Lincoln and Davis, presidents of the Union and the Confederacy respectively, saw themselves as instruments of the outworking of God's great plan for their people, both North and South. Generals Grant, Sherman, Lee, Jackson and so on--to a man--sensed that God was the ultimate determiner of the outcome of their respective military actions.  Majors, lieutenants, sergeants, corporals and privates wrote home in their letters with continuing thoughts about how God directed the course of their lives, how life and death itself was ultimately in His hand.  The women and families at home wrote back or recorded in their diaries thoughts that too laid the outcome of their hopes and fears at the feet of God.

We humans were on our own in this great cosmos.  Whatever became of us and our works was due entirely to our own efforts.  Even within portions of our religious culture, God was only an idea rather than a reality, an ideal on which even we "religious" people set our sights as we brought ourselves forward into a brave new world.

Thus all around us today the underlying dynamic involves the affirmation that the human will is in the process of bringing all of the dynamics of life under human control.  A human order is establishing itself around us.  In particular through modern science--physics, medicine, genetics--the heroic human will is bringing all of life under human direction.  Human progress, in fact human perfection, is in the process of establishing itself among us.  A brave new world is finally upon us.

No doubt Newton was the greatest definer of this mechanistic vision of the physical world around us and is deserving of being called the author of "Newtonian physics."  But actually he was not the founder of this mechanistic vision of life.  We see, for instance, this vision in the earlier works of the French mathematician Ren? Descartes.  It was also a view widely held within the British Royal Society of philosophers and scientists in Newton's day.

Thus for instance, John Locke, who studied human vision and the workings of the human mind and who was a contemporary of Newton's, formulated an explanation of human knowledge that depicted the mind as a machine which received bits of energy that came to it through the senses (notably the eyes) and that was processed by the machine-like mind into thoughts and ideas.

By the time of Napoleon at the beginning of the 19th century, the French scientist Pierre-Simon de Laplace was able to announce that "God" was no longer a necessary principle involved in his explanation of the workings of the cosmos.  His model of the cosmos worked entirely in accordance with natural laws that required absolutely no "intervention" on the part of God to make any of part the system work.  The system stood entirely on its own.

Needless to say, if Americans a half-century later during the Civil War were still ascribing to God the outcome of all great human events, Laplace's mindset had not yet captivated the whole of the Western world.  But it was certainly on its way toward doing so.

As we view the cosmos, so we also view ourselves.  This is ultimately the most important aspect of any cosmology--its spiritual and moral content.

Since we view the world we inhabit as a great machine, with even us as distinct parts, we have broken the sense of the integrity of the whole into a fascination with the dynamics of the interacting parts.  This is called reductionism.  In other words, supposing that the whole is merely the sum of the parts, we presume that we are automatically constructing the grand design of the cosmic whole by focusing of the life of the parts.  Thus the supposition is that if we devote ourselves to cultivating the individual components of life (namely ourselves) the whole (namely society and culture) will take care of itself.

In terms of the spiritual-moral features of the cosmology we are detecting very serious problems as we lose sight of the importance of a higher vision for human life.  For instance, most obvious is the recent breakdown in higher social units such as families, neighborhoods, communities--which once gave strong definition to our sense of human identity and purpose.  Some of us may even suspect that social units of an even higher order such as cultures or civilizations are headed for trouble.

The human result is clearly that modern "individual" life itself is troubled by bizarre compulsions and addictions, a sense of personal isolation and alienation, and even suicidal thoughts and actions.

Anomie or loss of personal identity is a serious consequence of the atomization or setting off of the individual into an autonomous existence.  In supposing that things have an identity in-themselves--apart from their function within the larger context--we have lost sight of the need for all things to find their higher purpose through relationship.  We today find it almost impossible to understand that throughout human history identities have been relational:   a man was a father, a son, a brother, a farmer, a Lutheran, a Rotarian, a Jones; a woman was a mother, a daughter, a sister, a housewife, a Catholic, a Quinn.  That's who they were; that's what they understood themselves to be.  Their sense of persona was built entirely on these relationships.  They had no identity apart from the parts they played in a number of social dramas.  Apart from the personal contributions they made to a larger social whole they were nothing.  The idea that one's identity could be found "out there" somewhere by itself was unthinkable.

This atomistic tendency of our culture's offspring are played out in more subtle ways in the decisions of young couples not to get married but to live together for some undetermined amount of time; or if married, not to have children; or if they have children, to let someone else doing most of the raising of these children.  The focus in adult life is in personal professional or career development--not in the performance of service to the family, the community or the nation.  (By and large mothers previous to the last half of the 20th century were at home raising children; fathers were not careerists but instead were "bread-winners" for the family.)

In short, a sense of loyalty or commitment to a higher level of life is radically lacking in our atomistic culture.  We are loners--looking out for ourselves.

Certainly a lot of this change in our outlook on life can be attributed to economics.  We are an incredibly wealthy people, and our wealth today is founded heavily on personal income.  Family fortunes (such as inherited farmlands or businesses) do not play the role they used to in establishing us economically in our world.  We move up the corporate ladder by taking on new jobs within the company, requiring us to move to new locations and establish new homes.  In fact, we now jump repeatedly from community to community, even company to company, as a means of enhancing our career growth.  We are a people given to looking out for ourselves personally.

At the other end of the stick, at the corporate end, there is correspondingly a similar shift in attitudes.  Businesses look out for the bottom line of profit--and its enhancement by whatever means possible.  The idea of producing a product or service of importance to the community is missing from corporate thinking.  Product lines shift rapidly as the profit profile shifts.  Companies buy out other companies simply to maximize profits--not because they want to get into a new line of manufacture or service.  Likewise they cut employees who have given almost a lifetime of service to the corporation--not because they are losing money but because they can increase their profits (though not necessarily their productivity) even more through this "downsizing."

Certainly this makes for a high degree of versatility and velocity in modern life.  This is great--if life is conceived of as mere machinery.  But viewed from a spiritual or moral vantagepoint, it is easy to see that we have traded off precious aspects of life in order to achieve this soulless efficiency.  We have made life as soulless as the machine.  In our "victory" in bringing all of life under a mechanistic, atomistic order, we have lost the very heart or soul of such life itself.

And once again, as in Newton's days, the realm of physics seems to be leading the way--with philosophy and theology trying to catch up.  I myself am one of those philosophers/theologians trying to catch up!

We are now slowly (very slowly) discovering that there are serious flaws in this (now 3 centuries old) mechanistic, and reductionistic, cosmology.  We are coming to rediscover that the whole does not automatically come into existence merely in gathering the many separate parts. The whole is assembled by a higher vision of things which then dictates how the parts are to be put together. Apart from this higher vision the parts remain only just that:  a pile of parts.  The parts do have their independent existence.  But ultimately they have no meaning by themselves.  Apart from their relationship to some larger entity, they are separate pieces with no great purpose to their being.

For this "relational" thinking we can thank the world of quantum physics or mechanics, started up through the field theories of Faraday, Maxwell and Mach in the last century, jumped forward by the discovery of the quantum particle by Planck at the turn of this century, widely enhanced by the relativity theories of Einstein in the early years of this century and the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg which followed soon thereafter, and filled in in great detail by those who have carried forward the work of quantum physics:  Bohr, Schroedinger, Weinberg, Feynman and many, many others.

The main ideas or features of the quantum revolution (as I have come to interpret it) are:

1) that mass or matter is essentially energized space;

2) that the form or appearance that this mass or energized space takes on is dependent on the perspective (relative placement and movement) of the observer;

3) that this perspective involves essentially a two-way communication of expectations (strangely transcending the limitations of space-time) between the observer and the "thing" observed;

4) in fact, we can never be truly detached "observers" of reality, for any effort to address reality will necessarily involve some kind of intervention into its realm, stirring this reality into response to us.  There is no "neutral" engagement with our cosmos.

It's just that under Newtonian laws, we had limited ourselves to only a particular set of metaphors by which to interpret reality.  The shame is, that while this toolbox of metaphors seemingly gave us "control" over a huge slice of life, its exclusive use has come to cut us off from an even bigger portion of reality--and isolated us from that portion we do "control."

Now we have begun to see the error of our ways--and are beginning to open our minds to looking beyond the self-imposed limits of mechanistic thinking.

This revolution has us back looking again at the question:  is there a God who is actively authoring the particular nature of our reality?  If so--who or what is this God?

I don't know where this vast power of God comes from.  But I do know that the power of God permeates our cosmos--forming and shaping the universe with such care and intense presence that from the smallest sub-atomic particle to the largest galactic super-cluster God is actively "thinking" all this into being.  His divine consciousness is the force that holds all of it together in incredible harmony.

This is worship in the purest sense of the word!

Moving with and in this kind of divine mindfulness, we take on the character of sons and daughters of God.  We become creatures caught up in the state of love (agape) for all that is and will be.  Like St. Francis, we can count all "things" within creation as "brothers" and "sisters"; we can be joined with all creation in a powerful fellowship of oneness, of holism, of holiness.  The broken fellowship with God is thus restored.

Who is this God?  We do not know directly, but have only "glimpses" of his nature.  Like Moses who was allowed only a small glimpse of God's backside, seen through the crack between two rocks, we can catch only the smallest sight of his glory.  As before Elijah, God more often reveals himself in the small whispers of a light breeze rather than the great sound and fury we like to associate with God.

This is all very contrary to our atomized culture, with its emphasis on self-development and self-empowerment, in distinction and often in competition with others.  I see instead the quantum thought  that who and what we are, and who or what the world around us becomes for us, is closely tied up in our ability to give over to that outer "other," to embrace it in such a way that we become one with it:  to love God with all our heart, mind and strength--and our neighbor as ourselves.  This is what I mean by a relational cosmology.

Yet now with the new scientific cosmology, we have begun to discover that letting things just lead us, by trusting in what at times looks to us like pure chaos, by engaging ourselves when we cannot be sure of the outcome, we open up a world of new life.  (In fact we will look closely at the mathematical realm of "chaos theory" which has also emerged with the New Science).

What we are doing by backing away from our well controlled, mechanistic world view is to return to a wisdom that has long been understood within the West (even within the realm of Western science):  the notion that we live best when we live by faith--a faith even in what often appears to us to be at times pure chaos.

We can live by such faith (as Jesus himself taught) because we trust that there is indeed an underlying or overriding Order to our universe--an Order however that depends not upon our ability to perceive and work it, but one which depends upon the benevolent power of God to support and move it forward.

Science has begun to respond powerfully (though by no means yet unanimously) to such an emerging--yet classically Christian--world-view.