’Is God a ‘person’?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how an outline of the nature of the fundamental principle of existence could be derived from the writings of Richard Dawkins, well-known atheist. In keeping with Dawkins’ secular worldview, we saw how this outline offered an excellent start to addressing God through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’. Based on this brief outline, a working definition of God emerged:

“God is the sum total of all the forces by which the universe unfolds in such a way that all the entities that emerge in its evolution (from quarks to the human person) each have the potential to become more complex when unified with other entities.”

With Dawkins’ outline of the fundamental aspects of God, this working definition, and the principles of reinterpretation that we have developed, this week we will address reinterpretation of the traditional Christian concept of God as ‘person’.

‘Person-ness”

The concept of the ‘person’ is somewhat unique to the West. It is related to the fundamental Jewish concept of time as seen as flowing from a beginning to an end, unlike the cyclical and recursive concept of time as found in the East. It also sees personal growth as the process of becoming not only ‘whole’, but distinctively so, as opposed to the Eastern concept of human destiny fulfilled in the loss of identity as merged into the ‘cosmic all’. This Western concept of ‘person-ness’ is one into which the idea of evolution fits readily, which leads to the religion-friendly idea of emergent complexity.

The idea of the human person emerging from the evolutionary phenomenon of neurological development is also unique to the West. While there is still much disagreement on how (or even whether) the person, with his unique mind, is separate from random neurological firings in the brain, the idea of the ‘person’ is well accepted. At the level of empirical biology, however, the distinction is difficult to quantify.

Nonetheless, Western society has proceeded along the path that however the neurons work, the effect is still a ‘person’, and recognized as such in the laws which govern the societies which have emerged in the West. While materialists can still claim that consciousness results from random neurological activity and that the basis for our consciousness is ‘just molecular interactions’, very few Westerners doubt the uniqueness of each human person.

Further, this concept of the person as unique provides a strong benefit to Western civilization. While perhaps rooted in the Jewish beliefs which underpin those of Christianity, the Western concept of ‘the person’ nonetheless underpins the other unique Western development: that of science. The evolution of language and use of both brain hemispheres led to the Greek rise of ‘left brain’ thinking (empirical, analytical) from the legacy modes of the ‘right brain’ (instinct and intuition), thus laying the groundwork for science.

As Jonathan Sacks sees it, when the two great threads of Greece and Jerusalem came together in Christianity, this framework evolved from a way of thinking to a disciplined facet of human endeavor. As many contemporary thinkers have observed, it is this connection between the uniqueness of the person (and the associated concepts of freedom) and the power of empirical thinking that account for the unique successes of the West. As Teilhard asserts, (and Johan Norberg thoroughly documents in his book, “Progress”):

“…from one end of the world to the other, all the peoples, to remain human or to become more so, are inexorably led to formulate the hopes and problems of the modern earth in the very same terms in which the West has formulated them.”

Not surprisingly, the uniqueness of the person is reflected in Western religion. Further, while the many different expressions of the three major monotheistic religions might disagree on the specifics, they all agree that persons are somehow uniquely connected to God, and that therefore God is in some way a ‘person’ who saves and damns, rewards and punishes, and provides guidance for life.

Our working definition (above) and our outline of the attributes of God from the last post, however, do not explicitly reflect such an aspect of the Ground of Being. Does this mean that from our point of view God is not a person?

‘Person-ness’ and God

The earliest human societies were all painfully aware of the forces in their environment which they could neither explain or control, such as weather, earthquakes, predators and sickness. They commonly attributed these forces to the work of intelligent beings, gods, as being in control of all these mysterious phenomena. Most of them imagined these gods as being human-like, but with much greater power. In the earliest societies, the many aspects of their mysterious environment were personified, even given names.

As society evolved, and humans grouped themselves into increasingly larger units, from families, to clans, to cities, to states, their emerging ruling hierarchies resulted in kings, sultans and other ‘heads of state’. Many societies evolved their understanding of the gods in similar ways, resulting in an ‘anthropomorphism’ of the gods: “like us but more powerful”.

When Jewish belief moved from a pantheistic understanding of ‘the gods’ to belief in a single god, the person-like aspect of this god was preserved. As Christianity began to emerge, it took with it the concept of God as ‘a person’. The writings of thinkers from Irenaeus through Augustine to Aquinas identify the attributes (as well as the gender) of God as personal. ‘He’ is omniscient (knows everything), omnipotent (all powerful) but still judgmental, and capable of jealousy and anger.

Such characteristics invite contradictory interpretations. If God gets angry or jealous, generally considered negative human behaviors, how can ‘he’ be said to be ‘good’? If he is all powerful, how can he permit evil? If he knows everything in advance, then the future is predetermined and how can human freedom be possible?

On the other hand, if God is not a person, in what way can humans be considered as ‘made in his image’? How is it possible to have a relationship with ‘him’ if ‘he himself’ is not a person?

So, with all that, Richard Dawkins’ question remains unanswered.

The Next Post

Next week we will begin to address these questions. Are our starting definition and list of attributes for the Ground of Being antithetical to the time-honored Western concept of God as ‘person’, or can the long development of the unfolding cosmos somehow be understood as compatible with our human personness?

How can God be more clearly seen through the ‘principles of interpretation’?

Last week we concluded the identification of nineteen ‘principles of reinterpretation’ that can be used to address the traditional tenets of Western religion. Since all religions in some way address and attempt a definition of the underlying ‘ground of being’, that of ‘God’, we will begin here.

A Starting Place

The concept of God as found in the many often contradicting expressions of Western religion can be very confusing. Given the dualities which occur in the Old Testament (such as punishment/forgiveness, natural/supernatural), layered with the many further dualities introduced by Greek influences in the early Christian church (such as body/soul, this world/the next), and topped by many contemporary messages that distort the original texts (such as the “Prosperity Gospel” and “Atonement Theology”) this is not surprising. It can be difficult to find a thread which meets our principles of interpretation without violating the basic findings of science while staying consistent with the basic Western teachings.
A perhaps surprising starting place might come from the writings of one of the more well-known atheists, Richard Dawkins. Professor Dawkins strongly dislikes organized religion, but in his book, “The God Delusion”, he casually remarks

“There must have been a first cause of everything, and we might as well give it the name God. Yes, but God is not an appropriate name (unless we very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers). The first cause that we seek must have been the simple basis for a (process) which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence.”

Here we find an excellent outline of the nature of the ‘fundamental principle of existence’ that resonates well with our nineteen principles.

– It must be the first cause of everything
– It must work within natural processes
– It must be an agent active in all phases of evolution from the Big Bang to the appearance of humans
– It must be an agent for increasing complexity
– It must be divested of “all the baggage” (such as magic and superstition) of many traditional religions
– Once so divested, “God” is an appropriate name for this first cause, even by educated atheistic criteria.

Dawkins goes on to claim that such a God cannot possibly be reconciled with traditional religion. Paradoxically, he fails to grasp how acknowledging the existence of such a “first cause” which raises everything to its current state of complexity is indeed at the core of all religion and offers an excellent place to begin our search. Our process for this is of course that of ‘reinterpretation’.
For an example of such reinterpretation, in our preliminary outline above we find a reflection of Pope John Paul II’s statement on science’s relation to religion:

“Science can purify religion from error and superstition.”

So here in this starting place we can begin to see a view of God that is antithetical to neither science nor religion, but one in which John Paul II echoes Teilhard when he sees it as one in which:

“Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”

Both John Paul II and Richard Dawkins recognize that Christianity has developed a complex set of statements about God. How is it possible to put these statements into a context which is consistent with the simple outline offered above: to ‘divest them of their baggage’? This is the goal of ‘reinterpretation’.
The way to go about it? We will use those nineteen ‘principles of reinterpretation’ which we identified in the last two posts to ‘divest the baggage’ in which the traditional statements about God are frequently wrapped.

A Preliminary Definition of God

A simple working definition of God, consistent with both science and religion might be
“God is the sum total of all the forces by which the universe unfolds in such a way that all the entities that emerge in its evolution (from quarks to the human person) each have the potential to become more complex when unified with other entities.”
The question could be asked, “But isn’t this just Deism?”. In summary, the Deists, most notably represented by Thomas Jefferson, conceived of a ‘ground of being’ which was responsible for everything which could be seen at that time. In their minds, in order to strip “the baggage” from the religious expressions of their time, God had to be understood as a designer and builder of the world, but once having built it, retired from the project.
However, theirs was a static world and in no need of continued divine involvement once ‘creation’ was accomplished. As they saw it, Man, given his intelligence by God, was capable of successfully operating the world independently from its creator.
The Deists were off to a good start, but without the grasp of the cosmos and its underlying process of evolution that we have today, they were unable to conceive of a continuing agent of a yet undiscovered evolution which continually manifests itself in increasing complexity. Their static world postulated either an uninvolved God or (as they saw traditional religion’s belief) a God continually tinkering with his creation. Thus we can first understand the idea of a ‘ground of being’ as resonant with both science and a ‘reinterpreted’ religion with a few simple observations. However, Professor Dawkins goes on to dismiss the possibility that a human person could have a relationship with a God such as his above assertion suggests. How is it possible to ‘love’ God? To understand Him (sic) as ‘father? How can such an understanding lead to a relationship conducive to our personal search for completeness?

The Next Post

Next week we will begin to address such questions to examine conventional conceptions of God through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, starting with that of ‘person’.

Part 1: Principles from Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.

Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at Blondel’s suggestion of ‘reinterpretation’ as a method of recovering the relevance of religion to human life and as a step toward recognizing its value as a tool for evolution.
This week we will look at six of Teilhard’s ‘principles’ which can be useful in this recognition.

The Evolutionary Principles of Reinterpretation

Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ offers a basis for principles which will be valuable in our search for the gold of relevance that is embedded in the raw ore of traditional religious thought. He offers six insights as a basis for such principles:

– First, Teilhard notes that evolution occurs because of a fundamental characteristic of matter and energy which over time organizes the ‘stuff of the universe’ from very simple entities into ever more complex forms. This principle can be seen to continue in the ongoing evolution of the human person.

– Thefr Principle: We grow as persons because of our potential for growth, which comes to us as a particular instantiation of the general potential of the universe to evolve
– Secondly, he notes that all things in the universe evolve, and the fundamental thread of evolution can be seen in the phenomenon of increasing complexity.
The Principle: The increasing complexity of the universe is reflected in our individual increase in complexity, which in the human manifests itself as personal growth
– A third observation is that physics addresses the principle by which elements of matter are pulled into ever more complex arrangements through elemental, natural forces (The Standard Model). Without it, the universe would have stayed as a featureless cloud of energy. This process continues to manifest itself in living things (Natural Selection) and can be seen today in the unitive forces of ‘love’ which unite us in such a way that we become more human.
The Principle: Just as atoms unite to become molecules, and cells to become neural systems, so do our personal connections effect our personal growth and through this evolution of ourselves and our societies
– In a fourth observation, he notes that adding the effect of increasing complexity to the basic theories of Physics and Biology also unites the three eras of universal evolution (pre-life, life, human life). As such, it provides a thread leading from the elemental mechanics of matter and energy through the development of ever more complex neural systems in Natural Selection to the ‘awareness of awareness’ as seen in humans.
The Principle: This ‘thread’ therefore continues its universal agency to be active in every human person in the potential of our personal ‘increase in complexity’, which of course is our personal growth.
– In his fifth observation, Teilhard, as well as Sacks and Rohr, as does Aldous Huxley, in his “Perennial Philosophy”, all see this primary human skill as the subject of nearly every religious and philosophical thought system in human history. These systems all offer paradigms and rituals for understanding the nature of the reality which surrounds us as necessary for us to be able to fulfill our true human potential.
The Principle: The true evolutionary core of a religious teaching is that which leads to increasing the completeness of the human person.
– In his sixth insight, Teilhard notes that “We must first understand, and then we must act”. If our understanding is correct, then an appropriate action can be chosen. If we act in accordance with what is real, our actions will contribute to both our personal evolution (our process of becoming more whole) as well as the evolution of our society. As Teilhard puts it,
“Those who spread their sails in the right way to the winds of the earth will always find themselves borne by a current towards the open sea.”
Or, As Richard Rohr puts it,
“Our lives must be grounded in awareness of the patterns of the Universe.”
The Principle: Authentic religion helps us to be aware of and cooperate with the creative energies which effect the universal phenomenon of evolution”

The Next Post

This week we looked at Teilhard’s six ‘evolutionary’ principles that we can use in our search for reinterpretation of religion. Next week we will consider some additional principles from other sources that we will employ as we examine religious teachings for their relevance to human life.

How can we use Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ to recognize religion’s potential as an evolutionary tool?

Today’s Post

Last week we recognized the waning influence of religion in Western societies and addressed the need to rethink traditional beliefs in terms of human life to tap into their wellsprings of insight and recover their relevance. We identified the concept of ‘reinterpretation’, first proposed by Maurice Blondel, and expanded eloquently by Teilhard de Chardin as the essential step for such relevance. This week we will take a first step toward this goal by setting the stage for such new insight.

The Process of Reinterpretation

From the earliest days of human thought, humans have attempted to understand the workings of their environment, to make sense of it, and to better relate to it. The whole of human history, from both science and religious viewpoints, contains a record of such activities. Human artifacts such as legal and moral codes document our attempts (in Teilhard’s words) to “articulate the noosphere”.

This articulation always involves searching and growing, which in turn requires the readiness to replace previous, outworn concepts with ones more consistent with a constantly expanding grasp of the universe.

With religion, according to Blondel, such ‘replacement’ consists of discarding all the superstitious, anthropomorphic, and otherworldly statements of belief, much like Jefferson did in forging his assertion of human equality based on his reinterpretation of the Gospels. In the resulting perspective God becomes the ‘core’, the “ground of being”, the ever-present agency which underlies everything as it ‘comes to be’.

In Blondel’s process of interpretation, this leads to new artifacts. Statements can be made from the new perspective which emerges from our understanding that we are embedded in a process of ‘coming to be’. To Blondel, it makes a difference that we see ourselves as ‘dynamic’, not static. We are ‘becoming’.

Teilhard expands and refines this approach by seeing the essential act of ‘becoming’ through his ‘lens of evolution’. From his perspective, this ‘becoming’ can be quantified by the increasing complexity of the ‘stuff of the universe’ over time which underpins the evolution of the entire universe. His insight provides the single thread which unites the three eras of universal evolution (pre-life, life, human life), and which is the key to explaining how humans ‘naturally’ emerge.

Teilhard understood that the evolutionary energy by which cosmic particles unite to increase complexity is just as present in the human activity of love as it is in the uniting of electrons and protons to become atoms.

He decomposed our individual and collective evolution into four steps:

– we always begin with a certain plateau of understanding in the first step,

– we then address those things which don’t work under our previous worldview in the second.,

– then in the third step we strip out those perspectives,

– and finally in the fourth step we go on to find a better vantage point, and eventually build new constructs.

Principles of Reinterpretation

So, if we can agree on the process, what about the guidelines? What signposts can we follow when we go about ‘stripping our conventional artifacts’? What principles do we employ when we take on the very difficult job of attempting an objective perspective on our subjective inner prejudices and attitudes? Many of these perspectives are so fundamental as to be nearly instinctual. We didn’t consciously develop them; they come with the subconscious acceptance of the beliefs and practices of parents, teachers, and society in general during our formative years. Overcoming them, therefore, requires us to lose the comfort and security of well-worn beliefs and begin a risky search for replacements.

The first step, therefore, is to follow thinkers like Blondel, Teilhard, Sacks and Rohr along this arduous path.

Blondel notes that all of us are to some extent already on this path. The simple realization that we must constantly attempt to see others objectively and to transcend our ego and self- centeredness if we are to have deep relationships with them, is a first step along this path. This need for overcoming ego is a basic tenet for nearly every religion. It is therefore a basic ‘principle of reinterpretation’.

Therefore, when we set out along the road to reinterpreting our traditional beliefs, we must be armed with such principles. As we will see, application of these principles to the many, often contradicting statements of Western religion will permit us to recognize the ‘core’ that Teilhard identifies and uncover their relevance to our lives.

Teilhard’s Approach to Interpretation

Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ has guided us thus far in our search for a universal perspective on ourselves. Teilhard’s unique approach to the nature of reality provides insights into the fundamental energies which are at work in the evolution of the universe and hence, as products of this same evolution, are at work in our own personal evolution as well. His insights compromise neither the theories of physics in the play of elemental matter found in the ‘Big Bang” nor the essential biological theory of Natural Selection in the ongoing evolution of living things. Instead, they bring them together into a single, coherent, continuous process which unites the pre-life, life, and human life eras of cosmic evolution. These insights also show how the ‘knowledge of consciousness’ which makes the human person unique in the biological kingdom is rooted in the cosmic scope of evolution.

This uniqueness, unfortunately, has been often addressed by science as an ‘epi-phenomenon’ or as just a pure accident. Teilhard instead places it firmly on the ‘axis of evolution’, that of increasing complexity. Doing so thus affords us a lens for seeing ourselves as a natural and essential product of evolution.

As Teilhard saw it, such a comprehensive understanding of evolution is therefore an essential step toward understanding the human person, how we fit into the universe, and how we should relate to it if we would most completely activate our human potential.

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at Blondel’s suggestion of ‘reinterpretation’ as a method of recovering the relevance of religion to human life.

Next week we will look at some different approaches to how our perspective of the basic things in our lives can change: how we can ‘reinterpret’.

How can we use Teilhard’s lens to rethink religion as an essential tool for evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Maurice Blondel, early in the last century, addressed the increasing irrelevance of religion in terms of its increasing emphasis on the ‘supernatural’, and how returning its focus to the human person was necessary for our continued evolution. His recommendation was that religious doctrines be ‘reinterpreted’ in the light of the findings of science to recover their relevance to human life. Or, as Teilhard would have it, they need to be examined through the ‘lens of evolution’
This week we will see how Blondel’s suggestion can be implemented.

Reinterpreting Religion

Blondel is difficult to read today, but Gregory Baum offers a clear summary of his insights in his book, “Man Becoming”. He notes that Blondel saw an impediment to the relevance of Christian theology in its tendency to focus on ‘God as he is in himself’ as opposed to ‘God as he is to us’.   Jonathan Sacks echoes this tendency, noting that the main message of Jesus focuses on the latter, while the increasing influence of Plato and Aristotle in the ongoing development of Christian theology shows a focus on the former. Both writers point out that this historical trend in the development of Christian theology is reflected in a focus on what and who God is apart from man. This results, as Sacks notes, in the introduction of a new set of dichotomies which were not present in Judaism, such as body vs soul, this life vs the next and corruption vs perfection. Such dichotomy, they both note, compromises the relevance of the message.  An example of this dichotomy can be seen in the ‘Question and Answer’ flow of the Catholic Baltimore Catechism:

“Why did God make me?
God made me to know, love and serve Him in this life so that I can be happy with Him in the next.”

   This simple QA reflects several aspects of such dichotomy.
– It presents the belief that ‘this life’ is simply a preparation for ‘the next’. This life is something we must endure to prove our worthiness for a fully meaningful and happy existence in the next. Therefore, our purpose in life is simply to make sure that we live a life worthy of the reward of heavenly existence when we die. As such, it has no implicit meaning.
– As follows from this perspective, we can’t expect meaning and the experience of happiness in human life.
– Ultimate meaning is understood as ‘a mystery to be lived and not a problem to be solved’. Understanding only happens in the next life.
– Happiness is a condition incompatible with the evil and corruption that we find not only all around us, but that we find within ourselves
– Life is essentially a ‘cleansing exercise’, in which our sin is expunged and which, if done right, makes us worthy of everlasting life.
As both Blondel and Sacks noted, the increasing Greek content of this perspective in Christian history slowly moves God from the intimacy reflected in Jesus, Paul, and John into the role that Blondel identifies as the “over/against of man”. It is not surprising that one of the evolutionary branches of Western belief, Deism, would result in seeing God as a powerful being who winds up the universe, as in a clock, setting it into motion but no longer interacting with it.

Dualism and Reinterpretation

So, where does this leave us? Most Western believers seem to be comfortable living with these dualities (not to mention the contradictions) present in their belief systems in order to accept the secular benefits of religion such as:

– a basis for human action
– a contributor to our sense of place in the scheme of things
– a pointer to our human potential
– a contributor to the stability of society

   While these benefits might be real, many surveys of Western societies, especially in Europe, show a correlation between increasing education and decreasing belief. Is it possible (as the atheists claim) that the price for the evolution of human society is a decrease in belief? That the increasing irrelevancy of religion is a necessary byproduct of our maturity?
Or is it possible that solutions to the ills of Western society require some connection to the spiritual realm claimed by religion? Put another way: is it possible to re-examine these claims to uncover their evolutionary values? How can the claims of religion be re-understood (‘re-ligio’) in terms of their secular values? Is it possible to look at them, as Karen Armstrong asserts, as “plans for action” necessary to advance human evolution? If so, religion certainly has the potential to recover the relevancy that is necessary for any tool with the potential of moving evolution forward.
To move toward such re-understanding, we will look at the idea of ‘reinterpretation’ itself, to explore how the perspectives of Teilhard, Blondel, Armstrong, Rohr and Sacks can be applied to the process of reinterpreting our two thousand years of religious doctrine development.
Considering that our lives are built on perspectives and beliefs that are so basic as to be nearly instinctual, how can we come to see them differently? Our histories, however, contain many stories of such transformations, and the unfolding of our sciences and social structures are dependent upon them.

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at Blondel’s suggestion of ‘reinterpretation’ as a method of recovering the relevance of religion to human life.
Next week we will look at some different approaches to how our perspective of the basic things in our lives can change: how we can implement the process of ‘reinterpretation’.

How can we use Teilhard’s lens to understand religion as necessary to evolution?

Today’s Post

For the past several weeks we have been tracing John Haught’s recognition that both religion and science need to evolve to effect the synthesis necessary to form a tool for dealing with the ‘risks of religion. In this series we have noted that both science and religion clearly have developed ‘tools’ for dealing with our evolution, but that these tools, effective as they have been shown to be, are still a work in progress. Last week we refocused Teilhard’ lens on religion’s ‘articulation of the noosphere’.

This week we will see at how religion’s side of this relationship must evolve if is to hold up its side of such potential synthesis.

Why Should Religion Evolve?

As Jonathan Sacks sees it, the secularization of Europe happened not because people lost faith in God, but because people lost faith in the ability of religious believers to live life peaceably together. More gradually, but also more extensively, Western Christianity has had to learn what Jews had been forced to discover in the first century: how to survive without power. From his perspective

– no religion relinquishes power voluntarily

– the combination of religion and power leads to internal factionalism, the splitting of the faith into multiple strands, movements, denominations, and sects

– at some point, the adherents of a faith find themselves murdering their own fellow believers

– it is only this that leads the wise to realize that this cannot be the will of God

What is needed, therefore, is for religion to continue to evolve, to recognize that many of the criticisms of the more well-spoken atheists are on target, and that most of the new findings of science only threaten the least reasonable aspects of religion as seen in such things as superstition, biblical literalism, dualism and focus on the afterlife. The fundamental belief in a principle of reality that is ‘on our side’, an evolutionary process in which we can realize our potential, and a recognition of the need for love are only found in religion. They need to be stressed anew for it to recover its relevancy to human life.

How can Religion Evolve?

What inhibits religion’s potential as a tool for ‘making sense of things’? It was only a few generations ago that religion was at the focus of all societies, but most respected polls today show a trend of decline in religion’s importance to society.

Although still clearly in the minority, the atheist voice has risen strongly in this same time frame. One consistent thread of this voice sees the religious viewpoint becoming completely replaced by an objective, materialistic and atheistic worldview in the near future. Popular, learned, and eloquent voices, such as Richard Dawkins, Oxford professor of “Public Understanding of Science”, is one of many who have written copiously of the many contradictions and superstitions that can be found in Western religion as well as a significant lack of grounding in the physical sciences. Science itself contributes to this trend as modern medicine and technology continue to extend their power to improve human welfare.

So, given these trends, how can religion move back to the center of human enterprise, equal to science in its application to the human need to ‘make sense of things’? Maurice Blondel, an early twentieth century French philosopher, addressed the problem of relevance in religion:

“A message that comes to man wholly from the outside, without an inner relationship to his life, must appear to him as irrelevant, unworthy of attention and unassimilable by the mind.”

With this succinct assertion, Blondel not only identifies the heart of the problem, but also opens the door to a path to returning relevance to religion. His observation suggests that this path requires religion to understand and express its beliefs in terms of human life as opposed to providing information about the ‘supernatural’, that which is “wholly from the outside”.

We have discussed religion as a ‘tool’ for us to continue our evolution at both a personal and societal level. Blondel proposes a ‘tool’ by which religion can realize its potential to improve its capability of helping us do just that.

The tool is ‘reinterpretation’.

The Next Post

This week we have seen how Jonathan Sacks echoes Teilhard’s call for a fresh approach to the potential synergy between religion and science. Like Teilhard, he concludes that the success of the West requires a balanced synergy between science and religion if it is to continue.

Next week, we will expand Maurice Blondel’s suggestion of ‘reinterpreting religion’ to recover its relevance to human life.

How can religion be seen as a tool for ‘articulating the noosphere’?

 Today’s Post

Last week we saw how religion can be seen as an attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’, in which the ‘laws’ of our personal and cultural evolution are sought and by which we can assure our continued personal and cultural growth.   This week we will see at how looking at them through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ at the level of religion can slowly inform our cultural standards.

From Articulating the Noosphere to Managing Human Evolution

Society has long struggled to both understand the principles which underlie a ‘successful’ society and to codify these principles into what we now understand as ‘laws’.  As chronicled by Nick Spencer in his book, “The Evolution of the West”, religion’s role in this historic process has been dualistic.  In many cases it has found itself trapped in the perpetuation of its financial, hierarchic, legalistic, and power scaffolding, and in other cases it has contributed to the fundamental concepts by which the delicate balance between personal and cultural civilization has successfully evolved.
Thomas Jefferson captured both arms of this dualism.   While his approach was to discard the ‘otherworldly’ aspects of the “Stories of Jesus” and focus on Jesus as a secular moralist, he nonetheless drew the basis of his understanding of human nature and personal freedom from these teachings.  The result, of course, was a cornerstone for a set of laws which has underpinned a truly ‘successful’ society.
Larry Siedentop, in his book, “Inventing the Individual’, traces the history of ideals that form the basis of Western values.   It’s not so much that these ideals are absent in Eastern thinking, but do not enjoy the primacy seen in the West.  He summarizes the ‘articulation of the noosphere’ as it has emerged in the West:

• Each person exists with worth apart from their social position
• Everyone deserves equal status under secular law
• Religious belief cannot be compelled
• Individual conscience must be respected

As Teilhard (and many others) have noted, the Western evolution of understanding of the person and society is becoming a standard embraced elsewhere:
“…from one end of the world to the other, all the peoples, to remain human or to become more so, are inexorably led to formulate the hopes and problems of the modern earth in the very same terms in which the West has formulated them.”
Johan Norberg, in his book, “Progress” documents in detail how this formulation, initially rising in the West, has made its way into many ‘developing’ countries.

The Perennial Philosophy

While considerable diversity and frequent contradiction is paramount among the threads of thought seen in the evolution of religion, Aldous Huxley saw common elements in all of them.  He defines the immemorial and universal ‘Perennial Philosophy’ which permeates all religions as:

“…the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being.”

Seeing this semi-theological assertion through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, we can see that this concept of the ‘Perennial Philosophy’ reflects the principle which powers the coming-to-be of the universe (the ‘world of things’) and that it is reflected in some way in the core of the human person.
Effectively, this ‘metaphysic’ points the way to the underlying activity by which we have come to be and the guidelines by which we successfully navigate our growth.  The Perennial Philosophy recognizes that there are basic dynamics of human existence which, understood and managed properly, will lead to increased completeness.  The religious and societal norms which have evolved, therefore, reflect our attempt to articulate these dynamics and the activities of understanding and management of them.  By definition, as we evolve as persons and as societies we hope to evolve them in a direction which activates our potential.
Or, as Karen Armstrong puts it in her insights on the many streams of thinking which developed during the ‘Axial Age’:

“The fact that they all (the sages of the Axial Age) came up with such profoundly similar solutions by so many different routes suggests that they had indeed discovered something important about the way human beings worked”.

The theologian, Cynthia Bourgeault, puts it a little differently:

”I think it’s fair to say that all of the great spiritual paths lead toward the same center—the larger, nondual mind as the seat of personal consciousness—but they get there by different routes.”

What’s the Alternative?

Successfully negotiating the continuation of our evolution goes beyond fulfilling our potential.  It is obvious today that human activity also has the potential of contributing to our extinction.  Finding and understanding the ‘laws of the noosphere’ also requires us to adapt to our ever-increasing population and the effects it has on the planet.  One example of the potential of such adaptation is acknowledged by John McHale in his book, “The Future of the Future”:

“At this point, then, where men’s affairs reach the scale of potential disruption of the global ecosystem, he invents precisely those conceptual and physical technologies that may enable him to deal with the magnitude of a complex planetary society.”

It’s not just that we are in danger of destroying our planet, but that even more danger lurks in our ever-increasing proximity to each other.  As we increasingly compress, we are more and more at the mercy of our instincts to defend our space, to keep ‘the other’ at bay, to defend our territory and make sure we get our fair share.  Inventing McHale’s ‘conceptual technologies’ means to develop evolutional strategies that overcome this strong resistance to closeness.

Johan Norberg documents nine distinct examples of such strategy in his book, “Progress”.
In this area it’s essential to our continued evolution for us to develop tactics which “use our neo-cortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of our reptilian and limbic brains.”
These ‘basic dynamics’ and ‘conceptual technologies’, therefore, are what is sought by humans in their attempts to ‘articulate the noosphere’.   Culling them from the enormous and often contradictory cluster of statements of beliefs that have arisen over the long evolution of religion is the main goal of a ‘reinterpretation’ process.
Teilhard offers a concise description of the validity of a person’s belief:

“By definition, his religion, if true, can have no other effect than to perfect the humanity in him.”

The Next Post

So, if we believe that that all expressions of religious beliefs include some elements of the ‘Perennial Philosophy’, what remains is to address them in the light of the perspectives we have developed thus far, then reinterpret them to find such kernels.  Next week we will begin to address the process of ‘reinterpreting religion’.

How can religion be reinterpreted by seeing it through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution?

Today’s Post

In the last few weeks, we have we have seen how Science and Religion, humanity’s two major belief systems, could extend their distinctive insights into a collaborative approach to the single reality in which we live.

Last week we saw how John Haught outlined a path for these two belief systems to become more synergistic, and hence more helpful to our search, in the approach which he termed, “anticipation”.

This week we will move to the next step of this ‘reinterpretation’ by addressing the ‘Root of Everything’

What’s At The Bottom of It All?

Our approach to the underlying causality of everything, the ‘ground of being’, has assumed the perspective of Teilhard with his highly comprehensive understanding of the process of evolution in the coming-to-be of the universe.  This perspective simply recognizes evolution as proceeding along an axis of increasing complexity over time.  Teilhard was one of the few thinkers to see how this process, essential to the fourteen or so billion years which precedes us, still continues in us: in our personal development as well as the development of our species.

He, as well as other thinkers such as Jonathan Sacks, Maurice Blondel and Karen Armstrong, saw the history of religion as the evolving search for the basis of this cosmic agency as it is manifest in personal human life.   As we have seen, this basis of personal life manifests itself as a branch of the cosmic ‘axis of evolution’ as its sap rises through living things.

The Common Threads of Religion

All the evolving threads of religious thought emerged across the multifaceted evolution of cultures and societies as they evolved their understanding of the roots of reality from a coarse animism and a necessary adjunct of the state.  Karen Armstrong, in her book, “The Axial Age” sees this evolution reaching a tipping point with the paradigm shift which can be seen in the period of human history from 900-200 BCE.  As she puts it,

“For the first time, human beings were systematically making themselves aware of the deeper layers of human consciousness.  By disciplined introspection, the sages of the Axial Age were awakening to the vast reaches of selfhood that lay beneath the surface of their minds.  They were becoming fully “self-conscious”. This was one of the clearest expressions of a fundamental principle of the Axial Age.  Enlightened persons would discover within themselves the means of rising above the world; they would experience transcendence by plumbing the mysteries of their own nature, not simply by taking part in magical rituals.…they all concluded that if people made a disciplined effort to reeducate themselves, they would experience an enhancement of their humanity.”

To paraphrase Armstrong and reflecting Teilhard and Sacks, evolution was becoming aware of itself.  Humanity was moving from its evolutionary critical point of ‘awareness of its awareness’ to its ontological critical point of ‘awareness of the principles of awareness’.  This step of “plumbing the mysteries of their own nature” was effectively a step toward understanding the ‘ground of being’ as the principle of what would later be understood by science as ‘evolution’.  While the theory of evolution as we know it today was still thousands of years in the future, nonetheless in the ‘Axial Age’ human persons embarked on a path that recognized the role that human choice played in both personal maturity and the evolution of society.

The fact that the stream of human inquiry has since bifurcated into the manifold strands found in religion and science only illustrates the value of recognizing, understanding, and cooperating with the underlying mechanisms which propel our evolution.  But at the root of it all, such understanding is necessary if we are going to continue to (paraphrasing Richard Dawkins) “raise the world to an increasing level of complexity”.

Teilhard labels this effort as ‘articulation of the noosphere’.  He saw this articulation as requiring two basic insights:

–  the ‘noosphere’ (the milieu of organized human thought) is structured by ‘laws’ by which evolution proceeds in the human species

–  such evolution cannot proceed unless we understand and cooperate with these ‘laws’ in the same way that we are learning to understand and cooperate with the laws of physics, chemistry and biology.

We can see religion, therefore, as the long, rambling, frequently contradictory and many-faceted attempt by the human species to identify these laws and attempt to apply them to human life.  Or, as Karen Armstrong puts it, “…to experience (growth) by plumbing the mysteries of (our) own nature”.  Just as we have come to see evolution as proceeding along the axis of rising complexity, we can now begin to see religion as the attempt to articulate the dimensions and continuation of this axis, marked by the success of its statements in continuing the rise of evolution through the human.

To understand religion, therefore, is to identify, among the diverse threads which can be found among its manifold and often contradictory forms, those statements of belief that, when practiced, move us onto a more complete “enhancement of our humanity”.  This in turn will lead to a society which better fosters such a grasp.

If we’re going to understand religion as an approach to ‘making sense of things’ in a way that helps us to understand things from the integrated perspective of Teilhard and Haught, and hence as a ‘signpost’ to a future in which we activate our potential, we must learn to see in it those insights which aid in such an understanding.

The Next Post

Next week we will continue our process of reinterpretation of religion by looking at religion as an ‘articulation of the noosphere’.  How can religious thought help us to better understand reality so that we can better negotiate our passage to the future?

How Can Religion and Science leverage each other?

Today’s Post

Last week we looked at the two most powerful streams of thought in human history: science and religion.  Nearly everything that can be seen in human society, from norms to laws to technology to human welfare can be attributed to one or the other (and in many cases, both) of these human enterprises.  But as John Haught points out (and Teilhard, Johnathan Sacks and Richard Rohr insist), there are areas in which they must both evolve if they are to continue their contribution to the human evolutionary ascent to fuller being. This week we will continue Haught’s insights into today’s shortcomings of these two systems, and how they can evolve to an integrated resource in which their strengths are leveraged in the great human enterprise.

The Inadequacy of the Two Stories

Haught sees a strong level of superficiality in both science and religion that inhibits relevance to human life:

“So far most (scientific versions of history) have stapled the human story only loosely onto scientific accounts of the earlier cosmological and biological chapters.  They have seldom looked deeply into how one stage interpenetrates the others.”

   He notes how neither of these two legacy ‘Cosmic Stories’ are satisfactory today as the ‘cosmic spark’ which underpins universal evolution is too otherworldly in religion, but overlooked altogether by science:

 “If the analogical (legacy religious) reading is unbelievable- since it has to bring in supernatural causes to explain how more-being gets into the natural world, the archaeonomic (legacy scientific) reading is even less believable since it cannot show how the mere passage of time accounts for the fuller-being that gradually emerges.”

  Haught notes, echoing Teilhard, how it is possible for the increasing discoveries of science to deepen the meaning and relevance of religion:

“…every aspect of religion gains new meaning and importance once we link it to the new scientific story of an unfinished universe.”

   But

“If analogy cannot make the emergence of life and mind intelligible without bringing in a non-natural mode of causation that lifts the whole mass up from above, archaeonomy is even less intellectually helpful in assuming that all true causes are ultimately mindless physical events, hence that life and mind are not really anything more than their inanimate constituents.”

   Further, Haught notes that both traditional science and religion, with their sights fixed firmly rearward, seem complicit in their disdain for universal potentiality.  He notes that:

“The cosmic pessimism of so many modern intellectuals, it turns out, is a cultural by-product of the implicit despair about the physical universe that had been tolerated for so many centuries by otherworldly, religious readings of nature.”

   It is this pessimism that is at the root of the ‘dangers of the past’ that infect our ‘existential anxiety’.  Science can open our eyes to the immensities of time and space, but in doing so it suggests both an impersonal nature of how they relate in an ultimately material basis of matter.   In doing so, those traditionally spiritual (Haught: ‘otherworldly’) beliefs of religion which have underpinned a positive stance to life in the past can become increasingly irrelevant.

As we learn more from science, beliefs which require unworldly hermeneutics become less relevant to human life, and hence less tenable.

As we have previously seen, and indebted to both Teilhard and John Haught, we delved into a very basic and powerful approach to reinterpretation which highlights the underlying problems of both traditional science and religion in making sense of our lives.

We saw that one aspect of this reinterpretation is simply a shift of perspective from locating ‘meaning’ in the past to positing it in the future.  Again, paraphrasing Haught:

“While traditional religion locates the fullness of being appearing in the past, a ‘timeless fiat accompli’, and science locates it in a set of mathematically perfect principles extant at the ‘Big Bang’, an ‘anticipatory set of eyes’ would see it as a dramatic, transformative, temporal awakening.”

   Or, as the poet Gerard Manly Hopkins saw it, as a

“Gathering to greatness/Like the oozing of oil”.

   But closer to the focus of our search for a story which is more relevant to our lives, Haught uncovers a perspective common to both science and religion:

“Both archaeonomic cosmic pessimism and analogical otherworldly optimism, by comparison, are expressions of impatience.”

   Impatience, an indignant dissatisfaction with our state and that of the environment which surrounds us, is a significant element of our ‘existential anxiety’.  Haught’s insight into this condition explains why neither the comfort provided by religion in the past or the intellectual satisfaction promised by technology for the future are working to ease such a condition.  Even after a read of Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress,” which documents a strong recent surge of improvement in global human welfare, many readers can still protest, “But look at all there is still left undone!”

   What can replace our traditional hermeneutic?  Haught recommends that we respect Hopkins’ “Gathering to greatness” as a good place to start:

“…every aspect of religion gains new meaning and importance once we link it to the new scientific story of an unfinished universe.”

The Anticipation Story

In his third category of ‘Cosmic Story’, Haught suggests a confluence between science and religion that leverages their strengths and ‘filters out’ their shortcomings.   He refers to this third story as “anticipation”.

“Anticipation offers a coherent alternative to both analogy and archaeonomy.  It reads nature, life, mind and religion as ways in which a whole universe is awakening to the coming of more-being on the horizon.  It accepts both the new scientific narrative of gradual emergence and the sense that something ontologically richer and fuller is coming into the universe in the process.”

   He proposes that such an approach to the nature of the cosmos can also bring about a profound sense of ‘belonging’ once we begin to trust the upwelling of wholeness warranted by fourteen or so billion years of ‘complexification’.

“An anticipatory reading of the cosmic story therefore requires a patient forbearance akin to the disposition we must have when reading any intriguing story.  Reading the cosmic story calls for a similar kind of waiting, a policy of vigilance inseparable from what some religious traditions call faith.  Indeed, there is a sense in which faith, as I use the term…, is patience”.

   Thus, the anticipatory approach to the cosmic story requires a certain patience with the ongoing process of complexification, certain in confidence in a future that somehow will be better than the past.  Placing the universe into the context of becoming requires us to understand that

“Not-yet, however, is not the same as non-being.  It exists as a reservoir of possibilities that have yet to be actualized.  It is a realm of being that has future as its very essence.”

   And, as Haught goes on to say, such an anticipatory perspective also is a factor in moving towards increased synergy between science and religion:

“…every aspect of religion gains new meaning and importance once we link it to the new scientific story of an unfinished universe.”

   Patricia Albere, author of “Evolutionary Relationship”, echoes this perspective

“..the long history of rising universal complexity suggests that we have only to allow ourselves to be lifted by the evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”.  To do this, “we only have to begin to pay attention”.

   And, as John Haught advises, “to anticipate with patience”.

The Next Post

This week we have looked a little deeper into how science and religion can evolve toward a more powerful integrated tool for managing the risks of evolution that we identified earlier. In doing so, we have approached it from the perspective of John Haught, who contrasts the legacy religious and scientific ‘Cosmic Stories’, but suggests a third, synergistic, insight into human life.  In his perspective, what is warranted as we participate in the flow of human evolution, is a spirit of ‘anticipation’: less a handwringing, indignant demand for faster progress than a recognition of the progress that is being made and a recognition that Albere’s ‘optimization’ is in fact underway in our lives as well as our societies.

But if we are to understand Haught’s suggestion that we evolve our religious thinking from ‘analogy’ to ‘anticipation’, how would our historical approach to religion change?

Next week we will begin a second relook at religion, this time from Haught’s perspective of ‘anticipation’ to sift the ore of traditional belief for the jewels of insight that it offers this exploration.