The Universe as Sacred Story: Bridging Science and Spirit

Teaching undergraduate students this semester has revealed their deepest concerns about technology’s growing influence on human identity. While they grapple with immediate challenges like social media addiction and its effects on attention and authenticity, their greatest fear centers on the approaching frontier of human-technology fusion. These students are watching the rapid advance of transhumanist technologies – from biohacking to neural implants. They are particularly unsettled by Ray Kurzweil’s prediction that within their lifetime, humanity will merge completely with technology in the Singularity. His vision of nanobots in our bloodstream creating brain-computer interfaces, leading to the rise of the “Techno Sapien,” strikes at the heart of their anxiety: not just being overtaken by artificial intelligence, but losing their essential humanity.

This fear is not unfounded. Today’s children are immersed in technology from early ages, handed iPads and iPhones as digital pacifiers. By the time they get to college, students find themselves caught between two impossible demands: processing an overwhelming flood of information that exceeds human cognitive limits, while trying to preserve their authentic selves. Many see AI tools like ChatGPT not as innovations, but as necessary crutches for survival in an educational system that has become a training ground for an increasingly mechanized world. Their core anxiety is not about technology itself – it is about the potential loss of human identity in a culture that prizes speed, efficiency, and power over genuine human development. What they fear most is not obsolescence, but the dissolution of self.

The Search for Soul

Despite their digital fatigue, students come alive when discussions turn to spirituality and the soul. Like fish suddenly discovering water, they dive deep into these conversations with newfound awareness and enthusiasm. Thomas Merton’s exploration of the True Self versus the False Self particularly resonates with them:

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy… The secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God… If I find God, I find myself and if I find myself, I will find God.

These words spark urgent questions for a generation shaped by technology: How does one discover the “true self” in a world governed by algorithms? What does divine presence mean in an age of information overflow? As technology increasingly shapes human consciousness, what are we becoming? And what role can religion play in this transformation?

Our traditional religious frameworks seem inadequate for addressing these questions. Students tell me that discussions of God become meaningful when connected to their lived reality – through the lens of social media, ecological concerns, quantum physics, and evolution. Ancient Greek metaphysical concepts like consubstantiality and the hypostatic union feel distant and abstract to them. When religion fails to speak to contemporary experience, it becomes background noise in the already cluttered human mental landscape. A sermon that ignores our technological reality might well be a reading from the phone book—both equally disconnected from a true search for meaning.    

The disconnect between science and religion, however, cuts both ways. Many scientists claim to comprehend the mind of God while simultaneously dismissing God’s existence. Some prominent voices in science reject religion based on elementary school understandings of faith, treating it as a collection of superstitious myths and ghostly figures fundamentally incompatible with scientific brilliance.

God as Depth and Future

Paul Tillich, the twentieth-century theologian, offers a more nuanced perspective. Writing in response to Christianity’s growing disconnect from modern life, he proposed that God is not a cosmic wizard but rather the inexhaustible depth and ground from which all experience emerges. We constantly dwell within this depth without directly perceiving it – it is the medium of our experience rather than its object. Beneath the surface of everyday life lies an infinite wellspring of meaning, an excess that overflows all phenomena. This infinite, inexhaustible depth is what we call God.

Following this understanding, atheism becomes impossible for anyone who acknowledges life’s profound depth. Religion, then, becomes the search for and naming of this depth. It is a surrender to the symbols and stories that give us courage to explore the infinite – not to prove God’s existence like any other object in the universe, but to plumb the mysterious depths that draw us ever inward and onward. As Tillich himself wrote:

A God whose existence or nonexistence you can argue is a thing beside others within the universe of existing things…. It is regrettable that scientists believe that they have refuted religion when they rightly have shown that there is no evidence whatsoever for the assumption that such a being exists. Actually, they not only have refuted religion, but they have done it a considerable service. They have forced it to reconsider and restate the meaning of the tremendous word God.

Ironically, scientists who dismiss religion as nonsense do believers a favor – they help us abandon the notion of God as a “Superman” and embrace a deeper understanding of divinity as infinite depth itself.

The Center’s Vision

The Center for Christogenesis envisions a bold synthesis of religion and science that reflects the panpsychic nature of our cosmos – a universe fundamentally characterized by both mind and matter. Teilhard de Chardin explored this relationship deeply, warning that divorcing science from the religious quest for ultimate meaning could lead to our destruction.

Teilhard recognized that science, despite its claims of pure objectivity, is driven by deeply spiritual impulses: the passion for discovery, belief in human perfectibility, the search for unity, and the drive for human betterment. The forces that propel scientific research, when oriented toward totality and future possibility, are fundamentally religious in nature.  By freeing religion from rigid dogmatic systems and recognizing its natural role in cosmic development, we can see how both science and religion pursue ultimate meaning and unity. Science alone, with its analytical and fragmentary approach, cannot satisfy our deepest yearning for meaning. Its powerful capacity for analysis must be balanced by a more holistic, global way of thinking – one that embraces religious insight. What we need, Teilhard argued, is a dual transformation: a science charged with faith and a religion that recognizes itself as integral to scientific understanding. He envisioned a new religious-scientific synthesis – a cosmotheandrism- born from the hybridization of these seemingly opposing domains. Through this integration, scientific work assumes the dignity of sacred duty, becoming like religion itself: charged with the promise of future possibility.

Thomas Berry, the late visionary geologian, spoke of humanity’s urgent need for a new universe story. As he wrote in “Christianity and Ecology”: “This universe, which we must now understand as our sacred universe, is the same universe as that presented in the Book of Genesis. It is a universe, however, that is experienced through immediate empirical observation rather than simply through the inspired words of a narrator writing in a distant region and an ancient time in a strange language.” For Berry, the future survival of both humanity and nature depends on their journey forward together. The moment calls for a new narrative – one that merges scientific understanding with religious meaning to illuminate the sacred nature of planetary life. Beatrice Bruteau captured this urgency brilliantly: “Something will explode if we persist in trying to squeeze into our old tumble-down huts the material and spiritual forces that are henceforward on the scale of the world.” Like Teilhard de Chardin, she recognized that superficial changes will not suffice: “An entire attitude, mind-set, way of identifying self and others and perceiving the world has to shift first, before any talk of economic, political, and social arrangements can be made. Anything else is premature, useless and possibly dangerous.”

We stand now at a precipice – the earth’s foundation shows widening cracks, and our future appears increasingly uncertain. Our path toward greater life requires us to view science and religion “synoptically,” seeing with the other, fostering a deep faith in future possibility. This is what Teilhard envisioned: “In the future the only religion possible is the religion which will teach us, in the very first place, to recognize, love, and serve with passion the universe of which we form a part.”


A Message from Ilia Delio and Jack Caputo on Religion as the Depth Dimension of Life
Video Here

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