Reverence for Life
"Reverence for Life" was the name
Albert Schweitzer gave to his work and philosophy, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952.
Reverence for Life is the appropriate attitude for human beings who feel thankful to a "providence," to the source of our lives, to the
process in the universe that has created all life and human life in particular.
Most religions look for that source in
a divine being who has simply created the universe single-handedly.
But we now know exactly the sequence of steps in the
cosmic creation process, from the creation of the universe, to the creations of galaxies, stars, and planets, to our own planet Earth, which at this time is the only known place in the universe where biological life has evolved.
In the nineteenth century the Austrian geologist
Eduard Suess gave the name "
biosphere" to a thin layer of the lower atmosphere and the lithosphere. But the biosphere was made famous by
Vladimir Vernadsky as the title of his 1926 book
The Biosphere.
The term "biosphere" also influenced
Teilhard de Chardin in his naming of a "mind-sphere" as the "noösphere." Teilhard introduced the term noösphere in a 1922 publication on his theory of cosmogony that he called "Cosmogenesis."
The idea of the earth and sky being populated with life was surely in the minds of
James Lovelock and
Lynn Margulis as they formulated their
Gaia hypothesis in the 1970's.
Many philosophers, almost all theologians, and essentially all religions hope to explain our existence by finding something outside the biosphere, something before the biosphere, even before the universe itself, came into existence.
Thousands of popular books and articles, as well as hundreds of "organized" religions promise to tell you the "
ultimate meaning" and the "purpose" of life.
Philosophers who search for the "meaning" of a human life often look to properties that distinguish humans from other animals.
They ask questions such as "What is the meaning of life?", "What is the purpose of existence?", and "Why are we here?" There have been many proposed answers to these questions from many different cultural and ideological backgrounds. The search for life's meaning has produced much philosophical, scientific, metaphysical, and theological speculation throughout history.
Most of the answers to these questions involve the idea of a supreme being, cast in the image of a man (not the other way around),
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