RELIGION AND THE ORDER OF NATURE RELIGION AND THE ORDER OF NATURE 1–Seyyed Hossein Nasr “The most comprehensive and intelligent treatment of its topic that has been written Nasr is one of the major intellects of our day.” — Huston Smith *** The current ecological crisis is a matter of urgent global concern, with solutions being sought on many fronts. In this book, Seyyed Hossein Nasr elucidates the religious view of Nature and the ecological crisis and argues that the devastation of our world has been exacerbated, if not actually caused, by the reductionist view of nature that has been advanced by modern secular science. What is needed, he believes, is the recovery of the truth to which the great enduring religions all attest, namely, that nature is sacred. Nasr traces the historical process through which Western civilization moved away from the idea of nature as sacred and embraced a world view that sees human beings as alienated from nature and nature itself as a machine to be dominated and manipulated by human beings. His goal is to negate the totalitarian claims of modern science and to re-open the way to the religious view of the order of nature developed over centuries in the cosmologies and sacred sciences of the great traditions. Each tradition, Nasr shows, has a wealth of knowledge and experience concerning the order of nature. The resuscitation of this knowledge he argues, would allow religions all over the globe to enrich each other and cooperate to heal the wounds inflicted upon the Earth.
