Although Big History has been producing growing impact upon the academic and learning communities, its ideas have yet to penetrate deeply into the broader mindset. One of the reasons for this is that there is bound to be some natural resistance to Big History, since Big History challenges the manner in which humans have traditionally regarded themselves, including their anthropocentric bias towards the notion of an inherent human eminence. This bias permeates nearly every branch of human study, including theology, philosophy and science, and can be seen for instance in the way that humans have crafted humanlike gods and have once seen fit to place Earth at the center of their universe. Although Big History recognizes and promotes the specialness of the human species, Big History paradoxically does so in a manner which challenges the idea of an inherent human eminence. Therefore, Big History will have a wider impact when its concepts begin to infiltrate and to alter the more traditional forms of human study, giving them the opportunity to be seen afresh from the broad perspective that Big History brings.
The academic discipline known as Big History has been gaining in popularity and reach. Originated by David Christian in 1989 (Christian, 1991) and based upon cosmological, evolutionary and anthropological evidence that has been crystallized only as recently as the mid-twentieth century, Big History today is reaching its widening audience through an assortment of propagative means: best-selling books, online learning portals, high school and university classrooms, etc. There is some reason to expect that the influence of Big History might one day equal or even surpass that of the more traditional history curriculum (Popp, 2023).
Big History delineates itself by encompassing the entire temporal range of the known universe, beginning with the Big Bang around 13.8 billion years ago, then working through the long formation of the stars, galaxies and chemical elements, passing next to the emergence of biological life upon the planet Earth beginning around 3.8 billion years ago—including the protracted dominance of single-celled life, followed by the more recent advent of multicellular big life—and finally focusing on the arrival of hominins and their surprising and unique transformation from a few hundred thousand bestial hunter-gatherers to the eight billion current denizens of an intricately constructed modern civilization. This wide perspective demonstrates one of Big History’s main objectives, to provide the broadest and most evidence-based context possible for the ongoing study of humans and their surrounding world (Christian, 2017).
Although Big History has been having a growing impact upon the academic and learning communities, its concepts have yet to penetrate deeply into the broader mindset. Part of the reason for this is of course that the discipline is relatively new, but there is also cause to expect that there will be a natural resistance to the ideas that Big History brings. This resistance stems from the manner in which humans have traditionally regarded themselves and their place within their surrounding world. As they have progressed towards behavioral modernity and have experienced a growing need to explain themselves, humans have almost always given preference to the notion of human eminence—that is, to the idea that the universe has endowed humanity with advanced attributes and a favored status, thereby accounting for the species’ unique and extraordinary abilities. This anthropocentric approach to self-explication permeates nearly every traditional form of human study, including theology, philosophy, and even science itself, meaning that the concept of human specialness has become so deeply ingrained within the zeitgeist that it is embraced almost without reflection. Nonetheless, this anthropocentric approach to explaining humanity has usually betrayed itself as a form of magical thinking—for instance, when humans saw fit to place themselves at the center of their universe. Much like this attempt, nearly every other attempt to explain the human species through an appeal to inherent human eminence has foundered against the facts of a sober reality.
What Big History can provide is a paradoxical opportunity for humans to reconsider this type of magical thinking and to begin to reassess themselves from a new perspective. This opportunity is paradoxical because at first glance it would appear that Big History, with its enormous temporal-spatial range and its recognition of the tremendous and long-running variety of Earth’s biological abundance, must necessarily overwhelm any notion of human specialness. But in fact, this is not the case at all (Spier, 2010). Big History actually promotes the idea of human specialness, devoting a large portion of its focus to the many astounding facets of the recent human transformation, while at the same time providing a broad enough context to make clear just how unique and consequential the human species is. The irony of Big History is that it does indeed recognize human specialness, but just not for the reasons humans have traditionally held. Therefore, Big History will have its most significant impact when it begins to infiltrate the more traditional forms of human study, such as theology, philosophy and science. These traditional forms of human study must be seen afresh in the light of Big History’s broad perspective, and must be given the opportunity to start anew.
Humanity’s role within Big History is paradoxical. On the one hand, given the backdrop of 13.8 billion years of chemical and galactic formation, and given the further context of nearly four billion years of biological and evolutionary life upon the planet Earth, humanity’s trace upon Big History’s spatial-temporal domain would appear to be nothing more than an insignificant blip. Hominins have been in existence for only 0.05% of the universe’s timeline, and Homo sapiens has been around for a mere 0.0015% of that timeline (Christian, 2004). Plus the geographical reach of humankind, even including the entirety of the Earth’s surface and the occasional trip to the moon, is still so infinitesimally small within the expanse of the cosmos as to be essentially irrelevant. The notion that humans are somehow a special creature within this world seems at first to be the height of ridiculousness, a feeble and anthropocentric attempt to elevate the species from pure paltriness to the epitome of grandeur. The size and scope of Big History must be laughing in the face of that attempt.
And yet….
In the standard depiction of Big History’s eight transitional thresholds, no less than three of these thresholds are devoted to just one entity—and in fact, that entity is the human species. And of all the transformational stories that Big History has the ability to unfold, none is more multifaceted and unexpected than the sudden human metamorphosis from bestial hunter-gatherer to the constantly talking, constantly innovating, constantly constructing organism that modern humans have become (Frank, 2005). All the telltale signs of a momentous event are present within the human story: an ever-increasing and more focused use of energy, a leveraging of goldilocks effects, and a quantum leap in complexity that defies entropy’s relentless tug. Furthermore, the pace of this human transition has been nothing short of stunning, on a scale of only several thousands or even hundreds of years, in the sharpest contrast to Big History’s more typical millions-and-billions-of-years meandering course. Finally, within this neighborhood of the known universe, awareness of Big History itself is entirely dependent upon the human species. Not in the solar systems and galaxies, not in the chemical elements and their multitude of combinations, and not in the countless other species forming the broad array of Earth’s biological abundance, not anywhere else within an observable radius is there even the slightest hint of an awareness of the size and depth of the universe, of an awareness of any aspect of Big History’s tremendous range. It is through humanity, and through humanity alone, that the universe can reflect back upon itself, an occasion that is surely not an insignificant blip.
The marvel in this paradox of Big History and humanity is how it mirrors the paradox of the way humans have traditionally regarded themselves. As they have marched towards behavioral modernity, humans have always explained their expanding presence within their expanding world by appealing to their own eminent nature. This is reflected in theology, where the gods are adorned with humanlike attributes, and in turn humans are crafted in the perfect image of their gods (Peterson, 2016). This is reflected in philosophy, where humans are portrayed as mastering their experience through an abundance of unique and intrinsic characteristics—language, rationality, moral sensibility, etc. (Ramsey, 2023). This is reflected in the natural sciences, where Earth, the human home, is placed at the center of a revolving and subservient universe (Americo, 2017). Yes, as they have marched towards behavioral modernity, humans have always explained their expanding presence within their expanding world by appealing to their own eminent nature—and humans have always been wrong. Earth is not located at the center of the universe. Humans were once—and not that long ago—purely animal, without the slightest evidence of language, rationality, or moral sensibility. And in a cosmos infinitely larger than the human domain, and in a timeline infinitely longer than the human epoch, any suggestion that the gods exist specifically for humans and for humans alone betrays itself as nothing more than a human fancy. Every attempt to explain humanity through an appeal to inherent human eminence has foundered against the facts of a sober reality.
And yet….
Although there has certainly been errancy in the details, the persistent conviction that there is something extraordinary about the human species must clearly be true. Consider that there is no other object and no other creature in the known universe that has ever even conceived of a god—what a glorious innovation. Consider that there is no other object and no other creature in the known universe that has inventoried its own unique qualities and made practice to exalt and to strengthen those qualities—what an intelligent thing to do. Consider that there is no other object and no other creature in the known universe that has noticed the patterns in the surrounding skies and made model of that celestial course—it is a construction most marvelous. The errors of humanity, the errors alone, they are enough to set the species apart from every other known entity in the surrounding universe. The irony in humanity’s many faulty attempts to explain itself as something special is that these attempts alone have proven the thesis to be fundamentally accurate. Humans are indeed extraordinary—extraordinary to an infinite degree—just not for the reasons humans have traditionally held.
Animals do not contemplate gods, and so neither did humans for a very long time. The human turn away from a purely animal nature and towards the characteristics of human behavioral modernity appears not to have started until around a few hundred thousand years ago (Henshilwood & Marean, 2003) and would have progressed slowly until around fifty thousand years ago (Klein, 2002)—at the time of the latest out-of-Africa migration—and did not begin to really accelerate until the rise of agriculture and civilizations, beginning around ten thousand years ago (Christian, 2018). This gradual awakening to an awareness of themselves and of their surrounding world, including an expanding conception of space and time, would have given humans a sense of wonder about how these circumstances had come to be and what events the future might possibly hold. Given the limited state of knowledge in those early days, the attempt to embody and to personify unknown causal forces in the form of a concerned and efficacious entity would have been nothing short of a stroke of genius. Those today who would ridicule religious thinking as somehow irrational are simply ignoring the history—in emerging from a purely animal past, for humans to have conceived of such a thing as a powerful and constructive deity to explain their many dawning discoveries would have been an innovative and generative act.
The history of religion further reveals that as humans have gained more knowledge and more understanding about their circumstances, their theologies have tended to adjust accordingly, becoming increasingly sophisticated with time (Peoples et al., 2016). Some of the earliest gods were simply equated to natural features and events—the river god, the sun god, the thunder god, etc. But requiring deeper answers to newer and more complex questions, humans began to contemplate gods of a richer character, turning for inspiration to the obvious and natural example of humans themselves. Beginning with the lusts, jealousies and conflicts of the ancient classical gods, the cladding of deities and angels with humanlike attributes would reach its culmination in the three major Western religions that are still practiced widely today—Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Covenants, law giving, personal conversation, incarnation. Even today, almost no child grows up in the Western world without an early conception of God as something like a wise and venerable man, bearded and perhaps a little bald, more humanlike than most humans themselves (Nyhof & Johnson, 2017). In turn, these human-inspired deities have been solicitous for their subjects, first and foremost at the moment of creation—crafting human beings simultaneously alongside a supportive world—and also in the moments of need and upheaval—through revelation, through resurrection, through the destruction of enemy forces.
In the twenty-first century, it is easy to forget that until as recently as a few hundred years ago, the assumed age of the earth was only a handful of thousands of years, and the physical extent of the universe, centered around the human home, was thought to be quite compact, with each sky-bound object near enough to be welcomed into the celestial neighborhood (Grant, 1997). With such notions of temporal immediacy and spatial locality, the concept of a personal and intervening god would have been perfectly plausible, indeed almost essential. It is only through the litany of recent cosmological, evolutionary and anthropological discoveries, now gathered within the folds of Big History—for instance, that the universe is actually billions of years old, that life had existed upon Earth long before humans came to be, that humans were once animals just like all the other animals, and that during their transformation to behavioral modernity, humans literally constructed every aspect of their modern world, including the deities—it is only through this litany of recent cosmological, evolutionary and anthropological discoveries that the assumptions upon which every current theology has been built have now been thoroughly destroyed. Big History has been a sledgehammer to the foundations of human theology.
Nonetheless, Big History also provides an opportunity for theology, the opportunity to adjust, as past theologies always have. The need to encapsulate the still unexplained features of human existence has not entirely disappeared, and although some will choose simply to live with the uncertainty, others will find greater benefit in the concept of an all-encompassing understanding, one that humans have yet to acquire and to achieve. Therefore, there is still room for a twenty-first century theology, as long as that theology can take the brave and constructive step of discarding old assumptions and incorporating new information. For instance, what type of theology will assimilate 13.8 billion years of time and a nearly infinite expanse of space, and not obsess with the human here and now? What type of theology will contemplate nearly four billion years of evolutionary life upon the planet Earth, as well as the likelihood of similar biological existences all around the universe, none less deserving of divine attention than the organisms of the present home? What type of theology will be humble enough to accept that humans were once—and not that long ago—purely animal, and that humans still retain all of those animal characteristics today? What type of theology will acknowledge that it has been humans alone who have constructed the entirety of the artificial modern world—without supernatural intervention, without superhuman miracle—and what type of theology will acquiesce to counting among those many artificial constructions the religions themselves?
The type of magical thinking that Big History exposes is the idea of an inherent human eminence. In theology, that type of magical thinking is most directly expressed in the notion of a personal, concerned, intervening, and humanlike god. It is a notion that was conceived naturally and wisely, it is a notion that now forms the cornerstone of every major Western religion, and it is a notion for which it will be extremely difficult to let go. But it is a notion that is no longer tenable within the context of Big History. Any twenty-first century theology not directly addressing and assimilating the facts of Big History (Ottati, 2020) is a theology simply begging to be ignored.
The origins of theology and philosophy would be difficult to separate, since each arose out of the need to answer similar questions, questions about the nature of humanity and its status within a widening world (Durfee, 1952). But whereas theology found its focus in the contemplation of external influences shaping the human experience, philosophy—at least the part not concerned with the natural sciences—found its footing in the contemplation of the human qualities, particularly those qualities clearly distinguishing humans from the remainder of the animal kingdom. Humans as the rational animal. Humans as the languaged animal. Humans as the moral animal. Philosophy’s great achievement then arose out of the follow-up to the recognition of these unique human qualities, with philosophy taking on the task of strengthening and promoting those qualities, urging humans towards a greater perfection through the process of becoming still more human. Philosophical thought has always seemed to recognize instinctively that humans are not the stagnant animal, that unlike the other animal species, there is something fundamentally mutative underlying Homo sapiens.
Philosophy’s mistake has been not to follow this awareness of human mutation all the way back to its initial source. In philosophy, the distinctive human qualities have always been taken as a given, as attributes that have been intrinsic to humanity from the beginning, instead of attributes that have been transforming humanity over time. For some philosophers, the presumption has been that these qualities have been bestowed by a benevolent god, and for others it would seem these qualities have just spontaneously appeared, but either way, the entirety of the Western philosophical canon—from Plato’s cave to Descartes’ cogito to Kant’s moral imperative—has been built upon the assumption that humans inherently are, and have always been, rational, languaged, moral, etc., that humans carry these qualities within them, as mind, soul, spirit, consciousness, or call it what you will. For philosophy, these intrinsic qualities are what establish the separation from and the superiority over the plant and animal kingdoms—establish inherent human eminence—giving the species a kind of natural and preordained status as the paramount organism of the biological world (Ruse, 2021).
Big History puts the lie to this form of magical thinking. The preamble to modern human existence covers an extremely long period of time, including three billion years of exclusively single-celled life, then several hundred million years of multicellular big life before the appearance of primates, and then about seven million years of hominins themselves. At no moment in this tremendous range of evolutionary time, and in no creature throughout the enormity of Earth’s biological abundance, has there ever been even the slightest hint of anything resembling rationality, language, or morality. For the entire biological world, including hominins until quite recently, life was strictly a survival-and-procreative venture, dominated entirely by the evolutionary demands of the here and now. Until just a few hundred thousand years ago, the idea that humans were a preordained and preeminent creature within the biological world would have been observably ludicrous. Humans, for millions of years, were no more than an animal, no different in their essential nature than all the other animals. And just as importantly, humans are still animals today (Sartwell, 2021).
Although by evolutionary standards the transition to human behavioral modernity has been extraordinarily rapid, it has not been instantaneous (Kissel & Fuentes, 2018). There is no evidence that a god one day nodded its head and turned humans into an intelligent, talkative and ethical race, and there is also no indication that humans one day happened to wake up and find themselves cogent, loquacious and virtuous. The last three thresholds of Big History, focused entirely on the human species, outline a continuous and accelerating transformation, from a pure beast living in a completely natural setting and concerned only with survival and procreation, to a modern organism situated firmly inside an artificially constructed environment and displaying increasingly complex behaviors in response to that artificial construction. The facts of Big History give no evidence of there having been inherent human qualities such as rationality, language or morality. What the facts of Big History point to is an ongoing, accumulating and palpable reconstruction of the human environment: fire pits, structured tools and weapons, ornamental jewelry, irrigation trenches, pottery wheels, thatched abodes, rafts, carts, stone monuments, etched symbols, printing presses, telescopes, steam engines, automobiles, rocket ships, skyscrapers, computers. What the facts of Big History describe are a species continually altering and expanding its behaviors in direct response to those artificial reconstructions—for instance, by navigating and manipulating their increasingly artificial world, and thereby displaying increasing levels of intelligence; for instance, by representing their increasingly artificial world, and thereby showcasing an expanding use of language; for instance, by negotiating and sharing their increasingly artificial world, and thereby developing a broadening practice of ethics. What the facts of Big History make clear is that humans have become special not for what they inherently are but instead for what they have constructively done. Rationality, language, morality—just like with the religions—these are simply human constructions. They are self-constructions, and there has been nothing magical about the building process, a process that has been both accretive and observable, and is still ongoing, existing right there in front of everyone’s eyes.
For today’s philosophers—too many of whom are unfortunately to be found comfortably and blindly ensconced inside academic walls (Kallens et al., 2022)—Big History should be the spur to a massive reconsideration of their entire subject of study. Although it might not be necessary to throw out the entirety of the Western philosophical canon, nearly every word should be reconsidered with fresher eyes, reconsidered in the light of how humans have come to acquire their rationality, their language, their morality, and how that acquisition remains ongoing today. Gone should be magical words such as mind and soul, and in their stead should be given greater attention to the observable mutations taking place within the human environment, and greater attention to the impact those mutations have upon human behavior. Big History provides the necessary perspective upon which to make these observations of continuous human change, and therefore any twenty-first century philosophy not directly addressing and assimilating the facts of Big History (Grayling, 2005) is a philosophy of dubious intellectual merit.
In most respects, science forms the backbone of Big History, providing the litany of sober, observable and testable facts that have constituted Big History’s timeline and all-encompassing descriptions (Chaisson, 2014). But it has not always been that way with the natural sciences. Like nearly every other target of human curiosity, the physical world was first approached with an anthropocentric bias, leading to such theories as the geocentric universe and a chemistry composed out of the substances most prominent to the human senses, such as fire, water, earth and air. The revolution that began with the empirical awakening of around four hundred years ago—coinciding with Big History’s most recent transitional threshold—was effective precisely because it removed the human perspective from the equation, removed the viewpoint of human eminence. Employing the tools of mathematics and experimentation, humans began witnessing their world through an unbiased set of eyes, and the results were immediately astounding, propelling the human transformative process into extreme overdrive (Cohen, 1994). The laws of motion. The laws of gravity. Atomic and molecular theory. Electricity and magnetism. Evolution. Genetics. Relativity. Quantum mechanics. People today swim in such a deep ocean of artifacts and understandings derived from these many recent discoveries that they must find it almost impossible to realize that none of these artifacts and understandings existed only a handful of generations ago. The culmination of these unbiased scientific efforts is the combined cosmological, evolutionary and anthropological understanding that coalesced around the middle of the twentieth century and became the material of Big History, an occurrence of the universe reflecting back upon itself. Big History stands as a crowning jewel of science.
Nonetheless, old habits have a tendency to linger. Ironically, the one topic in the natural world that still remains poorly understood is the topic of humans themselves. Although more is now known about the historical and biological buildup to Homo sapiens, and although new facts continue to be uncovered every day regarding the stages of the human transformation to behavioral modernity, the proposed explanations for this unique transformation have remained entirely inadequate, and seem also to reek from the stench of human eminence. This can be seen in the many dubious attempts to employ evolution as the explanatory cause for the human transformation, whether these attempts are based upon biology (Zwir et al., 2022), culture (Stanford, 2020), or psychological musings (Jonason, 2017). Ask yourself, what type of thinking would take a process that is known to happen genetically, randomly, piecemeal and mostly gradually over the course of hundreds of millions of years, and then apply that process to a transformation that has been accelerating population wide over but a sliver of that time, and with an overwhelming multitude of observably new effects—intelligence, language, mathematics, logic, innovation, construction, ethics, and so on. Scientifically speaking, evolution would seem to be the worst possible explanation for the human transformation, but today’s scientists—human scientists—cannot seem to help themselves. Their species is special after all, is it not, so why not make a scientific exception, and explain the human transformation as evolution run amok.
Or take the prevailing neurological hypothesis regarding the human transformation, the notion of a superior human brain. What a marvel of biological engineering that organ must be, with its nodes and modules primed for language, with its nodes and modules designed for computation, with its nodes and modules tuned for logic, with its nodes and modules targeting advanced social activity, with its nodes and modules accounting for almost every unique human behavior to be found under the current sun. Then develop an impressive-sounding phrenology based upon an assortment of colorful neuroimaging photographs, and apparently no further explanation is required (Jung & Haier, 2007). Never mind that not a single evidentiary detail has ever been provided describing how all this biological wiring is supposed to work (Uttal, 2001). Never mind that there has never been a cogent indication of how this incredibly complex apparatus suddenly came into existence, leaving not a single hominin behind. Never mind that a billions-of-years-old biological system designed solely as a stimulus/response mechanism has now been modified within just this one species to take on a wide variety of additional roles. Never mind all this, say today’s neuroscientists—human neuroscientists—because their species is special after all, is it not, and that certainly justifies a neurological exception, justifies explaining the human transformation as the by-product of a preeminent human brain.
It should be noted as well that the study of Big History itself is not immune to this type of anthropocentric thinking. The most frequent explanation provided by Big History academicians to account for the human transformation is that it is the outcome of collective learning, the accumulative passing along of information from generation to generation, in the form of stories, rituals, art, song, instruction, and so on (Baker, 2015). But then what exactly is explaining what? If collective learning is composed out of stories, rituals, art, song, instruction, and so on, then is it not itself entirely dependent upon language, intelligence, social cooperation, etc.? Does collective learning explain the human transformation, or is it collective learning itself that needs to be explained? Never mind the confusion, say Big History’s academicians—human academicians—because this is the beloved human species after all, is it not, with its cherished stories, rituals, art, song, instruction, and so on, so why be troubled by a little case of circular reasoning?
Implausibly rapid evolution, impossibly sophisticated neurology, illogically circular collective learning—these are no less forms of magical thinking than the idea it was a god who created modern humanity, or that modern humanity just spontaneously appeared. The lesson from science is that one must focus solely on the describable facts, and not insert additional perspectives, because these perspectives are almost certainly bound to be biased. It was only when the notion of human eminence was removed from scientific thinking that science began to flourish, and it is only when the notion of human eminence is reinserted into scientific thinking that science begins to flounder. Today’s scientists must remember these hard-earned lessons, because any twenty-first century science not maintaining its objectivity, and not addressing and assimilating only the facts of Big History, is a science gone off the rails.
Big History provides humanity with an opportunity. To date, humans have been in the habit of regarding themselves as a special entity within the universe, almost to the point of giddiness, willing to accept nearly any magical explanation that would support the notion of an inherent human eminence. This attitude has certainly been understandable, given humanity’s surprising and fast emergence from its animal past and given humanity’s unique and expanding awareness of space and time. But this attitude has also been blinding, keeping humans from a more sober reflection upon their unusual circumstances and upon how those circumstances have come to be. Big History, when done well, provides the broad context for this type of needed sober reflection, and it also provides an antidote to magical thinking.
The ironic consequence of embracing Big History is that by dispensing with the notion of an inherent human eminence, humans can then gain insight into what has actually made the species special. Not the hand of a god. Not intrinsic spontaneous qualities. Not scientific voodoo. What has made humans special is not what they inherently are but instead what they have constructively done, literally building themselves into the modern organisms they are today. The last three thresholds of Big History chart this course of artificial environmental reconstruction, and these three thresholds also make clear that humanity does not possess a predetermined or accomplished fate. The reconstruction of the human environment and its altering impact upon human behavior remains ongoing, indeed still seems to be accelerating, with the future remaining entirely full of possibility.
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