Hello to our new bloggers! Here is how the Kyoto Cosmos Club got started, according to the Archive which I hope to post in its entirety soon. Please let us hear your comments.
An Archive of the Kyoto Cosmos Club’s Meetings

The First Meeting, October, 2005
The Kyoto Cosmos Club was founded in 2005 by a group of teachers, scholars and artists. It happened almost by accident—but turned out to be a very happy one. Some ten scholars, mostly Professors at local universities or doctoral candidates or post-doctoral researchers—philosophers, theologians, physicists and mathematicians or teachers of literature and languages—had been meeting every few weeks to discuss things like the and the nature of our cosmos as the Hubble Telescope was showing it to us; we talked of “matter and energy” and ended up with super-string theory and the like. Ultimately we agreed that our marvelous universe was not just a mystery, but also a “Mystery”. How facts and theories like the above impact our religious faith was also central for us. All of the members of this initial group just happened to be religious, but they were from many different religions and were “religious” in many different modes. We were mostly Buddhists or Christians of one sect or denomination or the other, but some of us seemed to lean towards a more “New Age” take on their own faith in some sort of a transcendent dimension to things.
One Sunday evening in October of 2005 about ten of us met at Morris Augustine’s home in Iwakura—Kyoto’s northernmost suburb, to enjoy a little food and drink, and each other’s company, and to view the DVD, ”Star-Gazing”. This is a marvelous series of the earth-orbiting Hubble telescope’s pictures; they are put together with a detailed explanation of precisely what these magnificent “things” in the sky that we were beholding actually were, or seemed to be. And we were assured that what we were seeing was perhaps less than half of what was there, since Black Holes and Dark Matter seemed to surely be part of the “picture”. We were all clearly “egghead” types, though that included an artist and a poet or two, but we were all left in an almost childlike wonder.
Before we parted we all agreed to meet in a month and discuss a book that someone had brought along: The Universe Story, by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry. It had exactly the aroma that suited us: it was both a cosmologist’s story of the evolution of the universe since the Big Bang, and also an account of the evolution of life on our little planet. And most fascinating of all for our particular little group, the book presented a picture of the evolution of religion in all of the human societies over more that 5,000 years: all that have left us some record of themselves.
Before the evening was over we had decided we should meet regularly, around once a month, at least during periods when universities were in session in Japan. We would sit down to together for a leisurely meal in friendship and mutual respect of each other’s very different religious beliefs, and invite as many other kinds of believers as would care to join us. Without really realizing it the Kyoto Cosmos Club had been born. Most of us were familiar with notions of religion described in Rudolf Otto’s, The Idea of the Holy and in James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. We knew, or were convinced, that in some way or another all religions were born from the same transcendent Source or Ground of being. We also know that both the World Council of Churches and the Catholic Second Vatican Council—to choose only two Christian groups from among the thousands of groups and individuals who have done similar things—have declared that all religions were to be revered and respected as containing much truth in both moral and doctrinal matters.
This brief Archive of the nature and content of our discussions will give the reader a clear idea of the nature of our organization and the dates of meetings and the sources used to ground each meetings presentations and discussions. Some of the dates, however, have proved impossible to verify and so the accounts below may contain some small errors in this regard.
The Second Meeting, November, 2005: Morris Augustine Leads an Introductory Discussion of The Universe Story, and of the Notion of “The Anthropic Principle”
The same came together once again, and a few new ones. We were a very international group: Of the three mathematicians, all doing post-doctoral research at Kyoto University; two were Italian, Davide Guzzetti and Leonardo, and one was Austrian, Andreas Bender. Our Philippina, Nieves Godenez, was in the process of finishing her Ph.D. in International Relations at Kyoto University. Dr. Matheus Roris Cruz, a medical doctor from Brazil, was working on a Ph.D in Gerontology and Kyoto University, Dr. Michael Lyons was a physicist from Scotland and Canada, and Dr. Jonas Chianu from Kenya, was doing research in Agricultural Economics at Kyoto University.
Three officers were elected: Morris Augustine as President, since he held two doctorates particularly suited for the job: one in theology and the other in History and Phenomenology of Religions. Professor William Reis, Professor of Linguistics at Doshisha Women’s University, had managed to practice both Zen Buddhism and his original Quaker and Anglican beliefs simultaneously for some time, just as Augustine had combined his Catholic and Zen practice. Professor Paul Kelly of Kansai University of Foreign Languages was elected Secretary. It was decided that these three men would serve also as the Council of Advisors for our new creation; they would decide on appropriate answers to questions such as qualifications for membership or any disputes that might arise.
During our leisurely meal we talked about the both The Universe Story the “Anthropic Principle” but we felt no need to come to any conclusions about either. The latter, Anthropic Principle—held by many scientists but rejected by many others—holds that if the Big Bang’s explosion had taken even very small fraction of a second longer or shorter than it did, then the necessary carbon and hydrogen would not have been made in the explosion of later stars and so human and other forms of life at least on our planet would have been impossible. For most subscribers to the Anthropic Priniciple this strongly suggests a transcendent guiding “Force” behind the evolution of our cosmos and our own little planet.
Towards the end of our meeting we decided to discuss the problem of whether or not belief in “God,” gods, or the Transcendent that goes by many other names is just a matter of Freudian or Marxian illusion, somehow consciously or unconsciously trigger by the human brain. Or maybe there might be a less incredulous explanation from the point of view of current science of the structure of the brain. Two books, one pro- and one contra-God were suggested for our perusal.