John Haught's The New Cosmic Story: Inside Our Awakening Universe is my pick for Book of the Year because it addresses a longstanding gap in recent accounts of the cosmos and 'big histories' of life. Chestnut Hill CollegeIt's more than a matter of the human element being left aside. It's a genuine failure to incorporate humanity's historic sense of its own place into the narrative, or what Haught calls ‘the inside story of the universe.’One of the reasons, no doubt, is because this would make the topic of religion unavoidable, a topic he argues has been ’startlingly absent’ from Big History so far. In Haught’s view, we can’t expect to understand well what is going on in cosmic history, ‘apart from a careful examination of what goes on in the interior striving of life that reaches the summit of its intensity in humanity’s spiritual adventures.’Now, for lots of reasons, such a topic would be considered uninteresting for scientists, such as Michio Kaku, or Sean Carroll, or Lisa Randall, to name a few of my favorite writers, because as Haught himself acknowledges, too often organized religion has stood in the way of what we consider (a tad too breezily) to be the forward march of science. Any yet without a reckoning of humanity’s deepest spiritual longings, according to Haught, science will find itself constrained in its own self-understanding, an understanding that in his view remains too reductionist, too willing to describe the world purely in terms of its most fundamental components.

Source: Forbes December 31, 2017 14:26 UTC