Ursula Goodenough es bióloga estadounidense.
“I do go ahead and consider myself a religious person.”
Meaning of Life interview (2008)
Contexto: There are all sorts of transcendent response on offer but they to my mind are not necessary to call oneself religious. And obviously this is … semantics as much as anything else. But I do go ahead and consider myself a religious person.
Quoted in "Speaking of Faith: The Morality of Nature" by Krista Tippett in American Public Media (7 April 2005) http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/moralityofnature/kristasjournal.shtml
Contexto: I profess my Faith. For me, the existence of all this complexity and awareness and intent and beauty, and my ability to apprehend it, serves as the ultimate meaning and the ultimate value. The continuation of life reaches around, grabs its own tail, and forms a sacred circle that requires no further justification, no Creator, no super-ordinate meaning of meaning, no purpose other than that the continuation continue until the sun collapses or the final meteor collides. I confess a credo of continuation. And in so doing, I confess as well a credo of human continuation.
Fuente: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. 174
Contexto: Humans need stories — grand compelling stories — that help to orient us in our lives in the cosmos. The Epic of Evolution is such a story, beautifully suited to anchor our search for planetary consensus, telling us of our nature, our place, our context. Moreover, responses to this story — what we are calling religious naturalism — can yield deep and abiding spiritual experiences. And then, after that, we need other stories as well, human-centered stories, a mythos that embodies our ideals and our passions. This mythos comes to us, often in experiences called revelation, from the sages and the artists of past and present times.
Fuente: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. 60
Contexto: I have come to understand that the self, my self, is inherently sacred. By virtue of its own improbability, its own miracle, its own emergence … And so I lift up my head, and I bear my own witness, with affection and tenderness and respect. And in so doing, I sanctify myself with my own grace.
Fuente: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. 173
Contexto: The tapestry maker first strings the warp, long strong fibers anchored firmly to the loom, and then interweaves the weft, the patterns, the color, the art. The epic of evolution is our warp, destined to endure, commanding our universal gratitude and reverence and commitment. And then, after that, we are all free to be artists, to render in language and painting and song and dance our ultimate hopes and concerns and understandings of human nature. Throughout the ages, the weaving of our religious weft has been the province of our prophets and gurus and liturgists and poets. The texts and art and ritual that come to us from these revered ancestors include claims about Nature and Agency that are no longer plausible. They use a different warp. But for me at least, this is just one of those historical facts, something that can be absorbed, appreciated, and then put aside as I encounter the deep wisdom embedded in these traditions and the abundant opportunities that they offer to experience transcendence and clarity.
"Indifference: Far And Away The Most Dangerous Human Capacity", 13.7: Cosmos & Culture (28 April 2011)
Contexto: While I agree… that indifference is indeed our most dangerous capacity, I actually do believe that it's on the wane.
When I scroll back to my 1950's Connecticut girlhood and recall how clueless everyone was about just about everything, how we mindlessly parroted concepts like "Better Dead Than Red" and the "Domino Theory," how my friends were all lily-white and Koreans were gooks and I would have had no idea where to find Nigeria on a map – when I go back there and then think about Adam's students and my students and my kids and what they've come to understand and care about, it gets a whole lot better.
Fuente: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. 129
Contexto: We nurture our children selflessly. But we also recognize them as our most tangible sources of renewal — for a child, the world is always new. Renewal has been a religious theme throughout the ages … All of us see in children — our own and all children — the hope and promise of what we humans can become. As the forbears of our children we are called to transmit to them a joyous and sustainable vision of their future — meaning that we are each called to develop such a vision.
“The big bang is obviously one form of beginning, but the big bang in itself is unimaginable.”
Science and Spirit interview (2004)
Contexto: The big bang is obviously one form of beginning, but the big bang in itself is unimaginable. It's one thing to think about God making a flower or infusing the planet with love, but to imagine what might be behind the big bang is so removed from real life that it actually loses importance for me. There's so much else to think about that's here and now. I like the Buddhist concept of beginning-less-ness, that the universe has always been going on.
Science and Spirit interview (2004)
Contexto: All life has a kind of seamlessness. All creatures have to be aware of their environment, and there has been an evolution of the capacities needed for detecting increasingly complex stimuli. I have no problem calling this "meaning," since all creatures pick out meaningful facets of their environment. For the first creatures, these facets were physical and mediated by receptor proteins. Sperm and eggs find each other by protein shapes; photosynthetic bacteria find light by protein shapes. The impetus to figure out what's going on is still very much programmed into our highly complex brains.
Fuente: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. 167
Contexto: We are, each one of us, ordained to live out our lives in the context of ultimate questions, such as:
Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?
Where did the laws of physics come from?
Why does the universe seem so strange?
My response to such questions has been to articulate a covenant with Mystery. Others, of course, prefer to respond with answers, answers that often include a concept of god. These answers are by definition beliefs since they can neither be proven nor refuted. They may be gleaned from existing faith traditions or from personal search. God may be apprehended as a remote Author without present-day agency, or as an interested Presence with whom one can form a relationship, or as pantheistic — Inherent in All Things.
The opportunity to develop personal beliefs in response to questions of ultimacy, including the active decision to hold no Beliefs at all, is central to the human experience. The important part, I believe, is that the questions be openly encountered. To take the universe on — to ask Why Are Things As They Are? — is to generate the foundation for everything else.
Fuente: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. 139
Contexto: For me, and probably for all of us, the concept of a personal, interested god can be appealing, often deeply so. In times of sorrow or despair, I often wonder what it would be like to be able to pray to God or Allah or Jehovah or Mary and believe that I was heard, believe that my petition might be answered. When I sing the hymns of faith in Jesus' love, I am drawn to their intimacy, their allure, their poetry. But in the end, such faith is simply not available to me. I can’t do it. I lack the resources to render my capacity for love and my need to be loved to supernatural Beings. And so I have no choice but to pour these capacities and needs into earthly relationships, fragile and mortal and difficult as they often are.
“Well, God answers of course come in every flavor imaginable these days”
Meaning of Life interview (2008)
Contexto: Well, God answers of course come in every flavor imaginable these days so God can be process-God can be mind-God … so there are all of these ways that God is now configured as well as the ones that come to us from traditional religions where God has much more power — then there's the whole personal God part which I do talk about in there at some point. So I don't think that even that there is a God framework out there at this point that I am either accepting or rejecting. My response is that I call myself a non-theist as opposed to an atheist because as I see an atheist as having a belief about God, i. e. that there isn't one. And my I've never been actually very interested in the question I guess is one way to put it. I see it as a question That can be summarized in the aphorism "Why is there anything at all rather than nothing." And science doesn't have any answer to That so what I articulated in the book and continued to do is what I call a covenant with mystery where mystery is itself a … noun but I am using it as literally in absence of category. It's not like I have a mystery then I put attributions onto it it just … I don't know the answers.
Fuente: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. 28
Science and Spirit interview (2004)
Fuente: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. xx
Fuente: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. 75
On the Epic of Evolution in Cosmogen "Board Forum: How Grand a Narrative?" (1999) http://www.thegreatstory.org/HowGrand.pdf
Fuente: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. 11
Science and Spirit interview (2004)
Uncommon Knowledge (2005)
Fuente: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. 114
"It's Time For A New Narrative; It's Time For 'Big History'", in 13.7: Cosmos & Culture (10 February 2011) http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/02/10/133652898/its-time-for-a-new-narrative-its-time-for-big-history
Fuente: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. 167
Science and Spirit interview (2004)
As quoted in The Faith of Scientists : In Their Own Words (2008) by Nancy K. Frankenberry, p. 491
