Sentences with phrase «with cosmographies»

Science, which had formerly presented us with cosmographies of a humanly uninhabitable universe, is now the main stimulus for a new story of the universe hospitable to our twin requirements: It appeals to the religious need for not putting down our roots too deeply as well as to the environmental need to make nature our true domicile.

Not exact matches

Along with dualistic mythology several developments in scientific thought since the seventeenth century have contributed to the exorcism of mind from nature: first, there is the cosmography of classical (Newtonian) physics picturing our world as composed of inanimate, unconscious bits of «matter» needing only the brute laws of inertia to explain their action; second, the Darwinian theory of evolution with its emphasis on chance, waste and the apparent «impersonality» of natural selection; third, the laws of thermodynamics (and particularly the second law) with the allied cosmological interpretation that our universe is running out of energy available to sustain life, evolution and human consciousness; fourth, the geological and astronomical disclosure of enormous tracts of apparently lifeless space and matter in the universe; fifth, the recent suggestions that life may be reducible to an inanimate chemical basis; and, finally, perhaps most shocking of all, the suspicion that mind may be explained exhaustively in terms of mindless brain chemistry.