Philosophy and theology departments are increasingly irrelevant backwaters in the modern university, engaged in seemingly solipsistic debates. If they want to reclaim exalted status in the university and society, they would do well to embrace Big History.

Those who fail to understand that evidence is modern-day Scripture, and that the world we live in is an honorable world, betray God and humanity in the most egregious of ways.

While there is no Great Chain of Being, as the medievals understood it, there is most definitely a Great Matrix to which all beings belong.

Every religion, every ideology and every construct of self implies a perspective on what constitutes the good life, as well as some kind of critique of the bad. But what are we to do when our ideals are in conflict?

Is there some other way to adjudicate between the competing metanarratives that shape our lives and identities, determining how we think and act, what we hold to be true and good?

How do we decide which stories are worthy of our affirmation and support? Which narratives have the power to convince, convert and transform? Which religion does one choose?

We are in the early stages of what I think historians will one day call religion's Evidential Reformation. Increasingly, most of us relate to scientific, historic and cross-cultural evidence as more authoritative than a literalist reading of Scripture.

How should we read ancient narratives today? How do we understand the stories of religion, be it as outsiders looking in at foreign faiths or as thoughtful believers reconsidering our own tradition?

Religionists who deny certain facts of this Big History, who don't understand or accept the scope of the important details of this new unity of knowledge, do great damage.