Apologies

As readers will notice, the last edition, intended for March 16, was posted on February 16, by mistake. This week’s post will return to the correct order.  Many apologies.

Today’s Post

For the last several weeks we have been addressing the discovery of God through recognition of the thread of universal evolution as it rises in us.  We saw how this thread not only manifests itself in our capacity for personal growth and development (as articulated by Carl Rogers), but how, as we learn to trust in it, to be open to it, we can decide to cooperate with it.  As we have seen, this connection to the kernel of person with which we were born is effectively our connection to God.  Last week we saw how cooperating with this energy of becoming can be understood as ‘loving God’.

This week we will review how we got here, from Teilhard’s insight into the basic forces of evolution, through Science’s articulation of these forces, and finally to Psychology’s emerging understanding of the basic human enterprises of growth, relationship and maturity.

Teilhard’s Evolutionary Insight

The idea that evolution proceeds through the increase in complexity over time is not new.  Many thinkers, both scientific and religious, have remarked upon the increasing complexity of matter as it becomes more complex over time.  Science’s discoveries have given substance to this observation by articulating the processes described in the ‘Standard Model’, which describes how matter has emerged from the pure energy of the ‘Big Bang’ to the highly complex molecular structures which were the building blocks of the cell.  The theory of evolution as ‘natural selection’ has become better understood with the discovery of the gene and how it continues to lift the complexity of living things, even to the advent of the human person.

With all this, however, science has so far been unable to pin down the underlying mechanism of rising complexity.  Richard Dawkins bemoans the fact that we do not understand this mechanism as it plays out in the long first phase of evolution, from the Big Bang to the first cell, but believes that eventually this principle will become better understood:

“The first cause that we seek must have been the simple basis for a self-bootstrapping crane which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence.”

   He fails, however, to acknowledge that this ‘simple basis’ which ‘raises the world’ nevertheless must consist of a principle of evolutionary uplift that unifies the three great eras of evolution: pre-life, life, conscious life, and that it therefore continues to be active in human evolution.  ‘Simple’, perhaps, as he asserts.  ‘Profound’, however, without doubt.

This is, of course, Teilhard’s great contribution to this conundrum: the recognition that evolution proceeds through increased complexity, and therefore any complete understanding of reality must acknowledge that, as products of evolution, we humans are subject to it.

From Evolutionary Insight to Finding God

Teilhard’s insight into evolution, taken at a universal level, leads us to understand that this great uplift which “raised the world as we know into its present complex existence” is the same principle which is active in our individual lives.  It works along with (and is fundamental to) the great energies of the universe: atomic and molecular forces as well as those seen in Natural Selection.  Taken as whole they are manifestations of a single ‘ground of being’.

In keeping with our secular approach to God, these great energies would seem to have nothing to do with the anthropomorphic God so prevalent in the West (and so abhorrent to Dawkins).  Unlike Dawkins, however, we will go on to see how those traditional Western religious concepts, once reinterpreted in the light of our secular approach, are remarkably compatible with it.

Teilhard moves us on to the task of ‘finding God’.  As we saw in “Relating to God (Sept 6-October 27), he describes meditation as the search for actions of this principle of existence as they appear in ourselves.  This search, as he describes it, depends on no prior belief other than that resulting from a clearheaded grasp of evolution as it raises the complexity of reality.  He describes a search for a ‘Secular God’, which is nonetheless the most concrete agent of humanity within us.

Finding God Through Finding Ourselves: Psychology as Secular Meditation

   We saw how the evolution of scientific empirical thinking inevitably led to addressing the human person, and how this approach has evolved from Freud to current day existential psychologists.

All the great theorists of this period believed that there was a basis, a fundamental ‘ground’ for the human person which, if understood, could be managed to improve life.  Very few took Western religious teachings as a source for inquiry into this kernel of the person.  Indeed, many of them felt that traditional religious teachings could be antithetical to authentic human growth.   Thus, assumptions about the nature of this kernel varied widely.

It wasn’t until the early twentieth century that psychiatrists, using empirical data as a basis, began to objectively see this nature as basically ‘positive’, and therefore trustworthy.  The psychological journey slowly evolved from ‘analysis and diagnostics’ to a ‘guided inner search’.

And as Teilhard points out, an inner search for ourselves will always lead us to God.  Teilhard expresses this statement of belief as:

“Those who spread their sails in the right way to the winds of the earth will always find themselves born by a current towards the open seas.”

Summing Up ‘Connecting to God’

Adding to our steps from the January 5 post:

-After identifying God as an agent of evolution,

by which things increase in complexity over time,

through which the process of evolution is possible,

from the big bang to the human,

as products of evolution: even in our lives,

with which we can come in contact

by searching for the kernel of ourselves

using the emerging insights of science

understanding love as the energy which unites and completes us

we now understand that finding ourselves is not only finding God,

but loving  God

The Next Post

We have, using the methods of science, identified a God which can be understood in a ‘secular sense’, requiring no adherence to religious precepts, but is yet as close to us as we are to ourselves.  Such a God satisfies the requirements of science as expressed by the eminent atheist thinker, Professor Richard Dawkins as:

“The first cause …  which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence.”

   without recourse to

“all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers”.

   Next week we will begin our process of ‘reinterpretation’ with a look at how Teilhard’s perspective offers an opportunity to look at God from a new, ‘secular’ perspective.