it.” 
– David Christian

Christian, David (2004). Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley, University of California Press. (p. 10)

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“We have inherited from our forefathers the keen longing for unified, all-embracing knowledge.  The very name given to the highest institutions of learning remind us, that from antiquity and throughout many centuries, the universal aspect has been the only one to be given full credit. But the spread, both in width and depth, of the multifarious branches of knowledge by during the last hundred odd years has confronted us with a queer dilemma.  We feel clearly that we are only now beginning to require reliable material for welding together the sum total of all that is known into a whole; but, on the other hand, it has become next to impossible for a single mind to fully command more than a small specialized portion of it. I can see no other escape from this dilemma (lest our true aim be lost for ever) than that some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them - and at the risk of making fools of ourselves.  So much for my apology.” – Edwin Schrödinger

 Schrödinger, Edwin, and Roger Penrose. What Is Life? With "Mind and Matter". New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Preface.

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“Without a meaningful, believable story that explains the world we actually live in, people have no idea how to think about the big picture. And without a big picture, we are very small people.”

1. Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams

(p. 84)

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 “Many of humanity’s most dangerous problems arise from our seventeenth-century way of looking at the universe, which is at odds with the principles of science that we blithely use in countless technologies.  The main threats to our survival result from the almost total disjunction between the power of our technologies and the wisdom required to use them over the long period during which their effects will last.  A wise perspective must include a cosmological time-scale and be based in a reality that includes quantum mechanics, relativity, evolution and other scientific theories that underlie technologies like computers and cell phones, global positioning systems, and genetic engineering...  As a society, we have been exploiting the powers of a universe to whose existence we are blind.  Now we finally have the opportunity to end this alienation... discovering the universal reality in which we are all immersed.” – Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams

Primack, Joel R., and Nancy Ellen Abrams. The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos. New York: Riverhead, 2006, p. 4

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"Most people tend to identify themselves with fairly narrow categories — a nationality, a race, a religion — which leads not only to conflicts but also to a stunting of imagination and potential. The wider our sense of identity, the more likely we will be able to experience our genuine connection to the universe. If a lost child who knew nothing of her background and had been raised by an indifferent family suddenly discovered that she was the direct descendant of an illustrious house traceable back many centuries, her sense of identity would expand momentously even before anything else changed. The discovery of our own cosmic genealogies may have a similar expansive effect. We humans are luminous, stardust beings." (p. 119)

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“Most of us have grown up thinking that there is no basis for our feeling central or even important to the cosmos.  But with the new evidence it turns out that this perspective is nothing but a prejudice...  Prescientific people always saw themselves at the center of the world, whatever their world was.  They were wrong on the details, but they were right on a deep level: the human instinct to experience ourselves as central reflects something real about the universe, something independent of our viewpoint.”  – Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams

Primack, Joel R., and Nancy Ellen Abrams. The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos. New York: Riverhead, 2006, p. f.

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 “Scientists have discovered that evolution is not mechanistic, meaningless process.  Admittedly, if one looks primarily at interpretations drawn by prominent scientists and natural philosophers not long dead, there is ample reason to conclude that the history of change in our Universe gives no guidance for how we should lead our lives and weave our legacies.  But when we look at what prominent scientists alive today know and are discovering, we find a creation story that we can once again embrace as sacred, as holy, as ours.” – Michael Dowd

Dowd, Michael. Thank God for Evolution! New York: Viking, 2007, p. 2.

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 “Each of these cultures told sacred stories about how and why everything came into being, what is important, and how to survive and thrive in the landscapes and cultures in which they lived.  To interpret the early chapters of Genesis – or any of the world’s creation narratives – as representing the entire history of the Universe, or it imagine them as rival rather than complementary views of a larger reality, is to trivialize these holy texts.  It is also time for scientists to share their work with religionists and to understand that the traditions will not go away.  The ancient religious paths are aching for coherence with the great discoveries born of the quest to understand this vast Universe, the living world, our evolved selves, and especially our innermost psyches.” .” – Michael Dowd

Dowd, Michael. Thank God for Evolution! New York: Viking, 2007, p. 5.

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 “The age of nations has passed; Now, unless we wish to perish, we must shake off our old prejudices and build the earth...  The more scientifically I regard the world, the less can I see any possible biological future for it except in the active consciousness of its unity.  Life cannot henceforth advance on our planet (and nothing will prevent it advancing -- not even its inner servitudes) except by breaking down the partitions which still divide human activity, and entrusting itself unhesitatingly to faith in the future.”  – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)

Teilhard, Pierre. Human Energy. Translated by J.M. Cohen. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969, pp. 37-38

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For our age, to have become conscious of evolution means something very different and much more than having discovered one further fact...  Blind indeed are those who do not see the sweep of a movement whose orb infinitely transcends the natural sciences and has successfully invaded and conquered the surrounding territory – chemistry, physics, sociology, and even mathematics and the history of religions. One after the other all the fields of human knowledge have been shaken and carried away by the same under-water current in the direction of some development.  Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis?  It is more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)

Teilhard, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper, [1955] 1959, p. 219

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“There is nothing in modern cosmology that requires the existential view, nor anything that requires the meaningful view. The bottom line of both views is scientific accuracy: both hold that interpretations of reality where science is compromised for ideological purity should be rejected. But given this bottom line, an attitude toward the discoveries of modern cosmology is every person’s choice… The existential view automatically feels more familiar and natural because the West has cultivated it for generations… But where the existential view veers off into emotions like despair or resignation or a feeling of insignificance or even dark satisfaction, those emotions are arbitrary and unnecessary. The meaningful universe encompasses the existential, in the sense that the meaningful can understand the existential, but the existential cannot see the meaningful.”
 – Joel R. Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams

Primack, Joel R., and Nancy Ellen Abrams. The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos. New York: Riverhead, 2006. (pp. 274-275)

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“The choice of attitude is not a casual one. It’s all too easy to see scientific cosmology as an intellectual challenge, entertainment, cocktail banter, or even, as some cosmologists treat it, a professionally played sport, because these are the normal attitudes as long as we don’t participate in what a new universe means. But cosmology is not a game; it has the power to overturn the fundamental institutions of society.”
– Joel R. Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams

Primack, Joel R., and Nancy Ellen Abrams. The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos. New York: Riverhead, 2006. (p. 275)

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“Blind indeed are those who do not see the sweep of a movement whose orb infinitely transcends the natural sciences and has successfully invaded and conquered the surrounding territory-chemistry, physics, sociology, and even mathematics and the history of religions. One after the other all the fields of human knowledge have been shaken and carried away by the same under-water current in the direction of some development.  Is evolution a theory, a system, or an hypothesis? It is more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow."
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Science and Christ, New York: Harper & Row, 1968, p. 193.V, 246  ???

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“It's all a question of story.  We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story.  We are in between stories.  The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective.  Yet we have not learned the new story.  Our traditional story of the universe sustained us for a long period of time.  It shaped our emotional attitudes, provided us with life purposes, and energized action.  It consecrated suffering and integrated knowledge.  We awoke in the morning and knew where we were.  We could answer the questions of our children.  We could identify crime, punish transgressors.  Everything was taken care of because the story was there.  It did not necessarily make people good, nor did it take away the pains and stupidities of life or make for unfailing warmth in human association.  It did provide a context in which life could function in a meaningful manner.
 – Thomas Berry
Berry, Thomas.The Dream of the Earth, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. p.123.


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Education and religion need to ground themselves within the  empirical story of the Universe. Within this functional cosmology, we can overcome our alienation, and begin the renewal of life on a sustainable basis. This story is a numinous, revelatory narrative that can inspire the vision and energy needed to bring ourselves and the entire planet into a new order of magnificence.” 
— Thomas Berry

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“The final benefit of this story might be to enable the human community to become present to the larger Earth community in a mutually enhancing manner.  We can hope that it will soon be finding expression not simply in narrative such as this but in poetry, music, and ritual throughout the entire range of modern culture, on a universal scale.  Such expressions will sensitize people to the story that every river and every star and every animal is telling.  The goal is not to read a book; the goal is to read the story taking place all around us
– Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme

 Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, (1992) The Universe Story.  San Francisco: Harper, p. 3.