An unfolding drama of awakening

Take time seriously! This is John Haught’s impassioned plea to scientists and theologians alike. He sets out a carefully reasoned case for a sense of meaning that resides in “contributing to the drama of cosmic awakening.” His exemplary argument, built by fresh insight laid upon insistent repetition, offers a dynamic and assertive response to religion’s scientific despisers—but throws down a gauntlet for conventional theology also.

Haught’s initial dialogue partner is Albert Einstein. His central thesis is that Einstein failed to follow the logic of his theory of relativity, which should have pointed him to time as an unfolding drama of awakening. Instead, captivated by Baruch Spinoza’s pantheism, Einstein assigned no significance to time.

The majority of cosmologists today similarly fail to take time seriously, Haught asserts. He calls them archaeonomists—those who believe that “the only reliable way to understand the world around us is to trace everything back analytically to how things were in the beginning.” Such thinkers are the main targets of Haught’s withering ire. Their fundamental flaw is that they claim “all minds are reducible to insensate physical stuff and the impersonal laws of nature,” but to make their assertions, they “exempt themselves from being part of the atomized unconsciousness into which their worldview has decomposed the universe.” More subtly yet fundamentally, such reasoning is impatient: its pessimism “fails to allow that time carries with it emergent outcomes that were not implicit in the cosmic past.”