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January 16, 2020 – TheSecular Side of Spirituality

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Today’s Post

For the last few weeks we have been summarizing the part of the blog, “The Secular Side of God, in which we have seen how from Teilhard’s perspective, the traditional concepts of God and the Trinity can be reinterpreted into facets of universal evolution. Last week we saw how they play together in Teilhard’s convergent spiral, manifested in the ‘hominized’ vectors of Faith, Hope and Love, the human version of the universal agencies of unity, convergence and complexification, and thus continue the rise of complexity through the human person.

Throughout this journey, we have touched on the idea of ‘spirituality’, assuming that at every rung of evolution some sort of underlying agency moves the universe, and ourselves, from less to more complexity.

This week we will look at this commonly used term in more depth as we address the ‘secular side of spirituality’. The posts of September 14 through 26 October, 2017 are summarized this week.

The Evolution of ‘Spirituality’

In opposition to the traditional Western concept of spirituality as a quality of ‘supernature’, in which reality is dualistically divided into ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’. Teilhard sees only one reality, not two, and things traditionally relegated to the ‘supernatural’ are simply things that we have not yet recognized as ‘natural’

Teilhard takes the key underlying metric of ‘complexification of the universe’ as his starting point. As many have objected, how can we make this assumption? Teilhard’s answer is that if the universe did not evolve in the direction of increasing complexity, it would have been ‘dead on arrival’, and we would not be here to debate it. In his words, “complexification is not a phenomenon of the universe, it is the phenomenon”

Hence if we follow this thread of increasing complexity, we can better understand ‘how things come to be what they are’ and in doing so, better understand how we fit in.

In Teilhard’s day, this concept had yet to take root in traditional Physics. Science restricted evolution to the biological era, via the Darwinistic principle of ‘Natural Selection’. Teilhard was one of the few thinkers to question what happened in the preceding ten billion or so years that prepared the inanimate ‘stuff of the universe’ for integrating in such a way as to produce living cells.
Teilhard’s insight was that each particle of the universe somehow had the innate capability of joining with other ‘like’ particles to effect an increase in complexity in the resulting new particle. It wasn’t until the late 1960’s before empirical scientists, such as Ilya Prigogine, began to address the mystifying capability of natural things to ‘self-organize’, such as weather patterns (tornadoes), crystals, in their intricate patterns, and many other phenomena.

In the next few decades, scientists began to build an approach to physics which saw inanimate particles as inclusive of ‘information’. An example of this ‘information’ is how the complex DNA molecule provides ‘instructions’ for the conversion of nucleic acids into proteins, which would ultimately provide energy to the cell.

Paul Davies, who elaborates on this implicit factor in his book, “The 5th Miracle”, asks the question,

“How can mindless molecules, capable only of pushing and pulling their intermediate neighbors, cooperate and sustain something as ingenious as a living organism?”

   He answers his question:

“If I am right that the key to biogenesis lies, not with chemistry but with the formation of a particular logical and informational architecture, then the crucial step involved the creation of an information processing, system, employing software control.”

   Thus empirical science is being led to consider that there is something in material particles which contains what Davies analogically refers to as ‘software’. This ‘software’ is precisely what Teilhard understood as the underlying principle which guides things to unite in such a way as to increase their complexity.
Davies is quick to point out that science does not yet have an empirical understanding of exactly how this ‘software’ is embedded in the ‘hardware’ of matter, but like Richard Dawkins, he believes that it will one day be discovered.

The Spiritual Basis of Evolution

We have seen in our secular perspective of God how the principle metric of evolution is the increasing of complexity over time, and how this increasing complexity has yet to be quantified by science but yet is critical to science’s understanding of how the universe unfolds. We have also seen how this increase in complexity underpins the principle by which entities of a given order of complexity can unite in such a way that the ensuing entities are of a higher order.

Teilhard sees an energy at work by which this happens at every rung of evolution. At the rung of fundamental particles, it can be seen in the effecting of electrons from quarks, then atoms from electrons, protons and neutrons, then molecules from atoms. At the rung of the human person, it is the energy which unites us in such a way that we become more complete. At the human level this energy manifests itself as ‘love’.

It is at work, therefore, to an increasingly lesser extent as we look backward in time at all previous steps of evolution. While science does not yet have a term for this energy, the religious term is spirit.

As Teilhard points out, in the collection of his thoughts, “Human Energy”, the roots of this essential ‘complexifying’ energy of evolution are deeply embedded in the ‘axis of evolution’.

“Spirituality is not a recent accident, arbitrarily or fortuitously imposed on the edifice of the world around us; it is a deeply rooted phenomenon, the traces of which we can follow with certainty backwards as far as the eye can reach, in the wake of the movement that is drawing us forward. ..it is neither super-imposed nor accessory to the cosmos, but that it quite simply represents the higher state assumed in and around us by the primal and indefinable thing that we call, for want of a better name, the ‘stuff of the universe’. Nothing more; and also nothing less. Spirit is neither a meta- nor an epi- phenomenon, it is the phenomenon.”

   As Teilhard sees it, this ‘secular’ approach to spirituality overcomes yet another dualism that is common to religion: spirit vs matter.

“Spirit and matter are (only) contradictory if isolated and symbolized in the form of abstract, fixed notions of pure plurality and pure simplicity, which can in any case never be realized. (In reality) one is inseparable from the other; one is never without the other; and this for the good reason that one appears essentially as a sequel to the synthesis of the other. The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals (itself in) a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self-conscious.”

   Teilhard is making an essential point about spirit and matter here. He sees matter evolving to higher levels of complexity (‘synthesizing’) under the influence of the energy of complexification (‘spirit’), and the increased complexity which results from such synthesis is therefore capable of more complex interaction, which itself is capable of closer union (See last week’s post on the convergent spiral of evolution). This increased material level of complexity is a manifestation of an increased level of spirit. To Teilhard, spirit is “Nothing more; and also nothing less” than the energy of evolution, or in Davie’s analogy, “The ‘software’ which drives the ‘hardware’ to more complexity”.

In Teilhard’s perspective, therefore, the basic process of evolution can now be seen as a process of matter “changing its spiritual state”. ‘Spirit’ can now be seen as that which underlies the very axis of evolution, finally becoming fully tangible in the human person and his society.

The Next Post

This week we summarized the posts which addressed the concept of spirituality from Teilhard’s secular perspective, and saw how spirituality is a phenomenon essential to the process of evolution as it lifts the universe to ‘its current level of complexity’.

Next week we will continue our summary of the blog, “The Secular Side of God” by addressing the specific aspects of evolution as it is appears in human life. We have seen how evolution can be understood both by science and a reinterpreted religion as an increase in complexity leading up to the era of biologic life, but what happens when we introduce the concept of “Natural Selection”? Does Natural Selection replace ‘complexification’ as the key agency in evolution once the cell arrives? How do these two phenomena play out in human life? How can we become aware of evolution as it occurs in our lives?

January 9, 2020 – The Trinity and the Convergent Spiral of Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week we completed a look at how the concept of the ‘Trinity’ addresses three facets of the ‘ground of being’ that underlays the entire universe and has, as Richard Dawkins suggests, “raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence”.

This week we will look a little deeper into this agency, seeing it through a model proposed by Teilhard which illustrates how these three facets work together to effect this ‘raising’ over time.

This post is a summary of those posted from September 2 May to 16 May 2019.

The Universal Spiral of Evolution

Teilhard’s insight into evolution moves the subject from a biological process on a single planet which moves life toward manifestations that survive over time (Natural Selection) to one which increases the complexity of its products beginning at the ‘big bang’ and continues to this day, not only on this planet but at every place in the universe. As we have seen, he sees three factors are at work at each step of the the elements of ‘the stuff of the universe’ to effect this increase. He proposes this model as a way of viewing this process

In this simple figure, each element of evolution is acted on by three ‘vectors’ of evolutionary energy.

In the first vector, a, the element engages in union with other elements of the same rank, This unifying force produces a new product whose measure of complexity is slightly increased from the ‘parent’ elements, such as the atom which is a product of the union among electrons, protons, and neutrons. Teilhard refers to this vector as ‘tangential’.

The second vector, b, is an indication of the force which increases the potential for further union and complexity of the new product. Teilhard’ term for this is ‘radial’.

The resulting magnitude of complexity of the new product is indicated in the third vector, c,

By which the elements move forward and upward on the spiral as they increase their complexity.

Teilhard sees this convergent spiral as illustrating the process of evolution at every stage of every component of evolution in the entire cosmos. All components are acted upon by these three forces.

He notes, however, that every stage of evolution, while these three forces apply they appear in different ways to effect the outcomes of closer union, increased capacity for union and as a result, increased complexity. The forces of evolution by which atoms result from unifications of electrons, protons and neutrons, for example, while conforming in general to his model, are manifested quite differently from those which effect the evolution from atoms to molecules, and radically different from the appearance of the cell, the neuron, consciousness, and finally consciousness aware of itself: the human person. As the level of complexity increases, articulating and understanding how the three vectors play out becomes increasingly difficult.

This model, while explanatory of the underlying process of complexification as it rises throughout the entire universe, is not universally accepted by science. The complaint is that it can be seen as ‘teleological’, and hence a ‘back door’ intrusion of religion into the field of science.

There are, however, scientists who empirically inquire into such tangible complexification, such as Paul Davies, who, in his book, “The Cosmic Blueprint”, says

“I have been at great pains to argue that the steady unfolding of organized complexity in the universe is a fundamental property of nature”. (underline mine.)

   And, as we have seen, even the more clear-headed atheists, while dismissing religion as a valid school of thought, can refer to a process which

“…eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence. “

The Spiral of Evolution in the Human Person

If, as Teilhard asserts, the basic three vectors of the fundamental forces of evolution apply as well to humans as to atoms, how can they be seen as active in our lives?

If the three facets or ‘vectors’ identified above are still active in the human species, how do they manifest themselves in our lives?

We saw in the last post how the concept of a ‘triune God’ can be understood as the basic forces of evolution working in three interconnected ways, identified by Teilhard as ‘tangential’, ‘radial’ and resulting ‘vertical’, the increase of complexity.   Teilhard refers these three ‘facets’, or ‘vectors’ as that seen in one of Paul’s great summaries of the teaching of Jesus: the ‘theological virtues’.

The first of Paul’s three human components of this converging spiral is ‘Love’, the component of unity.   Love is the ‘hominized’ (Teilhard’s term) characteristic of the vector labelled ‘a’ in the diagram. In doing so, Teilhard frees the concept of ‘love’ from its popular understanding as a strong emotion and allows it to flower as the energy of the power of evolution to unite its products in ways that increase their complexity. To Teilhard, Love is less an act of emotion or instinct that encourages our relationships and more one of uniting us in such a way that we become more what it is possible for us to become. From this perspective, love is ‘ontological’: to love is to become. It is the energy which unites in such a way as to move us forward on the spiral.

Paul’s second component is that of ‘Faith’, the hominized appearance of ‘b’ in the figure above.   Faith is the pull of our lives toward the axis of evolution and hence the human response to the universal evolutional principle of complexification.

As we become more adept at ‘articulating the noosphere’, we begin to better understand the structure and the workings of the reality in which we are enmeshed. Such articulations of the universe will be undermined, however, if they are not preceded by a ‘faith’ that they exist at all. While this sounds like religious terminology, imagine if Newton had not first believed that there was some objective, measurable and most of all ‘comprehensible’ force by which objects moved from ‘static’ to ‘dynamic states. Faith is the first step toward increasing our grasp of reality and enhancing our response to the energy of evolution.

The third of these three components is ‘Hope’, ‘c’ in the figure. Hope is the result of engaging in Love and Faith which results in the opening our eyes to a future now seen as pregnant with possibility. It encourages us on our journey toward our potential for increased complexity as we move forward (and therefore upward) on the spiral.

One of the gifts of evolution in the human is the ability to look into the future, as murky and risky as that might be. If our look into the future is pessimistic and without hope, such negativity inhibits our movement up the spiral, toward a future in which the results of our growth are bleak, the fruit of our love is rejection, and we see ourselves as hopelessly inadequate to build a full life. Without hope, the evolutionary power of love, itself guaranteed over the fourteen or so billion years of universal becoming, is diminished.   Hope is that component of evolution by which we ‘rise’ as we move forward on the spiral.

The Next Post

For the past several weeks we have been tracing the traditional approach to God, Jesus and the Trinity. Fundamentals of Western religion, through the eyes of Teilhard to their secular sides. This week we looked at the whole picture in terms of Teilhard’s ‘spiral of evolution, showing how these concepts emerge as manifestations of the forces of universal evolution, and further how they can be seen to work in our individual lives.

Throughout this journey, we have touched on the idea of ‘spirituality’, assuming some sort of underlying agency which moves the universe, and ourselves, from less to more complexity.

Next week we will look at this commonly used term in more depth as we address the ‘secular side of spirituality’.

 

December 26, 2019 – The Secular Side of The Trinity

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw Jesus from our secular perspective, and noted how quickly the highly integrated understanding found in John became a victim of the endless human trend toward ‘dualism’. From our secular perspective, we saw how John’s vision strengthened the immediacy (immanence) of ‘the ground of being’ in human life and how Jesus was the ‘signpost’ for this spark of universal becoming which could be found in all the products of evolution, but only capable of being recognized as such by the human person.

This week we’ll take a look at the third stage of this unique evolution of the concept of God: the Trinity.

Today’s post is a summary of the posts from August 3 to August 17, 2017.

The History of the Trinity

As Bart Ehrman notes in his book, “How Jesus Became God”, unlike God and Jesus the Trinity isn’t addressed as such in any of the books of the Old or New Testament.   As we have seen, the understanding of God and Jesus in these books has evolved over time, but the concept of a ‘third person’ wasn’t developed until late in the first three hundred years of the new Christian church.

It wasn’t until this point in the evolution of the early church’s theology that this agent began to be considered divine in somehow the same way that Jesus was being considered.

In a nutshell, the new church began to consider God as being ‘triune’, somehow composed of three distinct but unified ‘persons’ whose agency in universal evolution was reflected in three separate ways. The most commonly used terms ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Spirit’, however, are of little help in achieving an integrated understanding of this complex concept. Thus in the same way that the church required belief without understanding as an ‘act of faith’ necessary for salvation (as in the belief that Jesus was both God and Man), it was soon to follow with the statement that God was also ‘three divine persons in one divine nature’.

And, in the same way that the controversy over the nature of Jesus was debated before the Nicene council, that of the Trinity continued to be debated. After the Arian controversy was resolved by the Nicean council, the debate moved from the deity of Jesus to the equality of the ‘Spirit’ with the ‘Father’ and ‘Son’. Was this new person, the ‘Spirit’, equal or inferior to the other two? How could it be integrated when it was absent from scripture?

This controversy was brought to a head at the Council of Constantinople (381) which affirmed that the Spirit was indeed of the same ‘substance and nature’ of God, but like Jesus, a separate ‘person’. While perhaps theologically acceptable, Karen Armstrong concludes in her book, “A History of God”,

“For many Western Christians . . . the Trinity is simply baffling”.

Richard Rohr agrees with Armstrong that of all the Christian statements of belief, that of the Trinity seems furthest removed from human life.

So, what secular sense can we make of this? Can the ‘secular’ sense make ‘common’ sense?

The Secular Side of the Trinity

From our secular viewpoint, when put into Teilhard’s context of universal evolution, the concept of the Trinity becomes not only much simpler but more relevant to human life. Looking through Teilhard’s (and before him, Blondel’s) eyes, we have seen how God can be reinterpreted from a supernatural being which is the ‘over and against of man’ who creates, rewards and punishes, to the ‘ground of being’, the basis for the universe’s potential for evolution via increase in complexity. And applying this perspective to Jesus, we saw last week how he can be reinterpreted from a sacrifice necessary to satisfy such a distant God, to the personification of this increase in complexity as it rises through cosmic evolution to eventually manifest itself as the human person: the ‘signpost to God’.

In the same way we can see a third facet of this ‘axis of evolution’, the ‘Spirit’, as the energy which unites the products of evolution in such a way as to effect their increase in complexity. From this perspective, the ‘Spirit’ is simply the “the agent of complexification in evolution.”

More specifically, we can begin to see how this ‘triune God’ can be seen to be ‘personal’.   The synthesized collaboration of these three principles of evolution effects what we know as the product of evolution that we refer to as ‘the person’.

Christianity puts names to these three aspects of the ground of being:

  • ‘Father’ as the underlying principle of the unfolding of the universe in general, but as the principle of this becoming as it emerges after long periods of time as the ‘person’.
  • ‘Son’ as the manifestation of the product of evolution that has become ‘person’
  • ‘Spirit’ as the energy by which this ‘becoming’ takes the form of increasing complexity which leads to the ‘person’

Or, more succinctly

  • The ‘Father’ acts to move the universe along its evolutionary path.
  • Jesus is the blueprint for this action.
  • Spirit is the agency by which such action results in increased complexity

As we have noted frequently in this blog, Teilhard describes the human manifestation of this third ‘person’, this third facet of the ground of being, as love:

“Love is the only energy capable of uniting entities in such a way that they become more distinct.”

   There’s something very revolutionary about this assertion. Before the advent of the human, universal ‘complexification’ rose through the outcome of such unification: increased complexity only occurred in the antecedent to the union, the precedents are left unchanged.

This can be seen in the early stages of universal evolution where more complex atoms result from the unification of less complex electrons and more complex molecules from less complex atoms. In the human person, the act of love increases the level of complexity in the uniters themselves. It is in this latest manifestation of the energies of the universe that we ourselves grow when we participate in love. So much more than the emotion which we experience when we unite, this unification effects our personal coming to be of what we are capable of. The point that Teilhard makes many times in his writing is that love is more ontological than it is emotional.

And in addressing this last agent of becoming, the ‘Spirit’, we can now see more clearly how John’s astounding statement begins to make secular sense:

“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him.”

Thus, Teilhard locates the ’Spirit’ squarely in the axis of evolution, as the manifestation of the energy which powers evolution through its rising levels of complexity. We can see in Science’s “Standard Model’ how this energy is manifest in forces such as the atomic forces, electricity and magnetism, gravity and chemistry as they all collaborate in raising the universe from the level of pure energy to that of matter sufficiently complex to provide the building blocks of life. We can also see how this energy continues to manifest itself in raising the complexity of living matter through the process of Natural Selection. Understanding the ‘Spirit’ is simply recognizing how evolutionary products aware of their consciousness (human persons) can cooperate with this energy to be united in such a way as to advance their individual complexity (their personal growth) and therefore continue to advance the complexity of their species.

Last week we noted that Richard Rohr decried how the increasing structure and dogmatism of the Christian church increased the distance between man and God by decreasing the relevance of its message. With our secular perspective, we can see how it is possible to understand the Trinity in terms which are relevant to life.

The Next Post

This week we saw that how adding the ‘Spirit’ to the ‘Father’ and the ‘Son’ completes an understanding of the ‘the ground of being’, the basis of the universe’s ‘coming to be’ in general. More importantly, we saw how we can begin to understand how this agent of evolution which has “raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence” (Richard Dawkins) works in our individual lives, as our personal dimension of the ‘axis of evolution’.

There is still another aspect of the concept of ‘The Trinity’ to explore. Understanding that the universe ‘is raised..to complexity” by the three-vectored actions of the ‘ground of being’, Teilhard proposes a ‘model’ how they act in concert to effect such raise in complexity. Next week we will look into this model as we address the “Convergent Spiral of Evolution.

December 19, 2019 – The Secular Side of Jesus

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This Week

Last week we took a look at how the basic Western understanding of the value of the human person has developed into a hermeneutic for a secular approach to a ‘science of the person’. We saw how many seeking to apply the methods of science to the improvement of human lives have adopted many of the core values of Christianity without being shackled by its belief in the ‘supernatural’.

This week we will begin to apply our ‘principles of reinterpretation’ from November 14, 2019, to some of the subjects of religion In our search for “The Secular Side of God’. The first such subject will be the ‘person of Jesus’. From our secular perspective, who or what was Jesus?

This week’s post summarizes the posts from May 11 to July 20, 2017.

Starting with the ‘New Testament’

The obvious starting place for such inquiry is the so-called “New Testament” consisting of the four gospels and other commentaries, the most influential of which is Paul.   Nearly all, if not all, Western religions base their teachings in some way on these documents, with the ‘liturgical’ religions making use of teachings which have evolved from these documents

The actual dates of the life of Jesus are not certain, and the first person to write about him seems to be Paul, some years after Jesus’ death. All the other authors of the ‘New Testament’ seem to have come later, so it seems that no one who wrote of Jesus actually knew him but depended on stories which were prevalent in the many new churches which sprung up after his death.

The ‘basic’ set of scriptures seems to be the three ‘synoptic’ gospels, effectively ‘stories of Jesus’, written some years after Paul, which depict Jesus as a Jewish man whose teachings offered politically dangerous interpretations of the law of Moses (The Torah), and suffered the consequence of death, after which he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. Bart Ehrman, biblical scholar, notes that the ‘miraculous’ content of these scriptures (virgin birth, resurrection, etc) are not uncommon to other such stories which appear during this time, and were probably understood by early Christians as competition.

These teachings, as found in the Synoptic Gospels, can be seen, unsurprisingly, to reflect the legacy of the Torah, and hence carried with them the same ‘dualities’ of the ‘Old’ Testament, such as

    • How is a good God compatible with evil in the world?
    • Was God a ‘loving father’ or a ‘vengeful judge’?
    • Was scripture a ‘law of God’ to be followed literally or a testament to be refined by Jesus’ teachings?

The New Testament introduced some new dualities, such as

    • Was Jesus human or in some way divine?
    • Did God kill him to avenge Adam’s ‘original sin’?

These dualities can be seen to be playing out even to this day.

The three Synoptic gospels are followed in the New Testament by a fourth, that of John, who introduces an entirely new perspective. In John, the ‘divinity’ of Jesus is emphasized, and his relationship with God is depicted as more intimate. From this perspective, John sees Jesus as a manifestation of an undercurrent of divine life in all persons, going so far as to say

“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in Him”

   In this concept of “the Word made flesh”, John locates Jesus as an aspect of the same ontology in which creation itself was effected, representing the ‘blueprint’ for creation in the same way that God can be seen in the ‘act’ of creation. While Paul first understood ‘the Christ’ as Jesus’ reward for his sacrifice, John more fully understands ‘the Christ’ as an essential thread of creation, become human in the person of Jesus.

So in just a handful of years, a single lifetime, we see the Christian understanding of Jesus evolving from a teacher whose morality seemed grounded in preparation for ‘the coming’, to one who offers a sacrifice to an angry, judgmental God who has withheld his love to humans due to an ancient sin, to one rewarded (“exalted”) with divinity for his sacrifice, to one whose ‘divinity’, whose ‘oneness with God’ was a necessary thread in the creation of the universe.   At the same time, we see an evolution of the understanding of God as well, from a God whose primary characteristic was ‘judgment’ to one whose very nature was ‘love’.; and from being located ‘out there’, over against us, to a presence so intimate in us that our very nature is entwined in it.

John clearly leads to a concept of God in which we and ‘he’ are intimate, how Jesus illustrates this intimacy in a way that we can imitate, and in the act of imitation we become more aware of ‘him’. With all this, however, it’s not difficult to see how successive theological development in the West has led to the idea of a distant God requiring ‘intermediaries’ to achieve contact (Jesus, Mary, Saints). The emergence of the theory of ‘substitutionary atonement’ in the 12th century, for example, saw Jesus as a mere afterthought when God’s first plan did not work out. The ‘cognitive dissonance’ between this theory and John’s assertion of “God in us” persists in many Christian expressions to this day.

Jesus and Evolution

So how does all this play out in our secular approach to God? As we have established, our approach to making sense of things is to place them in an evolutionary context, following the approach of Teilhard de Chardin. Where does Jesus, and ‘the Christ’ fit into this?

To Teilhard, this begins with the identification of ‘complexification’ as the essential metric of evolution. Once we understand this, the rest simply requires recognition of how this increased complexity manifests itself in every evolutionary step. To Teilhard, this can be seen in the increase in consciousness which results from such increase in complexity, a metric that can be seen in all steps of evolution from the big bang to the human person. He posits an ‘axis of evolution’, a tree the sap of which is increased complexity and the fruit of which is increased consciousness.

From this perspective, complexity, and its corollary, consciousness, grows until it manifests itself in the human person as ‘consciousness become aware of itself’. This capacity is unique to the human, and distinguishes ‘the person’ from its evolutionary precedents.

Jesus, to Teilhard, is the first person to seem to have been aware of this uniqueness, as shown in his understanding of ‘love’ as the underlying energy of this agency, the importance of the person, and the potential for intimacy with the sap of the tree from which we came. Paul’s first step to understanding Jesus as ‘the Christ’, followed by John’s step of understanding ‘the Christ’ as that aspect of this sap which produces the fruit of the human person, is evidence of both the significance of Jesus’ teaching to an understanding of evolution and its agency in continuing the rise of evolution toward ever more complex manifestations.

Thomas Jefferson, in surely what was one of the most momentous ‘reinterpretations’ of traditional Christianity, (presaging Richard Dawkins’ ‘divesting traditional religious beliefs’ of their ‘baggage’) boils down the teachings of Jesus to the core assertion that ‘we are all equal’, hence human persons

“may be trusted to govern themselves without a master”

And thus forming the cornerstone for what has evolved into a highly successful society.

The Next Post

This week we began begin to apply our ‘principles of reinterpretation’ to the ‘person of Jesus’, seeing how John’s insight of “The Word made flesh” identifies the person of Jesus as the earliest manifestation of a cosmic upwelling of what was to become ‘the person’.

Next week we will continue our summary of the blog into addressing ‘The Trinity’.

December 12 – Psychology as Secular Meditation

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Today’s Post

Last week we expanded Teilhard’s approach to meditation into discrete steps by which we can make contact with our ‘core of being’, and through this with the ‘ground of being’ which underlays universal evolution, as moving toward a general search for the “Secular Side of God”.

We noted that such an approach might sound ‘overly religious’, and perhaps out of place in a ‘secular’ approach to this ‘ground of being’. Even though, as we noted, it requires no religious mindset, it is also true that such religious perspective, warts and all, has seeped into Western secular culture with its increasing focus on the importance of the ‘person’ as well as the idea of ‘connection’ to both ourselves and our ‘mileu’.

In this general approach of looking at this search from the secular point of view, this week we will take a look at how a form of “secular meditation” can be seen in the secular empirical practice of ‘psychology’. We’ll look at psychology from the two major approaches of Freud and the ‘Existentialists’, and compare these approaches in light of Teilhard’s context of evolution.

This segment of the summary of the blog, “The Secular Side of God” can be found in the posts from November 10, 2016 to January 5, 2017

The Emergence of Psychology

Beginning with the rising tide of humanity’s awareness of itself as ‘personal’, summarized in Karen Armstrong’s book, “The Great Transformation”, humans began to apply empirical tactics to their understanding of the world about them. This new approach to reality inevitably led to the human person itself as a subject of this enquiry.

Even the most casual study of human history, however, reveals a ‘dark side’ to humanity. All of the great books of ancient religions recognize it and warn against it.   It’s not surprising that the first approaches to making secular sense of human behavior would have focused on this ‘dark side’

One of the first thinkers to attempt a systematic empirical approach to the human ‘psyche’ was Sigmund Freud, applying the new, empirical and objective methods of science to the making and testing of hypotheses of human growth and relationships. His hermeneutic, however, was more in line with an understanding derived more from the negative interpretations of Lucretius and Hobbes than the positive approaches of Plato, Plotinus and Augustine. While Freud wove a phenomenal cloth of hypotheses about the makeup of human nature, his assumption of the danger of the core of humanity colored his entire approach. In his view, the human person was, at its core, very dangerous indeed.

Freud was the first to systematically apply the emerging practices of science to study of the human person, and assembled a magnificent edifice of concepts, terminology and theory which was applicable to diagnosis and treatment of human emotional problems. Unfortunately, his premise of the dangerous nature of the basic human, combined with his disdain of organized religion, colored this remarkable undertaking with a deep-seated pessimism that was to permeate his ‘school’ of psychology.

Freud’s view of human ontology was surely influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, in which the human evolved from a non-human (animal) ancestor. He held that this evolution explained the source of our ‘dark’ side, and hence had to be overcome if we were to rid ourselves of our ‘psychoses’. In his words:

“Eros and destructiveness are intertwined within all erotic relationships. Love is not at the basis of everything unless you add hate to it”.

   While Teilhard could say of the voice that flows from our most inner core

“It is I, be not afraid”

   Freud would say

“It is Ego, be very afraid”

   Freud’s negative assumption of human nature can be seen in that bastion of European Christianity, Martin Luther. Luther himself, echoing Calvin’s assessment o “total depravity”, expressed his opinion of the basic nature of the human person when he said

“Men are like piles of manure covered by Christ”.

This approach permeated many expressions of Western Christianity, and no doubt highly influenced Freud.

So Freud, while pioneering the application of the objective secularism of science to the study of the human person, nonetheless arrives at a position at odds with Teilhard’s proposition that the kernel at the core of the person is a trustworthy manifestation of the same agent of rising complexity afoot in the evolution of the universe. However, we can find agreement between Freud and Teilhard on several things, such as the existence of a personal core of energy which underlies human growth and relationships, and understanding love as manifested in the reciprocal exchange of this energy between individual persons.

Teilhard and Freud sharply disagree on the nature and source of this energy, and the role that this reciprocal exchange could have in positive growth, maturity, and even the creation of the person involved in its exchange.  The difference between these two schools of thought, one positive and one negative, sharpens further when they are applied to human relationships at te social level.

The ‘Positive’ Schools of Thought

Even though Freud correctly recognized the ‘Dark Side’, his assumption that the kernel of the person is dangerous does not take into account that it is through engagement with this kernel that the human evolves from emotional immaturity toward personal wholeness. It’s not that the child’s essence is negative, but that his growth towards maturity is incomplete.

After the Second World War, a second, decidedly non-Freudian approach to psychology began to emerge. While agreeing with Freud that it is possible to have a ‘science of the human’, it is not necessary to ‘fragmentize’ him as was done by Freud. This ‘Existential’ approach, as it came to be known, focused less on understanding behavior by reference to a predetermined Freudian structure and more on understanding how persons themselves subjectively experience reality. Psychology began to move from analysis and diagnosis to guided inner search.

Thinkers such as Rollo May, Abraham Maslow and Ashley Mongatu were among the first to focus on the development of human potential and placing humans in an evolutionary context, believing that the negative and antisocial aspects of behavior discovered by Freud were more evidence of immaturity than as proof of an unredeemable core.

A more recent example of this approach can be seen in Carl Rogers, who summarized his approach to psychology:

“How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?”

   instead of,

“How can I analyze, diagnose, treat, cure, or change this person?”

   The goal of both approaches is betterment of the individual, but the methods are clearly different.

Rogers takes a view of our personal evolution that is quite different from Freud. He assumes that each human person comes into the world with a quantum of potency, and that instead of being broken, he is incomplete and capable of personal evolution –growth– towards increased being (or as Karen Armstrong would put it, “more completely possession of one’s self”).

It should be noted that Rogers’ articulation of the emerging characteristics of a maturing person are purely secular. His methods are those of science: observe, theorize, and test. They require no adherence to religious belief (and are often considered antithetical to some), but rather a basic, fundamental belief in the trustworthy nature of the basic self, and a willingness to cooperate with it.

In Rogers’ therapeutic relationship between therapist and patient, concepts such as belief, faith and love, commonly associated with religion, take on a new, secular, and much more relevant meaning.

Rogers’ approach offers a structure for a true, secular, employment of secular meditation as a means to self-discovery. 

Freud, Rogers and Teilhard in a Nutshell

Freud applies science to atheism, “It is Id, be very afraid”

Rogers applies experience to science, “It is me, I am trustworthy”

Tielhard applies science to religion. “It is I, be not afraid”

As Teilhard affirms, finding ourselves is finding the universal thread of evolution that rises in us. As Rogers discovers, the legacy that we receive as human persons can be trusted to power our growth towards more complete being. From this insight, God can not only be found but, the ‘ground of being’ can be embraced.

Teilhard and Rogers offer an approach for such a process:

After identifying God as the 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,

to which we can come in contact

by searching for the kernel of ourselves

using the emerging insights of science

The Twelve-Step program of Alcoholics Anonymous is another example of ‘secular meditation’. In creating this program in 1935, Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, with typical American pragmatism, designed a truly practical and deliberately secular program based on the Existentialist’s premise that humans, at their core, were redeemable. Several decades of practice of this approach has established significant objective evidence that the assumptions of ‘The Twelve Steps’ program are indeed valid.

The Next Post

This week we took a look at how the basic Western understanding of the value of the human person has developed into a hermeneutic for a secular approach to a ‘science of the person’. Granted that many scientists take a reductive approach to such science, seeing the human person as the organized activity of aggregated molecules, nonetheless those seeking to apply the methods of science to the improvement of human lives have adopted many of the core values of Christianity without being shackled by its belief in the ‘supernatural’.

Next week we will begin to apply our ‘principles of reinterpretation’ to some of the subjects of religion In our search for “The Secular Side of God’. The first such subject will be the “person of Jesus’.

December 5 Secular Meditation: Finding Ourselves, Finding God, Without Religion

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This Week

Last week we made a first cut at seeing how meditation can be understood as a secular approach to finding ‘the ground of being’ in its manifestation as ‘the ground of us’. Following Blondel’s assertion that “Every statement about God is effectively a statement about man”, we can see that every step toward God is therefore a step towards ourselves

This week we will move on to summarizing the blog, “The Secular Side of God” in looking more closely at Teilhard’s secular approach to ‘meditation’.

The Secular Side of Meditation

We noted last week that the very idea of ‘meditation’ conjures much negative association with the more empirical among us- seen as a decidedly right-brained excess of emotion requiring disdain for ‘life as lived’, disconnection from social life and ultimately self-centered. Teilhard’s example from last week, however, shows how the act of meditation can be understood as a clearer look at ourselves, or as he puts it, a “clearer disclosure of God in the world”.

Teilhard’s example can be expanded into a straightforward, secular roadmap for this process:

Step 1: Recognizing the facets of our person

“I took the lamp and, leaving the zones of everyday occupations and relationships, where my identity, my perception of myself is so dependent on my profession, my roles- where everything seems clear, I went down into my inmost self, to the deep abyss whence I feel dimly that my power of action emanates.”

Here Teilhard explores the ‘scaffolding’ of his person: those influences which affect the development of personality: beliefs, faiths and fears. How much of who we are and what we believe have we consciously accepted, as opposed to those facades which we have constructed as a protective skin to ward off the dangers of life?

Step 2: Accepting where we are

”At each step of the descent, with the removal of layers of my identity defined from without, a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me.”

What happens when we begin to recognize these facades and scaffoldings, recognizing which ones move us forward, and which hold us back, and try to imagine the consequence of divesting ourselves of them? How can we ultimately trust that which lies beneath is indeed ‘trustworthy’? Upon what can we place our faith in our capacity for the ‘dangerous actions’ that we must undertake each day?

Step 3: Acknowledging our powerlessness

“And when I had to stop my descent because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet, and from it flowed, arising I know not from where, the current which I dare to call my life”.

This is a difficult step for most of us. Whatever skills we have learned, tactics that we have developed and beliefs that we have forged, we have no control over the basic person we are or the energy of cosmic becoming that incessantly flows into us.

Step 4: Accepting powerlessness

“My self is given to me far more than it is formed by me.” “In the last resort, the profound life, the fontal life, the new-born life, escapes our life entirely.”

 This step is even more difficult. Beneath the trepidation of the many actions required of us in our daily lives is the fear of their consequences. Will we be able to successfully deal with the consequences of our decisions without the armors of ego, self-centeredness and emotional distance? Are we even able to predict the consequences of our actions, much less survive dealing with them? Ultimately, in spite of our professions, families and friends are we not alone?

Step 5: Trusting the ground of being

“At that moment, I felt the distress characteristic to a particle adrift in the universe, the distress which makes human wills founder daily under the crushing number of living things and of stars. And if something saved me, it was hearing the voice of the Gospel, guaranteed by divine success, speaking to me from the depth of the night:

                                                     “It is I, be not afraid.”

How do we dare believe that whatever is at the source of our being, it is nonetheless on our side? How is it possible to see this ‘fontal’ life which pours into us at each moment as an individual instantiation of the general forces which have brought (and are still bringing) the universe into being? How do we dare trust that these forces, welling up over billions of years, will continue to well up in ourselves? How can we begin to recognize and more importantly cooperate with this inner source of energy so that we can be carried onto a more complete possession of ourselves?

Secular Meditation

There is nothing religious about the first four steps. The assumptions about the nature of the universe that science and biology assert, once the phenomenon of increasing complexity is added, are all that is necessary to state them. The essential Teilhard insight is that the addition of this phenomenon, while not a specific scientific theory, is not only necessary for inclusion of the human person in the scope of scientific enquiry, it is also necessary for the process of evolution itself. A universe without increasing complexity would not evolve.

Thus this line of thought, that a search for the ground of being of the universe entails an understanding of the ground of our being, while finding a stronger (if somewhat unfocussed) voice in religion, is not mute in the empirical processes of science.

An example of this voice can be seen in the similarity between these five steps and the very successful but deliberately secular “Ten Steps” of Alcoholics Anonymous. The foundational step of exploring and learning to trust one’s self is at the basis of much of Western secular thinking. Psychology itself, as we will address next week, can therefore be seen as ‘secular meditation’.

The Next Post

This week we expanded Teilhard’s approach to meditation into discrete steps by which we can make contact with our ‘core of being’, and through this with the ‘ground of being’, as moving toward a general search for the “Secular Side of God”.

In this general approach of looking at this search from the secular point of view, next week we will take a look at how psychology can be seen as a form of “secular meditation”.

November 28 Relating to God

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Today’s Post

Last week, in moving on with summarizing the blog, “The Secular Side of God” we made a first cut at applying our ‘principles of reinterpretation’ to the basic idea of ‘God’ as the ‘Ground of Being’, which belief underpins all religions.   But we noted that by taking Teilhard’s approach to understanding God in the context of universal evolution, we see the objection raised by Carl Sagan, reinforced by Richard Dawkins:

“If by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying…it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”

While setting aside, for a moment, that all of the ‘laws’ which ‘govern the universe’ would in fact include the human person, the question is nonetheless valid. This week we will summarize the segments of the Blog from 15 September2016 to 2 February 2017, which address relating to the ‘Ground of Being’.

Why Should It Be Difficult?

If, as Teilhard asserts, the human is simply the latest branch of the ‘axis of Evolution’, itself alive and well throughout the whole of the universe for some fourteen billion years so far, then becoming aware of the existence and the agency of this upwelling of complexity in each of us, and establishing enough of a relationship with it to assure our further evolution would not seem difficult. Powered by the accumulation of evolved instincts, our pre-human ancestors were able to reliably get us to the most recent four or so hundred thousand years .

But, alas, as our human history shows too clearly, it’s not that easy. History is filled with examples of, for example, the conflict among the reptilian brain’s stimuli of ‘fight or flight’, the limbic brain’s need for relationship and our neo cortex brain’s desire to ‘sort things out’ before acting.
Christianity is frequently cited as a ‘leveling’ agent which addresses this age-old tension, and indeed many examples of this agency can be seen (such as Jefferson’s adoption of Jesus’ belief in human equality into successful Western governments), but even it is rife with ‘dualisms’ that pull us in one way or another. Its idea of God, on the surface a unifying concept, becomes rife with such dualisms.

Jonathan Sacks notes that much more so than Judaism, Christianity divides: body/soul, physical/spiritual, heaven/earth, this life/next life, evil/good, with the emphasis on the second of each. He sees the entire set of contrasts as massively Greek, with much debt to Plato. He sees in these either/or dichotomies a departure from the typically Jewish perspective of either/and.

This increasing dualism is contrasted with what Blondel insisted as fundamental to an understanding of the intimacy of God. Rephrased:

“It is impossible to think of ourselves as ‘over here’, and then of God, as ‘over against us’. This is impossible because we have come to be who we are through a process in which God is involved.”

   This is, of course, a logical conclusion from the essential message of John:

“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”

   Blondel, Teilhard, Sacks and the contemporary theologian Richard Rohr all decry how this message of John, itself a logical conclusion from the teachings of Jesus, is frequently minimized in the subsequent evolution of the Greek-influenced Church. Thus, it’s not difficult to understand the difficulty of returning to the sense of belonging that our ‘pre anxiety’ animal ancestors enjoyed. While Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’ might have a single trunk, we, lost among the branches, have to work to find it.

Finding the Way

A first step to such a search is to recognize that there is indeed a way. Teilhard’s postulation that the basic element of universal evolution, in which all things, including ourselves, are enmeshed, requires belief that the energy of this evolution having existed in all things for the fourteen or so billion years of universal ‘becoming’, is still active in its most recent product.

This is not a religious assertion. As we saw last week, even an atheist of such renown as Richard Dawkins can acknowledge it. While he fails to recognize its importance to human life, once understood the logical consequences of it lead unerringly to a positive and ‘future affirming’ grasp of human life.

Thus a starting place for ‘relating’ to a ‘ground of being’ (or, in Dawkins-speak, ‘the fundamental principle of existence’) is to begin to recognize how this universal agency of complexification manifests itself in the human person. Again, taking a cue from Teilhard,

“It is through that which is most incommunicably personal in us that we make contact with the universal“,

we can see that our search for God, therefore, begins with a search for ourselves.

This is, of course, an idea that first rises during the Axial Age (900-200 BCE). As Karen Armstrong, in her book on this period sees it:

”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.”

   Given the tangle of practices that emerge from this simple recognition, however, points to its difficulty.   One of these, however, resonates across nearly expression of religion.

Meditation

This term can evoke many negative reactions, especially in the minds of nonbelievers or those who highly value empirical thought over intuitional insight. While its basis is simply concentrating on finding and experiencing this ‘cosmic spark’, this ‘sap of the tree of evolution’ which lies in every human, the practices most commonly associated with it evoke pictures of self-abasement, withdrawal from relationships, other-worldliness and a general distancing from and disdaining of life as lived.   Teilhard himself, comfortable in both empirical and intuitional worlds, summarized an approach for this search for the ‘cosmic spark’ in a completely secular way. From his book, ‘The Divine Milieu’, he writes:

“And so, for the first time in my life, perhaps, I took the lamp and, leaving the zones of everyday occupations and relationships, where my identity, my perception of myself is so dependent on my profession, my roles- where everything seems clear, I went down into my inmost self, to the deep abyss whence I feel dimly that my power of action emanates.

   But as I descended further and further from that level of conventional certainties by which social life is so superficially illuminated, I became aware that I was losing contact with myself. At each step of the descent, with the removal of layers of my identity defined from without, a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me.

   And when I had to stop my descent because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet, and from it flowed, arising I know not from where, the current which I dare to call my life.

   What science will ever be able to reveal to man the origin, nature and character of that conscious power to will and to love which constitutes his life? It is certainly not our effort, nor the effort of anyone around us, which set that current in motion. And it is certainly not our anxious care, nor that of any friend of ours, which prevents its ebb or controls its turbulence.

We can, of course, trace back through generations some of the antecedents of the torrent which bears us along; and we can, by means of certain moral and physical disciplines and stimulations, regularize or enlarge the aperture through which the torrent is released into us.

   But neither that geography nor those artifices help us in theory or in practice to harness the sources of life.

   My self is given to me far more than it is formed by me.

   Man, scripture says, cannot add a cubit to his nature. Still less can he add a unit to the potential of his love, or accelerate by another unit the fundamental rhythm which regulates the ripening of his mind and heart. In the last resort, the profound life, the fontal life, the new-born life, escapes our life entirely.

   Stirred by my discovery, I then wanted to return to the light of day and forget the disturbing enigma in the comfortable surroundings of familiar things, to begin living again at the surface without imprudently plumbing the depths of the abyss. But then, beneath this very spectacle of the turmoil of life, there re-appeared before my newly-opened eyes, the unknown that I wanted to escape.

This time it was not hiding at the bottom of an abyss; it disguised itself, its presence, in the innumerable strands which form the web of chance, the very stuff of which the universe and my own small individuality are woven. Yet it was the same mystery without a doubt: I recognized it.

   Our mind is disturbed when we try to plumb the depth of the world beneath us. But it reels still more when we try to number the favorable chances which must coincide at every moment if the least of living things is to survive and succeed in its enterprises.

   After the consciousness of being something other and something greater than myself- a second thing made me dizzy: Namely the supreme improbability, the tremendous unlikelyhood of finding myself existing in the heart of a world that has survived and succeeded in being a world.

At that moment, I felt the distress characteristic to a particle adrift in the universe, the distress which makes human wills founder daily under the crushing number of living things and of stars. And if something saved me, it was hearing the voice of the Gospel, guaranteed by divine success, speaking to me from the depth of the night:

                                                     “It is I, be not afraid.”

The Next Post

This week we moved from applying our ‘principles of reinterpretation’ to the basic idea of ‘God’ to addressing a path to relationship with ‘the ground of being’. Agreeing with Blondel that “Every statement about God is effectively a statement about man”, we can see that every step toward God is a step towards ourselves.

Having seen this, the next question that can be asked is, what’s involved in ‘finding ourselves’?

Next week we will move on to looking at this activity through secular lens. What is there at our core, and how do we move towards it?

November 21 Reinterpreting God

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Today’s Post

Last week we looked at ‘principles’ which can be applied to a process of ‘reinterpretation’ of traditional religious teachings in our goal of finding the nuggets of relevancy in these teachings.

This week we will move on to applying these principles to the fundamental concept around which all religions revolve, the concept of ‘God’.

Today’s post summarizes the four posts from 21 July 2016 to 1 September 2016 on this subject.

A Starting Place

The concept of God as found in the many often contradicting expressions of Western religion can be very confusing. Given the duality which occurs in both the Old and New Testament (such as punishment-forgiveness), layered with the many further dualities introduced by Greek influences in the early Christian church (such as body-soul), and topped by many contemporary messages that distort the original texts (such as the “Prosperity Gospel”) this is not surprising. Finding a thread which meets our principles of interpretation without violating the basic findings of science but staying consistent with the basic Western teachings can be difficult. Many believe it to be impossible.

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, I said, but it must have been simple and therefore whatever else we call it, 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 process which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence.”

   Here we find a succinct outline of the nature of the ‘fundamental principle of existence’ as well as an excellent place to begin a ‘reinterpretation’ of the concept of God:

  • It must be the first cause of everything
  • It must work within natural processes
  • It must be an ongoing active agent (a “process”) in all phases of evolution from the Big Bang to the appearance of humans
  • It must be an agent for increasing complexity (“the raising of the world as we know it into its present complex existence”)
  • It must be divested of “all the baggage” (such as magic and superstition) of the many traditional religions
  • Once so divested, “God” is an appropriate name for this first cause

Dawkins goes on to claim that such a God cannot possibly be reconciled with traditional religion. Paradoxically, in this simple statement he offers an excellent place to begin just such a reconciliation.

Western religion also sees the potential for ‘reconciliation’. An example is Pope John Paul II’s statement on science’s relation to religion:

“Science can purify religion from error and superstition.”

   So 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.”

Is God A Person?

The concept of the ‘person’ is somewhat unique to the West. It is related to the fundamental Jewish concept of time is seen as flowing from a beginning to an end, unlike the cyclical concept of time as found in the East. It also sees the person as constantly growing to ‘uniqueness’ as opposed to the Eastern concept of human destiny fulfilled in the loss of identity as merged into the ‘cosmic all’.

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 the subject of 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.

Therefore, 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.

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 uniqueness of the person (and the associated concepts of freedom) and the power of empirical thinking clearly contribute to the unique successes of the West. As Teilhard asserts:

“…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 therefore God is in some way a ‘person’ who saves and damns, rewards and punishes, and provides guidance for life.

The approach that we have taken, however, does 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?

The Personal Side of God

From our point of view, God is not understood as a person, but as the ground or the principle

of person-ness. Just as the forces of atomic reaction, gravity and biology in the theories of Physics and Biology address the principles of matter and life, the overarching force of ‘increasing complexity’ addresses the increase in complexity which powers evolution and thus leads to the appearance of the person.

Teilhard offers an insight on this issue

“From this point of view man is nothing but the point of emergence in nature, at which this deep cosmic evolution culminates and declares itself. From this point onwards man ceases to be a spark fallen by chance on earth and coming from another place. He is the flame of a general fermentation of the universe which breaks out suddenly on the earth.” (Italics mine)

   He goes on to underscore the profound meaning of such of such insight:

“I doubt that whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized (becomes human) in him.”

   Thus, as Teilhard sees it, evolution requires complexification, which results in personization.

But, With All That, Is God ‘A Person’?

Dawkins, while he might admit to a process by which the universe evolves, holds out on this subject, quoting Carl Sagan:

“If by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying…it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”

Dawkins and Sagan are correct about our approach to God, in that our definition so far does not point to a God suitable for a personal relationship. While recognizing Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’ which fosters increasing complexity leading to increased ‘personness’, how can it apply to our personal life?

From Teilhard’s vantage point, the starting place for a personal approach to God, a ‘relationship’, is the recognition that this ‘axis of evolution’ which has been an agent of ‘complexification’ for some 14 billion years is not only still active in the human, but is the same axis that accounts for our ‘personization’. Humans are not only products of evolution who have become ‘aware of their consciousness’, but specific products, persons, who are capable of not only recognizing but more importantly cooperating with this inner source of energy that can carry them onto a more complete possession of themselves.

From Blondel’s perspective,

“The statement that “God Exists” can therefore be reinterpreted to say that “Man is alive by a principle that transcends him, over which he has no power, which summons him to surpass himself and frees him to be creative. That God is person means that man’s relationship to the deepest dimension of his life is personal”. (Italics mine)

So, in answer to the question, Baum goes on to state:

“God is not a super-person, not even three super-persons; he is in no way a being, however supreme, of which man can aspire to have a spectator knowledge. That God is person reveals that man is related to the deepest dimension of his life in a personal and never-to-be reified way.”

   Teilhard echoes Blondel when he says:

“It is through that which is most incommunicably personal in us that we make contact with the universal. “

“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 seas.”

The Next Post

This week we made a first cut at applying our ‘principles of reinterpretation’ to the basic idea of ‘God’ as the ‘Ground of Being’, which belief underpins all religions.

Having seen this, the next question that can be asked is , “so what”? What difference does it make if our concept of God agrees with Teilhard, Luther or the Budda?

Next week we will move on to using these principles to address the idea of ‘relating’ to God. How can we find God in our lives, in our world, and more importantly, connect to ‘him’?

November 14 Interpreting Religion

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Today’s Post

   Continuing our look at the role of religion in human evolution, last week we saw six examples of the parts that religion plays. In keeping with the perspective of secularity that we have taken in this blog, while they are not based on the traditional teachings of any religion, they are agencies common to all.

This week we go one step further into such a secular perspective, and that is the idea of God. Is it possible to approach the many and diverse ideas of the ‘ground of being’ for some level of commonality? Further, is there any way that a concept such as ’the ground of being’ can be compatible with the deliberations of science?

This subject is discussed in the five posts from May 25, (Reinterpretation) to July 7 2016 (Reinterpretation Principles).

Reinterpretation

Maurice Blondel was one of the first theologians to suggest that in order to survive in an age which saw the increasing influence of science, religion must become more meaningful, immediate and relevant. He saw it as necessary for religion to emerge from the hierarchical, supernatural and autocratic form that it had taken by the late eighteen hundreds. He suggested that to make this happen, religion must be ‘reinterpreted’.

While Blondel may have opened the door to rethinking the traditional understanding of God and the universe, others, such as Teilhard de Chardin expanded this concept by reinterpreting the tenets of science as well. Today, thinkers such as Jonathan Sacks, Karen Armstrong, John Haight and Richard Rohr continue this expansion.

As Michael Dowd observes, such ‘reinterpretation’ isn’t new to Western thinking::

“Just as Augustine reinterpreted Christianity in light of Plato in the 4th century, and Aquinas integrated Aristotle in the 13th, today there are dozens of theologians across the spectrum re-envisioning the Christian faith. Whose ideas are they integrating now? Darwin, Einstein, Hubble, Wilson and all those who have corrected, and continually contribute to, an evidence-based understanding of biological, cosmic, and cultural evolution.”

Principles of Reinterpretation

To many, however, the precepts of religion are too deeply rooted in the idea of God as completely supernatural to allow for such interpretation. God is understood as above nature but so powerful as to break through to the level of nature. To others, the traditional view of God, with its elements of magic and superstition, simply are not worthy of consideration.

Somewhere closer to the center of these two poles is the observation from Richard Dawkins, prominent atheist, in his book, “The God Delusion”:

“There must have been a first cause of everything, and we might as well give it the name God, 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 basis for a process which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence.”

   The opening of atheism to concepts such as a ‘first cause’ which ‘raises the world’ in a process of ‘increasing complexity’ is simply another way of understanding God as ‘secular’.

And, coming at it from the opposite pole, we can see how the thinkers listed above, Blondel, Teilhard, Sacks, Armstrong, Haight and Rohr offer discrete principles for mining the ore of traditional religious lore for the gold that lies within.

Blondel, writing late in the nineteenth century, suggested several ‘principles’ which could offer clarity in understanding the ‘ground of being’ from a secular perspectives. His principles are outlined in Gregory Baum’s book, “Man Becoming”.

  • ‘There is no human standpoint from which God is simply man’s ‘over-against’ “.  It is impossible to think of ourselves over here, and then of God, as over against us. This is impossible because we have come to be who we are through a process in which God is involved.
  • “Every sentence about God can be translated into a declaration about human life”. An example of this principle: To say that “God Exists” means that “We are alive by a principle that transcends us, over which we have no power, which summons us to surpass ourselves and frees us to be creative”.
  • “That God is person means that man’s relationship to the deepest dimension of his life is personal”, not that God is a person (which based on the definition above would limit God).
  • “That God is Father means that human life is oriented towards a future freely given”. God is ‘on our side’.

Teilhard and others expanded upon Blondel’s early insights into the recognition of religion (properly reinterpreted) as a valid hermeneutic for understanding the human person embedded in the universal process of evolution. From these expansions, seven ‘principles’ can be seen:

–          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 continues to be active in the appearance and continued evolution of the human person.

The 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 in the direction of greater complexity

–          All things evolve, and the fundamental thread of evolution is that 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

–          The basic process of physics by which evolution occurs consists of elements of matter pulled into ever more complex arrangements through elemental forces.  When recognized as part of the elements and forces described in the Standard Model of Physics, the phenomenon of increasing complexity completes the Standard Model by adding the characteristic which makes evolution possible. This process continues to manifest itself today in the evolutionary products of human persons and the unitive forces of love which connect us in such a way in which we become more human.

The Principle:  Just as atoms unite to become molecules, and cells to become neural systems, so do our personal connections enhance our personal growth which enhances our societies and assures our evolution.

Adding the effect of increasing complexity to the basic theories of Physics also unites the three eras of evolution (pre-life, life, conscious life) as it provides a thread leading from the elemental mechanics of matter through the development of neural systems in Natural Selection to the ‘awareness of awareness’ as seen in humans.

The Principle: This ‘thread’ therefore continues to be active in every human person in the potential of our personal ‘increase in complexity’, which of course is our personal growth.

–          This addition points the way to understanding how evolution continues to proceed through the human person and his society.  The neurological advancement in living things evolves the central neural system (the brain) in three stages: the reptilian brain, with its instinctive fight/flight reactions; the limbic brain, which incorporates emotional care of the young; and the neo-cortex brain, which is capable dealing with these instinctual stimuli.

The Principle: Human evolution can be understood as the increasing skill of employing the ‘higher’ neocortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of the ‘lower’ brains.

–          This ‘skill’ is the subject of nearly every religious and philosophical thought system in human history.  Understanding the nature of the reality which surrounds us is a critical step, which must be followed by decisions of how to react to it if we are to fulfill our true human potential.

The Principle:  Finding the core of a religious teaching involves understanding how the teaching can lead to increasing the skill of using the neo cortex brain to modulate the instinctive stimuli of the ‘lower’ brains’.

–          “We must first understand, and then we must act.” (Teilhard).  If our understanding is correct, then an action appropriate to the understanding 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, more mature) as well as the evolution of our society.  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 continued an overview of the eleven posts on the evolution of religion, looking at specific principles that help to see the underlying value of religious teachings among the many teachings that Richard Dawkins sees as ‘baggage’.

Having seen this, next week we will move on applying these principles to the core concept of all religions: that of the ‘Ground of Being’, better known as “God”. What does understanding God from the secular viewpoint do to the idea of relating to ‘Him”?

November 7 What Part Does Religion Play In Human Evolution?

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Today’s Post

Last week we began an overview of the eleven posts on the evolution of religion in which Jonathan Sacks’ understanding of how the evolution of human thinking can be seen in the evolution of religion from its earliest beginnings to the emergence of Christianity.

Having begun this look into religion’s role in human evolution, this week we look at some examples of how this role may be seen.

Our treatment of this subject can be seen in the seven posts from 14 January (Making
Sense of Things) to 14 April, 2016 (Stability).

Human Evolution: Moving Ahead

Last week we closed with an observation from Richard Rohr that offered a succinct summarization of human evolution:

“It was necessary for us to move beyond our early motivations of personal security, reproduction and survival (the fear-based preoccupations of the ‘reptilian brain’) … to proceed beyond the lower stages of human development.”

While this does not obviate other insights into our continued evolution, it does encapsulate the key skill that evolution requires us to learn: to use our neocortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of our ‘lower’ brains; stimuli which served our prehumen ancestors so well. This points to six such ‘skills’, the development of which religion has always fostered.

This does not suggest that the whole of religion bears directly on such skills. The many beliefs and practices of historical religion, in their contradictions, supernatural and dualistic modes can and do indeed work against such skills. As we shall see when we address religion’s relationship to science, religion requires ‘grounding’ to insure its relevance. By the same token, denying religion’s value to human evolution, as the materialists would have it, overlooks the existence of the values themselves.

Religion’s role in human history is notoriously complex, and decluttering history to find the threads of religion that contribute empirically to it is difficult. I think six activities first attributed to religion show the value:

Making Sense

Ian Barbour (“Science and Religion”) offers this definition of religion:

“A set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.”

   As can be seen in this definition, all expressions of religion result from some reflection upon reality and result in beliefs and practices which are felt to insure a beneficial relation to it. At their core, all religions are an attempt to understand reality, how we fit into it and how best to effect this fit.

All expressions of belief, however, having evolved over such great spans of time and including the intuitions of so many thinkers, have accumulated diverse and often bewildering explanations and claims to truth.  The evolution of religion as the human attempt to make sense of his surroundings has gone on for such a long time that every possible belief (attempt to make sense) has evolved along with it.

With all this, however, many valid insights can be seen to have found their way into human expression.

Understanding

Such insights began to surface, As Karen Armstrong sees it, by the time of the ‘Axial Age’ (800 BCE):

“The fact that they (thinkers of the Axial Age) all 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. …they all concluded that if people made a disciplined effort to reeducate themselves, they would experience an enhancement of their humanity. ”

   During this period, the need to make sense and organize society was giving way to the need to ‘become more complete”.

Transcendence

Armstrong goes on to see another insight that arose during this period, which was to play a huge role in the evolution of human thinking:

“There is an immortal spark at the core of the human person, which participated in – was of the same nature as – the immortal brahman that sustained and gave life to the entire cosmos.”

   While this insight evidently first rose in the East, it was quick to find roots in the major Western religion of Christianity. It was not only important for the role it was to play in Western society, but in the general belief in a future into which we are ‘invited’. As Maurice Blondel put it:

“Tomorrow can be better than today. The future is inveighed with potential, and we have the potential to fit into it like a child into a family.”

   In this aspect of religion, we are invited to think past the present, and past the obvious, to see not just the workings of the ‘immortal spark’ in us as persons, but in addition, in the lives of all that we relate to.

Acting

We saw last week how Richard Rohr sees the essential act of human evolution:

“It was necessary for us to move beyond our early motivations of personal security, reproduction and survival (the fear-based preoccupations of the ‘reptilian brain’) … to proceed beyond the lower stages of human development.”

Such ‘movement’, while being essential to ‘becoming’ requires an intense struggle against egoism and an overcoming of instinctual fears.   A ‘transcendence’ is required that sees the future as open, rather than closed, and ourselves as ‘gifted’ with potential as opposed to ‘cursed’ with impotency. To be able to ‘act’ is to understand ourselves just as capable of action as reality is capable of receiving it.

Transcendence is most often understood as a ‘religious’ experience, but at its base it is just recognizing the potential for a better way to see things. For ages, those able to ‘look beyond’ the obvious to the presence of a truth only partially seen, such as Newton looking beyond the apple to the unseen force of gravity, or Einstein grasping that at its roots, matter was just a unique way that energy manifests itself.

One aspect of religion is whatever we believe about reality that gives us the confidence to act, even when, especially when, we’re stepping into the unknown.

Belonging

As we have often addressed in this blog, one of the perennial ailments of the human psyche is the sense of being disconnected, alienated. As Carl Rogers and many other others have observed, Western religion is not clear on the nature of the human person which effects our ‘connections’ to each other. Richard Rohr summarizes the situation:

““…Augustine’s “original sin,” Calvin’s “total depravity,” or Luther’s “humans are like piles of manure, covered over by Christ.”

   Carl Rogers shows how Freud ‘piles on’ to these traditional mindsets with his opinion that

“the id, man’s basic and unconscious nature, is primarily made up of instincts which would, if permitted expression, result in incest, murder and other crimes.”

   Against this undeniable thread of Wester misanthropy, Maurice Blondel returns us to the basic gospel message, clearly articulated by John:

“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”.

   Blondel reinterpreted John when he said

“To say that God is father is to acknowledge that the relationship between us and the ground of being is that of child to parent.  The ground of being is on our side.  We belong to the universe as a child belongs to a family”

   Thus one aspect of religion is to go past that of a bond among believers, as do all religions, to the level of basing our actions on the belief that we ‘belong’.

Stability

The contemporary biblical (and agnostic) author, Bart Ehrman sees yet another characteristic of religion: that of helping to ‘shore up’ the ever more complex edifice of society. In his book, “From Jesus to Christ”, he tracks both the doctrinal development of the new Christian religion and how it contributed to our first truly diverse civilization: that of the Roman Empire. While he acknowledges the role that the emperor Constantine played in adjudicating the first great Christian schism, Ehrman also notes Constantine’s quite secular motive for avoiding a split in this new religion . He points out that Christianity offered two major benefits as a state religion: –

– it was capable of reinterpreting and appropriating facets of the many aspects of popular ‘pagan’ religions

    • Paul’s assertion that “Jesus came for all” insured the spread of the Roman empire into Gaul and Spain.

On a more contemporary note, Jefferson, many years later, was to factor Jesus’s teaching on human equality into his revolutionary concept of a government based on human freedom.

The Next Post

This week we continued an overview of the eleven posts on the evolution of religion, looking at six discrete ways that religion, in spite of its many shortcomings, can be seen to aid in the continuation of evolution of the human species.

Having seen this, next week we will move on to interpreting religion itself. We have noted in many places in this blog how religion includes threads of expression which lend themselves to Armstrong’s “enhancement of (our) humanity”, but how can they be found?