From the Solerian perspective, humans have misunderstood the natural evolution of the universe and the laws that drive it. They have developed these misunderstandings as they have become conscious and developed powers of self awareness and sentience. While Soleri believes theology has been important in helping us to consider our relationship to the cosmos and giving us a larger purpose, our holding on to a literal interpretation of these beliefs have helped to deny the progress and evolution of the scientific revolution in decisively improving the reality of human life in the modern world. We see this with the linear, predictable and increasingly repetitive debates in US society about Evolution and Global Climate Change. Social and religious conservatives take a skeptical view, even when the degree of scientific evidence is overwhelming. This is especially the case with issues that are political inconvenient for them to look at in a critical and honest way. The result is a stifling of the US political and policy-making process with nonsensical, intellectually unsupportable and ill-informed ideas and memes. Religious beliefs and religions have played a key role in helping us to operate in denial of the laws of nature and reality. In so doing we have created massive economic, political and social distortions that increase the distance between us and the reality of a Global Sustainable Society or what Soleri alternatively terms The Lean Society which is based on his "Principles of Leanness".
However, the problem of our society's decline cannot be completely blamed on social conservatives Solerian thinking explains. The "Grand Delusions" was an intellectual tool invented by Soleri to explain to the world via his worldview, the multi-faceted way in which delusions often become twisted into something that continues to thrive in society even when its rationale within normal or rational social or psychological parameters is not plainly evident. That is social delusions only survive in society, by becoming seen as sensible attributes that helps explainl by reactionary groups. These groups often sets an emulation model in which the leadership aspires to define oneself as the purest by taking the most extreme view in reaction to modern understandings of how the world actually works. Part of the delusion is with the way the marketplace operates in denial of the limits to growth.
Human consciousness is limited so as to not see other forms of emergent consciousness and connectedness within the universe, Paolo Soleri uses the Bubble Diagram to illustrate the ways in which we are cut off from the larger reality of the universe.
His earlier work, the Omega Seed hypothesis sees the development of humanity within the larger context of universal evolution from the Big Bang. So we are part of a larger process of universal manifestation. However the human story is one that is undefined and we are at a pivotal point in terms of needing to confront the Grand Delusions in order to achieve an Escape Velocity to overcome the dangers of our current condition whereby we have allowed those delusions of the mind to dominate the public and global discourse within the globalization and modernization process. For Soleri consumerism and materialism is a outcome of an animistic view of life in which a simplistic understanding of phenomena leads to a superficial way of seeing the world that enables opportunism and opportunistic people to gain control by control and manipulate the iconography of the age.
So he embraced a theistic view in that he denied that our development was towards a decentralized view of creation that animism might provide. For it is that Animism is about the worshiping of nature and or natural objects. He took the prevailing Western view which has since the Holy Roman Empire took over Europe for the Catholic Church saw nature worshiping religions and practices as a primitive "dead end" in relation to the theological evolution of humanity.
For example the idea in his mind was that a Christian is superior to being a Pagan. He believes that the "hyper-consumerism" of our age is tied to an animistic impulse. The idea of evolution in a scientific within the Omega Seed Framework of Arcology extended and connected with a evolution in human consciousness. His later work with designing the Bubble Diagram on the right was a further evolution of that idea. We can actually see three elementals in tension in this Dialectic:
Thesis - Theological/Spiritual
Anti-thesis - Scientific Understanding of how the world worked in the surface physical level
Synthesis - How these two manifested in the interplay of the prevailing mainstream "mass marketplace of idea"
So the human desire to revert to the "Grand Delusion" theological worldview on a collective level was too great, causing a backlash against science which was has become evident by the continued embracing anti-scientific and anti-logic memes that served this desire to continue to worship what Soleri termed as the Animistic Tendency. Opportunistic Capitalists like the Koch Brothers have used this social dynamic to their advantage. Thy have done this by manipulating large numbers of reactionary social and religious conservatives to embrace their political movement to roll back the modern social welfare evolution of the liberal democratic state, which was the result of a compromise between capitalist and socialist forces in the middle 20th century.
At some point, humanity regressed and became a devolution of human development and progress. We embraced suburbia and consumerism rather than frugality and a more Arcological view of building the centers of civilizations. I see this in his view as try seeing this as a result of the increasing and resurgent influence of Animistic ideas in the modern world.
While Paganism does have an aspect of animistic thinking that is tied to the worship of material things, idols and primitive rituals and incantations that revolve around a superficial superstitous understanding of the physical realm similar to what we would see in terms of how indigenous people are portrayed in an old movie or story. Its possible that Soleri's perception of Animism is a throwback from that time. However, a deeper aspect of animism is rooted in ancient wisdom of how nature and ecosystems and life functions and how human reality is interwoven with that reality.
The story goes as this: Humans in denial of physical reality have continued to worship higher powers that do not exist. These worship structures were inherited from Animistic cultures, so that even as we supposed advanced into more monotheistic world views we still kept that simplistic Animistic tendency. In this process, we have created complex social systems of denial of the actual physical logical structures now illuminated by science.
As an alternative to both Pan Theism, Theism and Atheism Soleri proposes with The Omega Seed Hypothesis this idea of a world operating holistically according to physical laws of "compression".