Caminante, no hay camino,

se hace camino al andar.

(Traveller, there is no road,

the road is made by walking.)

–Antonio Machado (1875–1939)

We are living in perilous times. Not only do we inhabit a world of huge and complex challenges, it also seems increasingly likely that we are standing at a critical fulcrum in human history: a moment where our species faces either a downward journey through collapse and crisis to possible extinction, or we find new ways to see, think, and shape the world—ways to cooperate with our own evolution and so lay the foundations for the next, postindustrial, human era (Nelson , 19, 20).

Of course the Holocene has witnessed several such changes in civilizational form as nomadic existence transmuted into settled communities, empires emerged, and human progress and ingenuity eventually gave rise to the modern industrial age. However the transformational cusp at which we now stand has several significant differences which are rooted in our transition into the novel geological epoch that is the Anthropocene—an epoch in which human activities now rival (and indeed supersede) global geophysical processes as the primary drivers shaping the planet. Whereas the Holocene has been a stable, accommodating environment against which human civilizations have been able to evolve over thousands of years, the Anthropocene is, unsurprisingly, a rapidly changing and potentially much less hospitable one.

While human activity has left subtle traces on the planet for thousands of years, “the great acceleration” of the last of the last sixty years (Steffen et al , 82) which has ushered in this new epoch has had an impact many orders of magnitude greater, and one moreover which is happening simultaneously across the whole globe. An ever expanding population coupled with unsustainability at multiple levels from the small and localized to the global means that we have reached, and indeed breached, a variety of significant planetary boundaries. As the 2016 Living Planet Report from the World Wildlife Fund (which monitors global biodiversity and human ecological impact) succinctly puts it: “We are no longer a small world on a big planet. We are now a big world on a small planet where we have reached a saturation point” (Living Planet Report , 4).

World population currently stands around the 7.5 billion mark, a large percentage of whom need better access to food, water, and energy to improve their basic standard of living. The predicted addition of a further 2 billion people by 2050 means that pressure on these basic resources will only intensify. Hand in hand with this there are clear signs of environmental deterioration which call into question the continuing ability of our planet to provide for unchecked human need (and greed). Climate change is perhaps the most high‐profile of these areas of deterioration but it is only one of a number of Earth systems which are threatened by our current patterns of production and consumption.

As a way of conceptualizing and studying these, Rockström et al. (, 472–75) have developed the (still evolving) concept of “planetary boundaries.” This scheme delineates safe boundaries for nine critical processes/areas: biosphere integrity, climate change, ocean acidification, land‐system change, unsustainable fresh water use, disruption of nitrogen and phosphorus flows in the biosphere, alteration of atmospheric aerosols, pollution by novel entities, and stratospheric ozone depletion. Since these boundaries are upstream of the global tipping points for the system in question (Steffen et al. , 736/1), they represent the safe operating spaces within which human society can continue to flourish.

The crossing of any of these boundaries may seriously affect human well‐being, and current analyses indicate that four, possibly five, of these systems—biosphere diversity, climate change, biogeochemical flows, land‐system change, and freshwater use—have already been pushed beyond these safe operating zones (Barnosky et al. , 51–57; Steffen et al. , 753; ; Mekonnen and Hoekstra , 1–6). Moreover, the first two of these are seen as core boundaries—ones which have the potential on their own to drive the Earth system into a new state should they be substantially and persistently breached (Steffen et al. )

The challenges posed by the Anthropocene are thus unprecedented in their scale, complexity, developmental speed, and in the threats they pose to Earth's ecosystems. Hence responses based on marginal changes to current trajectories—in effect “fiddling at the edges”—are likely to be wholly inadequate in preventing systems collapse of various kinds with resultant collapse of large segments of the human population or even of globalized society as a whole (Steffen et al. , 752). Thus the time available to forge new directions and civilizational shape is drastically foreshortened. Instead of thousands of years in which to effect change, futures specialist Ruben Nelson suggests that we are looking at less than a hundred years in which to get the project sufficiently established and advanced to keep the possibility of a human future open; moreover, that there is zero probability that nine billion people can continue to live in a version of a late modern/industrial form of civilization and achieve sustainable development (Nelson , 21, 22). Something completely new is needed, but it will be a race against time to find and form it. We are indeed living in perilous times.

However, along with the contracted timescale there is another significant difference between previous civilizational changes and the one which we must now negotiate. Whereas the processes of earlier transitions were unconscious, we do at least have some sense of the necessity for a change in our organization and habits; and even if this is only barely glimpsed by many and contested by others, it holds the seeds for a way forward which need not end in the decline and disappearance of Homo sapiens. Indeed, Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (, 17–18), who originally proposed the idea of the Anthropocene, also noted that its advent inevitably raised one of the great future tasks of mankind, viz. the development of “a world‐wide accepted strategy leading to sustainability of ecosystems against human induced stresses”—something which would necessitate intensive research efforts and wise application of the knowledge acquired in the noösphere (Crutzen and Stoermer , 18). For Nelson this means nothing less than that, for the first time in our species’ history, we must become sufficiently aware of ourselves and our planet to consciously guide our own evolution, becoming “architects and intentional co‐creators of new ways of seeing, thinking and living—ways that truly fit the unique conditions that are emerging in the twenty‐first century” (Nelson , 21).

Both of these perspectives have strong resonances with philosopher of science Nicholas Maxwell's repeated calls for a transition from knowledge‐inquiry to wisdom‐enquiry (e.g., Maxwell ; ). Maxwell contends that many of the global problems we are now facing have arisen because our pursuit (particularly academic) of knowledge and technological skill have given us unprecedented powers to act without giving us the concomitant understanding and capacity to act wisely: the “crisis of science without wisdom” as he designates it (Maxwell , 3). He argues for the pursuit and promotion of global wisdom (, 4), and that we need a revolution in our institutions of learning such that the basic intellectual aim becomes the acquisition not of knowledge, but of wisdom—something which he defines as “the capacity to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others, thus including knowledge and technological know‐how, but much else besides” (Maxwell , 77). In a world where cybernetic advances have provided thousands upon thousands of potential loci for Helga Nowotny's agora—the public space in which socially robust knowledge is developed (Nowotny, Scott, & Gibbons ), but in which difference is increasingly valorized, and fake news, alternative facts, and offensive stereotypes propagated—the need for wisdom is more urgent than ever.

Thus we come to the inverse side of the Anthropocene challenge outlined earlier: where do we find/how do we develop the wise knowledge needed for species survival which Crutzen, Nelson, Maxwell, and others point toward? What is clear is that scientific knowledge is necessary but not sufficient for the task: while it can provide many of the necessary tools for understanding, measuring, and monitoring the complex changes to the Earth's planetary systems, and while likewise technological expertise might furnish us with machines and devices which could contribute to ameliorating aspects of these problems, something more is needed. The present crisis also demands a reflexive turn—the development of a deep and self‐critical awareness of ourselves and our situation, without which we cannot move beyond the inherited horizons with the attendant patterns of thought and action which keep us anchored in our present state and in peril of ecological crisis. Moreover, this conscious move towards directing our own civilizational evolution needs to happen at every level: persons, families, friends, groups, communities, organizations, polities, and whole civilizations (Nelson , 21). Scientist and author on science Peter Atkins once wrote that “Whilst poetry titillates and theology obfuscates, science liberates” (, 123). However it would seem that Atkins’s omnicompetent liberator Science may, after all, need a little help from poetry, theology, and the like!

So then, how can we integrate scientific knowledge with Maxwell's “much else besides”? Can information from Wolfgang Janke's praecisio mundi, the world where only what can be precisely calculated, presented, measured, and made available counts as real (,12), be successfully yoked with the rather messier outputs of the humanities? Where might the science and religion project fit into this quest for understanding? Theological thought systems have much wisdom on human motivation and behavior of the kind which seems to be urgently required—can these be conjoined with scientific understanding to produce the kind of broader, deeper understandings we need if we are to persuade people, communities, and nations of the seriousness of the challenges we face and persuade them of the need for change? The question is thus whether we can find ways in which inherent tensions underlying the different ways of knowing in the sciences and other historical, cultural, and religious perspectives can be overcome and a new kind of knowledge developed.

At first sight the answer to such questions is not entirely promising. Much of the science and religion debate in recent times—grounded in critical realism and centered on issues of causality—has tended to inhabit apologetic cul‐de‐sacs of one kind or another (Drees , 126–29). Moreover such discussions have had little valency or traction outside of the dedicated arena of science and religion (Drees , 2). However there have been various moves to reframe the debate in different ways, including attempts to develop different methodological strategies and epistemological groundings for the work (Gregersen and van Huyssteen ). Of these, van Huyssteen's postfoundational rationality with its associated dialogical model (, , ) and an extension to this (Bennett , 191–202)—would seem to offer an especially good way of integrating particular types of theological insight with scientific and other material to develop the kind of deep, rich, and wise knowing which seems to be called for in order to ensure human and planetary survival and well‐being.

There are other insights and tactics from different disciplines which might also make useful contributions in this respect: Susan Haack's Foundherentist approach to the justification of knowledge (, ); Nowotny et al.’s () work on “socially robust knowledge” developed through public discussion and debate; Isabelle Stengers’s “Ecology of Practices” (); or Lev Vygotsky's concept of “zones of proximal development” (, 86) where we can help each other to learn and unfold potential. The burgeoning field of transdisciplinary enquiry (Morin ; Thompson Klein ) could also have much to contribute to thought about fruitful ways to develop science and religion engagement as part of such a project.

The challenge of the times for this field of intellectual endeavor then is just the same as that at the higher and larger levels of operation: science and religion work needs to find the courage and imagination to move beyond its inherited horizons, patterns of thought, and ways of acting if it is to make any useful contribution to understanding and responding to the acute crisis our species faces. There is no blueprint, however, no map to show the way—so once again we have to make the road by walking it.

It was precisely these issues about reliable knowing—what kind of knowledge is needed to negotiate this moment of transition, and how we go about making it—which underpinned and were addressed through both the form and content of the 62nd annual conference of the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science in June of 2016 entitled How Can We Know? Co‐Creating Knowledge in Perilous Times. Rather than following the traditional plenary format of a lecture by a single speaker, a series of questions relating to the origins and nature of knowledge were addressed through moderated dialogues between a pair of speakers from different disciplinary backgrounds. Other aspects of the conference were also presented very differently as a way of encouraging participants to explore their own ways of seeing the world and constructing knowledge about it, and reflecting on whether there were other possibilities for these. Tools drawn from play and used as ways of investigating the world and interrogating ideas, formed the backbone of six chapel talks and various other group activities. Some of these departures from established and time‐tested patterns caused no small degree of discomfort to conferees, but were an integral part of the conference journey of exploration through embodied form as well as content. In this way we too had the chance to experience the truth of Machado's poetic aphorism and make various new roads through the walking of them.

The articles which now follow in this thematic section of Zygon are a continuation of that process. Position papers made available by each speaker prior to the conference were subsequently revised in light of those dialogical exchanges and the attendant ones with the conference audience, and it is those amended papers that are now presented here as the basis for an ongoing conversation. The four dialogues—on imagining and knowing, rationality and nonrationality within different traditions, the biological bases of knowing good, and on knowing ourselves—considered questions which were not merely abstract but rather were aimed at exploring afresh the nature and demands of reliable knowing and, in so doing, at fostering personal and shared learning beyond the limitations of the different scientific, religious, and secular traditions within which we are each embedded.

J. Wentzel van Huyssteen's essay () sets the stage beautifully for this, using evolutionary epistemology to trace the impact of evolving human knowledge on the emergence of disciplinary and interdisciplinary reflection and establish the epistemic status of theological reflection as a credible partner in a pluralist, interdisciplinary conversation. Following this arc he discusses why cognitive goals and ideals taken on by humans cannot be explained or justified in terms of survival or reproduction alone. Van Huyssteen argues that our capacities for rational knowledge, moral sensibility, and aesthetic appreciation, along with the human propensity for religious belief, can no longer be explained simply in terms of biological evolution. This in turn paves the way for seeing that, though the problems themselves might differ, the emergence of the activity of problem solving itself is central to both scientific and other research traditions. Whilst the reasoning strategies of theology and the sciences might appear to be widely diverse, there is in fact a clear and demonstrable overlap in how they pursue intelligible problem solving at empirical, experiential, and conceptual levels.

His dialogical partner, anthropologist Jonathan Marks (), whilst agreeing that human beings surpass other species in their capacities for measurable and comparable rational problem solving, nevertheless argues that the human mind is rooted in symbol and metaphor rather than logic and literalism. He contends that rational thought is in fact a byproduct of a more fundamentally unique human ability—that of being able to think nonrationally. Yes, humans do solve problems, and by virtue of their big brains, do it bigger and better than other species. But we also talk to imaginary people, cultivate aesthetics, enter revelatory trances, and discuss possible worlds which are neither within our present experience, nor connected to survival and reproduction. Marks argues that culture consists largely in this construction of imaginary worlds whose shape may be arbitrary (even silly) and whose logic and reason are based on local premises. Tracing the origins and subsequent arcs of bipedalism and language evolution—both of which developed and persisted despite producing associated problems which required further evolutionary solutions—he argues that our zoologically unprecedented capacity for symbolic communication is connected to the loss of canine teeth, the lowering of the larynx, and the changing use of the tongue for speech and control of breath. The consequent need to master this unique form of communication requires the huge investment in immaturity for the extended childhood that is the hallmark of our species. However what it makes possible are associations, rooted in the arbitrary, the invisible, and the imaginary. Language is a mixed blessing—allowing the communication of both good and evil, the offering of praise and insult, and enabling the capacity to mislead as well as instruct. It is also less efficient in terms of Darwinian survival than say, the dance of the bee or the song of the gibbon. But in enabling us to talk about what is not, what was, what might be, and what ought to be, it opens up a world of story and remembrance, of possibility and morality—a rich world of which extends way beyond the mere survival utilities of how to eat and mate successfully!

Perhaps the key message from these first dialogue partners is the central importance of imagining to reasoning and thus to knowledge. One of the aspects of understanding what reason is and does is seeing what is made possible by reasoning with counterfactuals, with things that are not true and may never be. This is what we do when we set up control conditions in scientific research; indeed, it is one of the most important aspects of instructing our students in scientific methodology, to say nothing of formulating hypotheses for that which may be causing some event we wish to understand and explain. It is also a central feature of play—the method by which (in both an individual historical sense and an evolutionary sense) our early explorations the world by (through setting the “as if” of the indicative against the “as is” of the subjunctive) are made. Imagination is thus an essential “cognitive lube” in the development of knowledge, and perhaps never more so than now as we seek new ways to build a knowledge rich and thick enough to help us navigate the perilous times we inhabit.

The issue of rationality is also crucial to the essay by Phillip Cary (), who traces its place within intellectual traditions. Cary argues that the Enlightenment association of science with reason and religion with tradition is rendered vacuous by the postmodern insight that the sociohistorical context of tradition is inevitable, even in modernity. Rather than concluding that irrationality is inescapable because tradition is inescapable, Cary sides with Alasdair MacIntyre () in arguing for a “right‐wing postmodernism” in which traditions are themselves the home of different rationalities. Noting that it is thus possible to conceive of science and religion as both being potentially self‐critical intellectual traditions, he then explores the ways in which they are similar and different, in particular through tracing the shared Socratic elements which thread through them. One result of this shared legacy is that conflict between the two does not necessarily conform to the Enlightenment expectation of pure reason versus an authority tradition, but can be seen as rival traditions of rationality in critical dialogue with one another. Thus intellectually healthy religious traditions should not accept the modern notion of the relationship between science and religion; indeed, such an idea is vitiated by modernity's failure to understand itself and—in a very unSocratic way—to recognize its own prejudices as simply those belonging to one tradition among others.

Cary's conference dialogue with Louise Sundararajan also examined a series of similarities and differences between Western and Eastern cultures. Here, though, Cary observes that critical discussion between science and religion is commonplace within Western culture precisely because so much of modern Western secularism is predominantly secularized Christendom, and thus still contains a significant residue of Christian beliefs, habits, and values. The concluding paragraph of his essay—with its firm rejection of the naive and outdated modernism of those who see no value in traditions that are other than modern, and their reduction of the science and religion dialogue to reason verses faith, underlines its argument that members of different traditions of rationality can, have, and still continue to learn from one another. Like the employment of imagination discussed above, this willingness to accept, engage with, and be enlarged by the discourse of those with different rationalities is likely to be a critical element in the pursuit of both the knowledge and the cooperative action which our times demand.

In a longer piece, Margaret Boone Rappaport and Christopher Corbally () take us deeper into the biological basis for knowing good, contending that it is a phenotypical trait of human lineage. They begin by reviewing a variety of research material on the nature and the origins of morality, using “social brain network,” pathological, and primate field studies. Whilst deeming these helpful, they also hold them to be insufficient in explanatory terms. The focus of their own work is on understanding human moral capacity in the genus Homo and they offer a provocative narrative of “morality in action.” This takes the reader back 90,000 years to analyze the essential features of moral thinking and behavior, providing interesting evidence and suggesting intriguing hypotheses along the way. From this narrative they identify and discuss ten essential features of morality (both individual and group elements) such as tentativeness, a rejection of recklessness, a capacity for empathy with those being judged and the experience of the burden of such judgements, and finally a corporate sense of both resolution and future hope. This exploration of morality from an examination of its successful operation makes for a far richer picture of the meaning of what it means to “know good,” and takes us into the cultural roots of a biologically rooted but specifically human lineage trait.

Christian Early's essay (), originally a separate presentation from the plenary dialogues but very much at home in this sequence, then asks us to step back and acknowledge important connections between research on emotion, affective neuroscience, and morality in humans that are not limited to felt connections between familiars, and which illustrate the important role of our embodied, emotional life in even the most symbolically mediated of our moral sentiments. He points out that David Hume's supposed separation of facts and values (is and ought) actually includes an important connection through the emotions. Rappaport and Corbally's rich cognitive model also implicates these, with contemporary research in the cognitive neurosciences likewise indicating the inseparable unity of cognitive and emotional states (cf. Anderson ). It is not only Hume who noticed that the warrants for moral judgments are often rationalizations after the fact; contemporary psychologists like Jonathan Haidt () also suggest likewise. Indeed, for some of these thinkers, emotion may be the whole game.

Early suggests various noncognitive ways we might work on our emotions in such a way that others (in particular strangers and enemies) can come to be included in our moral circle. This is also consistent with a virtue ethic where doing good is not so much a matter of what one consciously entertains, but of what one has worked to make habitual. Early also points towards recent extended discussions of attachment suggesting that early hunter‐gatherer communities had attachment models spread over wide social networks. Contemporary research suggests that in adults cognitive models of attachment figures can produce the same emotional advantages as the actual presence of others (Mikulincer and Shaver ), indicating that such emotionally basic mechanisms may have far wider value than a mere extension to familiars. The socially connected individual may even include a “down regulating” brain activity baseline which does not distinguish between individuals. Early's suggestion is that ultimately our moral capacities of empathy and fairness grow out of the ground of love, and that love is the core of who we are and what we need to thrive.

The final dialogue of the conference, between Warren Brown and John Teske, addresses what might perhaps be the trickiest question of all—what does it mean to know ourselves, and who is the self we seek to know? Brown () approaches this question by contrasting the differences between a Cartesian (“I think, therefore I am”) conception of the self and an embodied (“I act, therefore I am”) one. Confronting Cartesian body–soul (or body–mind) dualism, he argues that we do not have some disembodied, hidden, inner, real self of which we can gain knowledge by introspection; rather, we are entirely physical creatures, formed by our physical and social environment, and occasionally coupled to artifacts or others. Brown contends that our existence inheres not so much in what we think, but in how we act bodily in the world, and most importantly in our relationships with other human beings. On this reading embodiment, embeddedness, and relational extension constitute the locus, habit, and shape of the self. Brown's reflections as an evangelical Christian on the religious significance of this perspective on self‐knowing, drawn from the philosophy of mind and from human cognitive science and neuroscience, are particularly interesting. The resulting shift in his theological anthropology and in his understanding of a religious self is covered further elsewhere (Brown and Strawn ). An earlier—and very long held—view that everything religiously important was private and exclusively individual, has now been superseded by one which sees spirituality not as a property attributable to the individual, but as something which extends into the community in which people worship and live out their Christian life: the spirit embodied, active, and shared in a network of persons connected by worship—“we sing therefore we are.”

There is little disagreement from Teske () with this reading—indeed, he has provided an in‐depth review of the research supporting this view in a previous () Zygon article, “From Embodied to Extended Cognition.” To set alongside it, he provides here an exploration of key aspects of the formation and existence of the narrative self. He argues that our conscious fealty is committed to the self we present through the formation of our narrative self, despite the inherent reliability problems of such. Teske explores the cognitive neuroscience behind the limitations of our narrative selves (including pathological forms of confabulation) looking at how we generate plausible but insufficiently grounded accounts of ourselves. He argues that the normal pattern of narrative creation and checking, that same “critical thought” which van Huyssteen, Marks, and Cary all directly address, is—despite its uniquely human service to “commitment strategies” unobtainable by other species—rendered problematic by the evolutionary logic of self‐deception. Teske contends that the close relationships (as also implicated by Early and by Brown) within which we find the counterbalancing feedback to our self‐deceptions are what make positive change and self‐transcendence possible. He also discusses the darker aspects of self‐deception and the way in which different religious traditions acknowledge these and draw our attention to them through concepts such as sin and injunctions to remove the log from our own eye before pointing out the mote in our neighbors'. In this respect, such traditions may be of more use to us in these perilous times than the Enlightenment thought which seems to be in denial about this “shadow side” of the human self.

It was suggested at the beginning of this introductory essay that a reflexive turn was part of the necessary response if we are to survive the challenges which the transition to the Anthropocene seems certain to force upon us. Thus alongside a proper awareness of our situation, we also need to develop a deep and self‐critical awareness of ourselves—what moves and motivates us for example—if we are to find ways of working together at making the necessary civilizational transition in the foreshortened time likely to be available. These final four articles serve the dual function of pointing toward and contributing to such a task: the deep and rich reflections on the roots and reach of our human morality laid out by Rappaport and Corbally and by Early give an indication of the sort of work that needs to be done in this direction. The novel and imaginative approach adopted by the first two also serves as an interesting example of how new ways of approaching the task can both open up different possibilities for thinking about issues and add additional depth and texture to the understandings which result. Similarly, the deeper apprehensions of our selves offered by Brown and by Teske are also vitally important for developing the clear and critical self‐understanding, without which our chances of successfully working together at local, national, and global levels to address the problems which currently face us, are vanishingly small.

We are living in unprecedented times and we have no blueprint for how to negotiate them—the road can only be made by walking it. These articles and the conference which engendered them stand as modest attempts to begin to do just that and, in so doing, to also contribute both knowledge and elements of “much else besides” to Maxwell's “wisdom‐enquiry” project (Maxwell , 77).