An enormous intellectual adventure. In this groundbreaking new book, the American biologist Edward O. Wilson, considered to be one of the world's greatest living scientists, argues for the fundamental unity of all knowledge and the need to search for consilience --the proof that everything in our world is organized in terms of a small number of fundamental natural laws that comprise the principles underlying every branch of learning. Professor Wilson, the pioneer of sociobiology and biodiversity, now once again breaks out (...) of the conventions of current thinking. He shows how and why our explosive rise in intellectual mastery of the truths of our universe has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos and the human species--a vision that found its apogee in the Age of Enlightenment, then gradually was lost in the increasing fragmentation and specialization of knowledge in the last two centuries. Drawing on the physical sciences and biology, anthropology, psychology, religion, philosophy, and the arts, Professor Wilson shows why the goals of the original Enlightenment are surging back to life, why they are reappearing on the very frontiers of science and humanistic scholarship, and how they are beginning to sketch themselves as the blueprint of our world as it most profoundly, elegantly, and excitingly is. (shrink)

Lynn White's thesis, that the disenchantment of nature in the first chapter of Genesis led to reduced concern for the environment in the West, has received little empirical research at the level of individual differences in religious experience. In this study, we separated the effects of four different measures of religious experience on four different indexes of concern for the environment. Results offered substantial support for White's thesis: belief in the Bible, and only belief in the Bible, predicted scores on (...) all four indexes of environmental concern and did so in the direction expected by White's thesis; this occurred independently of the effects of background items; standard regression showed the effects of belief in the Bible to be independent of those of other measures of religious involvement on two indexes, and on the other two indexes stepwise regression showed the same thing; and in only two of twelve cases did any other measure of religious experience significantly predict an index score independently of belief in the Bible. (shrink)

“[A] scathing assessment... Berry shows that Wilson's much–celebrated, controversial pleas in Consilience to unify all branches of knowledge is nothing more than a fatuous subordination of religion, art, and everything else that is good to science... Berry is one of the most perceptive critics of American society writing today.” —The Washington Post “I am tempted to say he understands [Consilience] better than Wilson himself... A new emancipation proclamation in which he speaks again and again about how to defy the tyranny (...) of scientific materialism.”—The Christian Science Monitor In Life Is a Miracle, the devotion of science to the quantitative and reductionist world is measured against the mysterious, qualitative suggestions of religion and art. Berry sees life as the collision of these separate forces, but without all three in the mix we are left at sea in the world. (shrink)