© 1999 Meredith Sprunger
© 1999 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
Edward O. Wilson
Knopf, 1998, 298 pp.
Edward O. Wilson is one of the world’s great scientists and a Francis Bacon-like synthesizer of the twentieth century. He is a professor in the field of biology at Harvard, the author of two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, On Human Nature (1978) and The Ants (1990), as well as the recipient of many fellowships, honors, and awards. Dr. Wilson’s encyclopedic knowledge of the natural sciences, the social sciences, and humanities, leads him to postulate the unity of all knowledge.
Wilson believes the thinkers of the Enlightenment who believed in the unity of all knowledge, individual human rights, natural law, and indefinite human progress, were on the right track. He reviews the history of the Enlightenment that set the stage for the scientific revolution. Christianity’s mistake, he believes, was to allow revelation to dominate reason.
All behavior, he postulates, is guided by epigenetic rules that, in turn, are the result of the interaction between heredity and environment. “Gene-culture coevolution is, I believe, the underlying process by which the brain evolved and the arts originated.” (p. 218) In philosophical orientation, he states, “I am an empiricist. On religion I lean toward deism but consider its proof largely a problem in astrophysics.” (p. 241)
Many readers of Consilience will find they are exhausted, snowed, or bored with the endless recital of facts and information. But Wilson’s erudite and comprehensive discussion of the underlying unity of knowledge is an important contribution to laying the intellectual foundations for the advent of the Fifth Epochal Revelation on our planet.
Professor Wilson would disagree. “Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradiction between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views? No, unfortunately, there is not.” (p. 264) He goes on to say that the eventual result of the competition between these two views “will be the secularization of the human epic and of religion itself.” (p. 265)
He recognized that we are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. Synthesis, he believes, is the answer to this dilemma. In the latter part of the book Wilson points out that we are entering a new epoch in human history when genetic evolution will become conscious and volitional. He closes the book with a detailed description of the dangers of overpopulation and environmental pollution. “In the course of all of it we are learning the fundamental principle that ethics is everything.” (p. 297)
Steve Pope in reviewing Consilience in the Christian Century says, "This approach is flawed in several ways. First, Wilson seeks to unify knowledge by construing all knowledge as the kind of objective, empirically verifiable information intended by the natural sciences. This project rides on the dubious assumption that there is only one kind of truth, the kind of empirically established explanations attained by scientists. (p. 1031)
“Wilson at least shows us what the world looks like form the point of view of a secular, scientifically educated person who recognizes the need for intellectual integration and moral integrity.” (p. 1033)
The only greater and more comprehensive description of the unity of science, philosophy, the arts, and religion with which I am acquainted is The Urantia Book. Theologians long for this kind of unity of knowledge. Hopefully, these religious leaders and people like Edward Wilson will discover it.