16 - Comparing stories about the origin, extent, and future of life: an Asian religious perspective

Summary

Paradigms of cosmic meaning

The purpose of this chapter is to compare and contrast Western and Asian ways of telling stories about the world rather than the actual stories they tell. The hope of this exercise is that by understanding the logic that drives Asian storytelling, we can see a new way of getting past the inevitable differences between the stories that religion and science tell. This way of approaching conflicting stories, it will be argued, offers significant improvements over two popular strategies for reconciling religion and science: first, the argument that they tell completely different and non-overlapping stories; and second, the attempt to integrate religious and scientific stories into one seamless whole. In contrast to these approaches, the logic of Asian storytelling recognizes the importance of having many different and overlapping stories about the same event without feeling compelled to reconcile them to each other.

The voyages of discovery that spanned the globe and mapped new continents in the early modern era of European history were underwritten by faith in progress and the capacity of human knowledge – which were, in turn, rooted in a Judeo-Christian philosophy of history. In the present age, which has already embarked upon interplanetary exploration, we are situated in a vastly more complex ethical and religious world: the prior age of exploration and intercultural contact has revealed the diversity of religious and philosophical perspectives within Earthbound cultures.