Can science, appreciated through sensitive participation, provide a sole foundation for a religious position? Ursula Goodenough joins the increasing list of authors, including Brian Swimme, Thomas Berry, Paul Davies, who argue to varying degrees that it can. She sees religion as telling us "How Things Are" and "Which Things Matter," and thereby "integrat[ing] cosmology and morality." Science, she argues, can substantiate a "religious naturalism," and from this can flow "a planetary ethic, an ethic that would make no claim to supplant existing traditions but would seek to coexist with them, informing our daily lives in our cultural and religious contexts."

The basis of her vision is an open acceptance of both the third-person and the first-person approaches to our religious tendencies. On the one hand, our consciousness, love, empathy, compassion are the consequences of a biochemistry and a nervous system whose evolution we can now understand quite fully. On the other hand, these faculties are the very core of our personal existence. At the third person level, the account is reductionistic: there is at this level no additional vital ingredient required for a scientific description. But she opposes any "nothing but" reductionism. The first-person perspective, my awe at the universe, my love for my fellow beings on the planet, is affirmed in its own right, and is seen as consonant with the scientific account. As a result of the scientific account, we can now see how it is that these feelings are not merely the whim of a moment, or the product of culturally arbitrary conditioning, but are indeed essential to what it is to be a human animal.

As I read Ursula Goodenough unfolding her passionate vision, I become clear why she can truly describe it as religious. The groundwork for a religious naturalism is superbly laid—in this respect the detail and precision with which she presents the context of our human experience is an important advance on previous authors. The structure of her book is also an important innovation, in its alternation of third-person and first-person perspectives. Most importantly of all, she presents a highly coherent case for the possibility of a planetary ethic which bypasses the authority of scriptural tradition (now increasingly seen as inadequate) deriving its authority instead from science.

It is, however, a non-theistic vision, and this raises questions as to whether the "depths of nature" which inspire awe and amazement can indeed be described as sacred without reference to the divine. The theistic reader will, like me, wish to probe with care the reasons for the absence of God from her picture. Goodenough recognises that theism is based on mystical experience and, in many religions, on an "intimate relationship with a deity." She tentatively explores the mystical area in the first-person section of a key chapter entitled "Awareness," starting with the controversial proposition that "the fact that we take in, reflect, and encounter an I-ness is apparently at the core of religious experiences that we call mystical." She notes further that "mystical experiences have been interpreted as the apprehension of the Divine within or the numinous Other." But she hardly pursues this analysis further: "... we ask, Is this Other? Is this God? ... But in the end it doesn’t matter."

For me this indicates the most significant methodological gap in the work. In the end, perhaps the words used don’t matter, but the fact of the "mystical" experience does. The reason why she cannot analyse this area is not just the intrinsic quality of its transcending words, which every mystical writer has to grapple with as best they can, but because she makes no attempt to bridge the philosophical gap between first and third person perspectives, and in particular because she has no second-person perspective which both links the two and provides the domain of much religious experience.

The gap between perspectives becomes clear in the Awareness chapter. She defines awareness, and consciousness (which she regards as self-awareness) in functional terms: "The first cells ... may not have been programmed to be aware. But this could not have lasted for long ... Awareness is modulated by receptors and their associated signal transduction cascades ..." There is no mention here of the fundamental philosophical problem of awareness (or "consciousness" as it is termed in some of the philosophical literature) and the philosophical inadequacy of functionalism, which is the issue of how there is a "what it is like" about such a process (Velmans, 2000; Chalmers 1995). It is the second person perspective, the perspective and ontology of relationship, that ultimately bridges this gap.

So, when it comes to theism (the possible "intimate relationship with a deity") the absence of an I-thou, second person perspective is apparent. At the human level, the perspective of relationship is marked by a partial participation of each member of the relationship in the being of the other, as Other. Her examination of relationship with God, however, always collapses into the first-person or the third-person. She quotes, with apparent affection, some of the more regrettable Christian hymns ("Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling ...") which are marked by unbridled projection of first-person woundedness, and she speaks in third-person terms of "the concept of a personal interested God" (my emphasis). But she offers no possibility of an experience that contains, in addition to these ever-present factors, a second-person perspective distinct from either. Consequently there is no place in her system for mystical experience to take a cognitive role.

The success of what she has achieved within the confines of her chosen methodology opens up with even greater urgency than before the need for a systematic methodology that unifies all perspectives including the second-person. Until this is done, the idea of a global ethic, and the idea of the sacred, remain as promises that are appealing but not yet fully grounded. While there is no solid link between perspectives, both ethics and divinity remain susceptible to the philosophical criticism that "it is impossible to get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’."

Chalmers, D J (1995) ‘Facing up to the problem of consciousness’ J. Cons. Studies 2, 200-19

Velmans, M (2000) Understanding Consciousness, Routledge