Naturalistic Paganism
“Turtles all the way up and turtles all the way down”: Introduction to March’s theme — Cosmos, by John Halstead
Last summer, my wife and I were taking a walk around our neighborhood. As we looked up at the stars, we began to speculate as to how many stars there are. I got out my phone and started Googling. It turns out, I was way off.
The number of stars that you can see on a clear, moonless night in a dark area, far away from city lights, is only about 2,000. We live in a suburb. close to Chicago, and the combination of city lights and humid Midwestern air drastically reduces the number of stars we can see. We have a wildly different view of the night sky when we visit relatives in Utah and go up in the mountains or out in the desert.
The Milky Way’s Galactic Center in the night sky above Paranal Observatory
All of the stars we can see are part of the Milky Way Galaxy, which our solar system is a tiny party of. The Milky Way has at least 100,000,000,000 (100 billion) stars, and maybe four times that much. Which means there are 50-200 million more stars in the Milky Way than we can even see on the clearest night! (The average number of planets around each star is estimated at 2.5.)
And that’s just our galaxy. Until the 1920s, it was believed that the Milky Way was the only galaxy. Now we know that there are 100 billion galaxies in the observable Universe. Which means there are approximately 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10 sextillion) stars. That is believed to be more stars than there are grains of sand on the entire earth!
Andromeda galaxy with the naked eye.
If the whole galaxy were bright enough, this is what you’d see at night (with the moon as a reference).
If we want to get a sense of the size of a galaxy, we can look at Andromeda, our closest galactic neighbor. It is 2.5 million light years away, which means we are just now seeing the light that left it 2.5 million years ago. It is the only galaxy you can see in the northern hemisphere with the naked eye. On the right is an image of what Andromeda looks like in our night sky. We can only see the nucleus of the galaxy, because the rest of it is not bright enough. But below is an image of what Andromeda would look like if we could see the whole thing. This really gives you a sense of its enormity, given that it is 2.5 million light years away! Earlier this year, NASA released an image of the Andromeda galaxy. At the bottom of this article is a video which zooms in on the sharpest image ever taken of our galactic next-door neighbor.
And this is just the macrocosmic scale. The universe is just as vast on the microcosmic scale: it goes “down” as far as it goes “up”. By way of illustration, the scale of human beings to the earth is approximately the same as the scale of human beings to the smallest things visible in a microscope. That is to say, the earth is on the scale of 10^7 meters (1 with 7 zeros behind it), while the smallest thing visible in a microscope exists on on the scale of 10^-7 meters (1 with a decimal point 7 zeros in front of it). Similarly, the scale of human beings to our sun (10^9) is approximately the same as the scale of human beings to a water molecule (10^-9). The Orion Nebula (of which we are a part) is on about the same scale (^17) in relation to us as the largest quarks are believe to be. (Note, this is entirely theoretical and there is some doubt as to whether it is even meaningful to talk about “size” at this level.) The Milky Way is on approximately the same scale (^21) in relation to us as an electron is. And the Local Group and the Virgo Supercluster (the system of galaxies that includes the Milky Way) are on roughly the same scale (^23) in relation to us as the smallest of elementary particles, neutrinos. It’s turtles all the way up and all the way down! Here’s a fun interactive application that allows you to experience these scales. And at the bottom of this article is another video which does the same thing.
If your mind was blown several paragraphs back, don’t worry. So was mine. Many words comes to mind. Awesome. Vast. Incredible. Overwhelming. But even these words seem too small to wrap around this thing we call the “Universe”. Even the words “Universe” or “Cosmos” may seem too small. I think it is even bigger than what are the biggest word for many people: “God” or “Goddess”.
We can have three different reactions to the realization of the scale of the Cosmos (macro- and micro-): (1) We can ignore it, keep our eyes on the ground, and shut our minds off from it. (2) We can try to shrink it in our minds and wrap our words around it, words like “God” or “Goddess”, so that we can regain a sense, however illusory, of control or purposefulness. (3) Or we can let it expand our minds, fully experience the joy and the terror it elicits, and just allow whatever words (or actions) happen to rise up from within our depths in response to it, without trying to limit it or control it. Personally, I do a lot of No. 1 and No. 2, but it is the last approach that is most consonant with Humanistic Paganism.
This month, our theme is the Cosmos. If you have an essay about astronomy or the stars, participle physics or quantum mechanics, or anything with huge numbers or very small ones, send your submissions to humanisticpaganism [at] gmail [dot] com.
The Author
John Halstead is a former Mormon, now eclectic Neo-Pagan with an interest in ritual as an art form, ecopsychology, theopoetics, Jungian theory, and the idea of death as an act of creation. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HP, he is the author of the blogs, The Allergic Pagan at Patheos and Dreaming the Myth Onward at Pagan Square. He is also the administrator of the website Neo-Paganism.org.
We Are (Not) Special: Anthropocentrism and the Evolving Universe (Part 2), by John Halstead
Cosmic Evolution
As mentioned in Part 1, if we were to go back in time and reset the course of evolution, it is highly unlikely that we would be here the second time around. On the other hand, according to some theorists, it is highly likely — perhaps inevitable — that some form of tool-using, self-conscious species would evolve. (For example, self-consciousness might be a form of convergent evolution.) While many biologists emphasize the directionlessness of evolutionary history, many physicists are now identifying a developmental trend in cosmic history, one moving toward localizations of increasing order and complexity which operate against the general entropic trend of the universe. If this is true on the cosmic scale, it is arguably true on a biological scale as well.
Philosopher Ken Wilber argues that, by portraying humankind as merely one strand in the web of life, deep ecology assumes a one-dimensional or “flatland” metaphysics. According to Wilber, a “deeper” ecology would perceive that the cosmos is hierarchically ordered in terms of complexity. Hierarchy does not imply dominion, though — it implies responsibility. This brings me to the third model of evolution, one which combines the insight that human beings are both special and not special. In this “Special/Not Special” model, the universe itself is evolving toward self-consciousness. One step in that evolution of the universe is the development of beings who are self-conscious. In other words, at some point in its evolution, the universe goes from being unconscious to having parts of itself — us — become aware of themselves as parts, as a stage in the process of the whole becoming aware of itself. In this sense, we are special. We as a species represent a point at which the universe has moved closer to self-consciousness. As a result, we have special responsibilities toward other species and the universe as a whole. Read More
We Are (Not) Special: Anthropocentrism and the Evolving Universe (Part 1), by John Halstead
I had something like a spiritual experience watching a movie recently.
The movie Lucy is not what I would call a “good” movie. Starring Scarlett Johansson, Lucy is about a young woman who is kidnapped and has an bag of a new recreational drug implanted in her abdomen against her will. She is then forced to “mule” the drug across international borders. In the process, the bag is perforated and she absorbs a very large dose of the drug into her system. As a result, she begins to be able to access larger and larger percentages of her brain. She gains superhuman abilities, starting with extraordinary reflexes and perception and increasing until she can control matter and even the flow of time.
What made the movie stand out for me was a montage of images which Lucy experiences connecting her both to her remote ancestral past — in the form of her primate ancestor “Lucy” — and to the universe as whole — in the form of mind-blowing macrocosmic vistas. It was little Kubrick 2001-ish. As I walked out of the theater, I had this intense feeling of both our infinitesimal insignificance and our inestimable consequence as a species. I don’t know if this was the intent of the movie, but I was left with an intense feeling both of radical dissociation from the everyday concerns of my life and of deep responsibility to the universe as a whole.
PostPaganry, Part 2: Reason and Spirituality, by Glen Gordon
Postpaganry draws on spiritual naturalism by applying reason to spiritual and religious1 matters. This includes science, but also the application of my own reason in interpreting my subjective spiritual experiences.
From the beginning of my Pagan spiritual awakening 15 years ago, I was — and continue to be — driven by a desire for connection with nature and with my own heritage. During my studies of, and training within, British Traditional Wicca and modern Druidry, a dissonance emerged for me. This dissonance was caused by trying to reconcile what I was learning from independent study about the history of Wicca and Druidry, on the one hand, and feeling that they were not being represented accurately, on the other. Neither Wicca nor Druidry were meeting my spiritual needs. Celebrating the Neopagan wheel, which was designed with British seasons in mind, felt incongruent with living in the high desert of the U.S. Southwest. Reason lead me to believe that an earth-based religion would be one that was in sync with the seasons where I actually lived. In addition, the projections of human qualities onto nature in the form of anthropomorphic, engendered gods — which gods had originated in a culture impacted by different ecological conditions than where I was currently living — felt forced.
“Faith for the Naturalistic Pagan: Trusting in the Return of Warmth” by Crafter Yearly
As a Naturalistic Pagan and as a trained philosopher, I tend to find the whole concept of faith generally off-putting. As a naturalist, the association of the term with various theistic worldviews does not appeal to me. I do not like the term when used as a proxy for belief in goddesses and gods. It appeals to me even less when associated with belief in the Christian god, one of seven Christian virtues.
As someone with philosophical training, the concept of faith is likewise problematic. Faith is the counterpoint to reason. To have faith is to believe something to be true that you do not have good evidence for. In this way, faith is the opposite of reason. It is the willful presupposition of a preferred belief or outcome, regardless of the absence of logically defensible reasons. For these reasons, I often adopt a rather dismissive view of the concept.
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