Author Archives: matt.landry1@outlook.com

January 17, 2019 – The Secular Side of God: How Did We Get Here? The Question of God

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the insights of Jonathan Sacks have led us back to the theme of this blog: “The Secular Side of God”.  In offering a secular perspective on religion, as a “philosophical understanding of the human condition and our place within the universe”, Sacks stresses the need for more than the innovation and invention of Norberg in human evolution, but the awareness of meaning.  Like Teilhard, whose ‘evolutionary context’ opens the door to reinterpreting religion, Sacks’ perspective reveals a potential link to science and hence offers a powerful tool for continuing to fabricate the future of human evolution.

As we have seen in this blog, the insights of Sacks, Blondel, Teilhard, Jefferson, Rohr and others all reflect the need for a rethinking of the fundamental concept of ‘God’ before the traditional teachings of religion can be sifted from the chaff which has been accumulated over the many thousands of years, and seen for the core insights by which we can continue our evolution.

This week, we begin a summary of how these thinkers came to understand God as the very core of being from which the entire universe has come to be, including the human person, and how this perspective helps us see the value of synthesized religion and science to the continuation of our journey to Teilhard’s “fuller being”.

The Teilhardian Shift

We began this shift in perspective by seeing how Teilhard applied his scientific evolutionary insights to Christianity, specifically Catholicism, to recast its “philosophical understandings” into not only a universal perspective but one in which the human person fits without recourse to religious ‘miracles’ or scientific ‘accidents’.  In this endeavor, Teilhard was able to place the “human condition” naturally into its “place within the universe”, in keeping with Sacks’ above secular definition.

This shift identifies the beginning point for “The Secular Side of God” by seeing God as the underlying agent by which evolution proceeds as an ‘increase in complexity’.  Teilhard’s identification of this increase in complexity as the basic metric of universal evolution not only elevates the concept of God to a universal agent, but offers an insight into evolution as a continuous process which can be understood as proceeding in succeeding stages, from the ‘big bang’ all the way to its current manifestation in the form of human persons.

Key to his concept of increasing complexity, Teilhard saw each step of this process as the result of the ‘entities of evolution’ uniting at each stage in such a way as to increase not only their ‘complexity’, but their capacity for increased unification resulting in further complexity.  In his words:

“Fuller being from closer union”

   He extrapolates from this by noting that such union also ‘differentiates’, in that the evolutionary products aren’t assimilated into each other with such union, but emerge as not only more capable of future union but more distinct as well.  In his words:

“True union differentiates”

   In Teilhard’s insight, these two actions together constitute the key to universal evolution.  Without either, evolution would not proceed, and the universe, if it existed at all, would be stuck in a static sea of quiescent energy.

In his foundational book, “The Phenomenon of Man”, he carries these two basic actions forward through primordial matter and energy (the realm of physics), through the first phase of life (the realm of biology) to the current phase highlighted by the human person’s ‘awareness of his awareness’, which he refers to as ‘The Noosphere’.  In his sweeping and integrated grasp of universal reality, these are simply phases united by the single evolutionary thread (differentiating unity) in which the pure energy of the ‘big bang’ manifests itself in the increase of complexity leading to (so far) the human person.

Seeing the universe as emerging in ‘cycles of becoming’ leads to the insight that these cycles evolve along a single ‘axis of increasing complexity’ by which all things are connected by their place in the flow, the upwelling, of this basic energy over time.

Teilhard’s understanding of an ‘agent of complexity’ by which evolution proceeds is not restricted to those with a religious background.  One of the foremost atheist thinkers, Professor Richard Dawkins, famously declared:

“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.”

   While Dawkins evidently could not conceive that such a God could still be compatible with religious concepts, he implicitly agreed with Teilhard that something was indeed active in the history of the universe to effect the complexity that we now see.  His insistence that religion is incompatible with science was of course based on the many years of warfare between the two that followed the beginning of “the age of reason”, and strengthened by his many valid criticisms of it.  In the “all or nothing” position he takes in his battle with religion, however, he cannot imagine any aspect of religion which could be compatible in any way with science.

In the last several posts, however, we have seen how Teilhard and Sacks, in their more holistic hermeneutics, show an entirely different approach.

The Next Post

This week we have returned to the subject of “The Secular Side of God’ by summarizing how Teilhard, Sacks and others expand the idea of God from a ‘superior being’ with ‘infinite powers’ to the ‘universal agent of becoming’ by which the universe has evolved (and continues to evolve) to states of greater complexity.

Next week we will review how this reinterpretation, instead of ‘watering down’ the concept of God (such as happened with the Theists) can move us on to a much more comprehensive understanding of God which throws new light on both the composition of the universe and as Sacks puts it, a “philosophical understanding of the human condition and our place within the universe.”

January 10, 2019 – The Secular Side of God, Redux

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a look at the potential synergy between religion and science as seen by Jonathan Sacks, who understood it to be not only possible but necessary.

Sacks also returned us to the underlying theme of this blog when he introduced a secular concept of religion:

“Science needs religion, or at the very least some philosophical understanding of the human condition and our place within the universe, for each fresh item of knowledge and each new accession of power raises the question of how it should be used, and for that we need another way of thinking.”

   This week we will look at how this statement is a key insight into “The Secular Side of God”.

 

The Secular Side of God and Continuing Human Evolution

 

We have seen how Johan Norberg in his book, “Progress”, offers significant metrics on the unprecedented two hundred year uptick in human welfare that has occurred since the mid eighteen hundreds.  We also saw how Norberg sees the two characteristics of human freedom and relationships as essential to this increase.  Norberg never mentions God or any of the beliefs common to the God religions in his exhaustive listing of the metrics of human welfare, nor does he go into the ‘noospheric risks’ that we explored last October.

Five things, however, seem clear.

One – Evolution is proceeding under our feet, without conscious and explicit management, and that it is proceeding in the direction that Teilhard postulates (increased complexity).  Such complexity can be seen and even measured in the characteristics of human welfare that Norberg lists.

Two – As Norberg cites, the characteristics of freedom and relationship are essential for these metrics of welfare to unfold.

Three – Even though traditional religion is rife with superstition, dependence on hierarchy and desire for power, its prime focus is the human person and the relationship among persons.  This can be seen in the fact that nearly all religions contain some version of the ‘Golden Rule’ which identifies the key to harmonious relationships as a positive self-image.  We have seen how Jefferson extends this recognition of the worth of the person into a building block of a governmental paradigm which underlays the most evolutionary successful societies on Earth.

Four – While science spasmodically (and often contradictory) attempts to address the human person, as Sacks observes:

“To the extent that there is a science of human behavior, to that extent there is an implicit denial of the freedom of human behavior.”

This leaves religion, warts and all, as the only “philosophical understanding of the human condition and our place within the universe.”  The trick is to reinterpret it (such as Jefferson did) to clarify those ‘understandings’ which will underpin our continued evolution.   

Five – Since “The past is no guarantee of the future”, we have no guarantee of the future of our evolution.   There are, as we have seen, potential pitfalls, and if these noospheric risks are not managed properly, evolution cannot be expected to continue.

   We have seen how Jefferson made use of the core message of Jesus to formulate his position on the importance of the human person to the structure of society.  In doing so, he was thus was the first to envision an ‘attachment point’ between the ‘spiritual’ themes of Western religion and the evolving ‘secular’ themes of Western culture, which had been seen as in opposition for the first half of the two hundred years of evolutionary uptick that Norberg maps.

Knowledge, Power and Evolution

Restating Sacks ’assertion:

“Science needs religion, or at the very least some philosophical understanding of the human condition and our place within the universe, for each fresh item of knowledge and each new accession of power raises the question of how it should be used, and for that we need another way of thinking.”

   This reflects Teilhard’s insight that to manage our voyage through the noosphere, we must understand it.  But Sacks goes a little deeper by quantifying this search for understanding in terms of ‘items of knowledge’ and ‘accession to power’.  As he sees it, both facets of our voyage require us to answer the question “how should it be used?”  Understanding of the noosphere involves more than the empirical insights of science. As Sacks sees it, it is more important to our continued evolution to understand their meaning.

In this approach, Sacks understands religion in one sense as a “philosophical understanding of the human condition and our place within the universe.”  This is quite different from the traditional understanding of religion as ‘truths to be adhered to’, and much more in line with the underpinning of the beliefs that apply to Norberg’s assessment of human welfare.

As an example of how such a ‘noospheric risk’ can present itself, consider how many times in recorded history a despot has come to power by distorting “items of knowledge” to “accede to power” by using news designed to incite fear (such as Hitler’s campaign to blame Jews for Germany’s woes) as a step to power.  Trends such as this can be seen today in the demonization of ‘the other’ in the many arguments on immigration.

As we saw in the posts on morality, Teilhard saw the need for religion’s understanding of morality to be reinterpreted in light of human evolution.  Sacks articulates why this is necessary, and, like Teilhard, understands that managing our existence requires us to understand how such things as information and power must be managed properly.

Beginning to understand such a ‘Secular Side’ of what religion has traditionally referred to ‘God’ is a first step toward unlocking religion’s great potential to partner with science as tools for continuing our personal and collective march into the future.

The Next Post

This week we have seen how Jonathan Sacks returns us to the theme of this blog, “The Secular Side of God”, with his reinterpretation of religion as a “philosophical understanding of the human condition and our place with the universe.”

Next week we’ll begin to review what we have seen in this blog that addresses such a reinterpretation.

January 3, 2019 – The Confluence of Religion and Science- Part 3

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Today’s Post

Last week we looked at the last four of Teilhard’s seven ways of seeing the natural confluence between religion and science.  As we saw, Teilhard understands them to be natural facets of a central synthesized understanding of the noosphere, and therefore potentially of benefit to continued relevance to human life.

This week we will take a look at how another thinker sees this potential for a closer and more beneficial relationship.  Jonathan Sacks, former British Chief Rabbi, comes at this subject from a slightly different perspective.  While Teilhard situates traditional dualities into an evolutive context to resolve them, Sacks understands them in the context of the two primary modes of human understanding intuition and empiricism.

Sacks On the Evolution of Religion

Teilhard of course placed religion (as he does all things) into an evolutionary context as one strand of ‘universal becoming’.  His understanding of the mutual benefit of a synthesis between science and religion is focused on their paired value to the continuation human evolution.

Sacks, in his book, “The Great Partnership”, stays closer to home, focusing on religion’s potential to help us to become what we are capable of becoming.  From this perspective, religion, properly understood and applied, is a mechanism for our personal growth.  As discussed previously, Sacks sees the evolution of human thinking in the unfolding of religion and the evolution of language, and thus as a slow movement towards a balance between the ‘left’ and ‘right’ hemispheres of the human brain.  In this way, the cooperation between religion and science can be seen as simply a more balanced and harmonious way of thinking in which the traditional ‘dualities’ (as seen by both Teilhard and Sacks) can be resolved.

Science’s Need for Religion

With this in mind, Sacks recognizes the West’s unique understanding of the person as the cornerstone of its success in improving human welfare.  Like Jefferson, he also recognizes the role that religion has played in the development of this unique perspective:

“Outside religion there is no secure alternative base for the unconditional source of worth that in the West has come from the idea that we are each in God’s image.  Though many have tried to create a secular substitute, none has ultimately succeeded.”

   The ‘none’ to which he refers can of course be seen in those countries which tried to create a “social order based on secular lines”.  These examples can be seen in Stalinist Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and the Kim family’s North Korea.

As he sees it, the problem arises when an alternative to religion’s value of the human person is sought.  Sacks locates the failure of such searches in science’s inability to address human freedom.  As he sees it:

“To the extent that there is a science of human behavior, to that extent there is an implicitly denial of the freedom of human behavior.”

   He sees this duality at work in Spinoza, Marx and Freud, who argued that human freedom is an illusion, but notes that “If freedom is an illusion, so is human dignity”.  Hence when human dignity is denies, the state no longer viable.

Sacks agrees with the success of science in overcoming the superstitions that often accompany religion, but notes that it does not replace the path to ‘meaning’ that religion offered.  He summarizes these two facets of human understanding:

 “Science takes things apart to understand how they work.  Religion puts things together to show what they mean.”

   For science to be effective, its statements must be ‘proved’, and the means of doing so are accepted across the breadth of humanity.  Both the need for such rigor and the success of its application can be seen in the many aspects of increased human welfare (effectively advances in human evolution) as seen in our series on Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress”.   Clearly the ‘scientific method’ is at the root of human evolution.

However, as we noted in this series, Norberg recognizes the basis of human evolution as human freedom, innovation and relationship.  These three facets of the human person are not ‘provable’, and which existence, as we saw above, is even denied by many ‘empiricists’.  Since they are active in the sap of evolution, they also must be in the root.

At the level of the human person, Sacks observes that “Almost none of the things for which people live can be proved.”  He offers the example of ‘trust”:

“A person who manages the virtue of trust will experience a different life than one to whom every human relationship is a potential threat.”

      Therefore, any group in which all the members can trust one another is at a massive advantage to others.  This, as evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has argued, is what religion does more powerfully than any other system.

The unprovable human capability to trust, like many others, underpins human evolution at the level of society.  It contributes to the success of relationships, one of Norberg’s three ‘basics’, as Sacks goes on to observe:

“Therefore, any group in which all the members can trust one another is at a massive advantage to others.  This, as evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has argued, is what religion does more powerfully than any other system. “

Religion’s Need for Science

Just as the left- brained perspectives of science are in need of the right-brained balance of religion, as implicitly recognized by Norberg, so are the perspectives of religion in need of balance from science.

The claims of all forms of religion are based on metaphorical beliefs, many of which are anathema to those who are powering the ‘progress’ curve outlined by Norberg.  As we saw in the case of Thomas Jefferson, he systematically stripped the gospels of such ‘miraculous’ teachings to reveal what he considered to be the bedrock of “The Teachings of Jesus” which he in turn applied to his underlying (and unprovable) assertions of the value and dignity of the individual human person.

Many educated persons believe that scientific insight will eventually replace religion as the base of human action.  It is certainly true that in the past two hundred or so years, many religious teachings have become unacceptable due to the rise of empiricism, such as the formal blaming of the Jewish race for the death of Jesus, the seven literal days of creation, and so on.  The continuing influence of religion in many parts of the world is more due to its ability to push back on state corruption and savagery than its teachings on reincarnation and virgin births.  But with the increasing evolution of state structures more benign to the human person, such as that found in democracies, the underlying importance that religion places on the individual human person plays a larger role.

For religion to continue to play a role in this evolution, it must be seen as relevant.  As Sacks sees it:

“Religion needs science because we cannot apply God’s will to the world if we do not understand the world.  If we try to, the result will be magic or misplaced supernaturalism.”

The Road to Synthesis

So, how do we get to the point where right- and left- brain process are balanced?  Sacks addresses what happens when we don’t:

“Bad things happen when religion ceases to hold itself answerable to empirical reality, when it creates devastation and cruelty on earth for the sake of salvation in heaven.  And bad things happen when science declares itself the last word on the human condition and engages in social or bio-engineering, treating humans as objects rather than as subjects, and substitution of cause and effect for reflection, will and choice.”

   He recognizes that science and religion have their own way of asking questions and searching for answers, but doesn’t see it as a basis for compartmentalization, in which they are seen as entirely separate worlds.  Like Teilhard, he sees the potential for synergy “..because they are about the same world within which we live, breathe and have our being”.

He sees the starting point for such synergy as “conversation”, in hopes that it will lead to “integration”.  From Sacks’ perspective:

“Religion needs science because we cannot apply God’s will to the world if we do not understand the world.  If we try to, the result will be magic or misplaced supernaturalism.”

   By the same token, he goes on:

“Science needs religion, or at the very least some philosophical understanding of the human condition and our place within the universe, for each fresh item of knowledge and each new accession of power raises the question of how it should be used, and for that we need another way of thinking.”

   Even though Sacks doesn’t place his beliefs, like Teilhard, in an explicitly evolutionary context, he does envision a more complete manifestation of the human emerging as a result of a more complete balance between the influence of the ‘right’ and ‘left’ brains (modes of engaging reality).  In this sense, he echoes Teilhard’s belief of ‘fuller being’ resulting from ‘closer union’.

The Next Post

This week we have seen how Jonathan Sacks approaches 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 synergy between science and religion if it is to continue.

Next week I will begin to wrap up this blog, “The Secular Side of God” with a review of what we set out to do, the steps we took, and the conclusions to which we came.

December 27 – The Confluence of Religion and Science- Part 2

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Today’s Post

   Last week we took a first look at Teilhard’s insights into how we can begin to see Christianity as less a competitor to science and more as a step toward an integrated understanding of the human person and his place in Teilhard’s ‘noosphere’.

Last week’s three insights were taken from Teilhard’s collection of papers entitled “Human Energy”.  This week we will continue looking at Teilhard’s conviction of the value of Science and Religion to each other, taking four more insights from his cornerstone book, “The Phenomenon of Man”.

Science and Religion: Getting From Here To There

In the fourth insight, Teilhard cites his belief that to live the noosphere we must understand it:

“Man is, if I have not gone astray in these pages, an object of unique value to science for two reasons.

(i) (The human person) represents, individually and socially, the most synthesized state of order which the stuff of the universe is available to us.

(ii) Collectively, he is at present the most mobile (in the process of changing) point of the stuff in course of transformation.

   For these two reasons, to decipher man is essentially to try to find out how the world was made and how it ought to go on making itself.  The science of man is the practical and theoretical science of hominisation.  It means profound study of the past and of origins.  But still more, it means constructive experimentation pursued on a continually renewed object.  The program is immense and its only aim is that of the future.”

   In the fifth insight, he recognizes, however, that the emergence of science was not without its seeming competition with religion.  As Steven Pinker outlines in his book, “Enlightenment Now”, the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, while offering great clarification of human affairs appropriate to the ‘articulation of the noosphere’, still placed most of the ills of the noosphere at the feet of religion:

“To outward appearance, the modern world was born of an anti-religious movement: man becoming self-sufficient and reason supplanting belief.  Our generation and the two that preceded it have heard little but talk of the conflict between science and faith; indeed it seemed at one moment a foregone conclusion that the former was destined to take the place of the latter.”

This sentiment was strongly evident in the earliest claims of the superiority of empiricism over that of intuition, such as that which appeared in the Enlightenment.  As much as I value the insights of Steven Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”, this biased viewpoint can still be found tucked into the back chapters.

Further, as Pinker undertakes the difficult subject of personal happiness in this book, he is forced to recognize the significant correlation between meaning and life satisfaction.  He does not seem to understand that science does not incorporate meaning at the personal level into its wonderful insights.  As Jonathan Sacks points out:

“Science takes things apart to see how they work.  Religion puts things together to see what they mean.  The difference between them is fundamental and irreducible.  They represent two distinct activities of the mind.  Neither is dispensable.  Both, together, constitute a full expression of our humanity.  They are as different and as necessary as the twin hemispheres of the brain.  It is in fact from the hemispherical asymmetry of the brain that the entire drama of the mutual misunderstanding and conjoint creativity of religion and science derive.”

   In his sixth insight, Teilhard, goes on to envision a future relationship between science and religion in which their viewpoints capitalize on Sack’s potential synergies, and they begin to come into a synthesis in which the manifest structures of human evolution are seen as facets of a single thing:

  “But, as the tension is prolonged, the conflict visibly seems to be resolved in terms of an entirely different form of equilibrium- not in elimination, nor duality, but in synthesis.  After close on to two centuries of passionate struggles, neither science nor faith has succeeded in discrediting its adversary.  On the contrary, it becomes obvious that neither can develop normally without the other.  And the reason is simple: the same life animates both.  Neither in its impetus nor its achievements can science go to its limits without becoming tinged with mysticism and charged with faith.“

   And, so, Teihard summarizes his understanding of how the empiricism of science and the intuition of religion, the traditionally understood ‘left’ and ‘right’ brain perspectives that Sacks highlights, can now be seen as potentially two integrated and synthesized human enterprises.  Long envisioned as the opposite sides of a deep-seated duality, Teilhard sees them as destined to bring us to a more complete understanding of ourselves and the noosphere which we inhabit.

In his seventh insight, Teilhard summarizes his belief that such synthesis is necessary for the continuation of human evolution:

“Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge– the only one that can embrace the past and future of evolution so as to contemplate, measure and fulfil them.”

   As we have seen, Johan Norberg, in his book, “Progress”, implicitly agrees when he cites the three factors of freedom, innovation and relationships as essential for the continuation of the human progress (which we have seen is essentially quantification of human evolution).  In showing how these three factors are critical to secular progress, he is in implicit agreement with Teilhard that “neither (science nor religion) can develop normally without the other” and Sacks that “Both, together, constitute a full expression of our humanity”.

These three factors of course are seldom cited as aspects of intuitional thinking, but are addressed in some form in every expression of religious belief.

The Next Post

This week we have completed looking at Teilhard’s seven insights that underlay his assertion that the continuation of human evolution requires a synergy between science and religion if it is to continue.

While this week we cited the belief of Jonathan Sacks on the two ‘domains of thought’ of these two enterprises, next week we will look a little more deeply into his insights of how they can better team to assure this continuation.

December 20 – The Confluence of Religion and Science – Part 1

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Today’s Post

Last week we noted once again that even with the evolutionary progress that can be seen in the secular world, undriven by a singular impetus for advancing evolution per se, but nonetheless effecting a startling increase in human welfare over the past two hundred years, continuation of this trend is not inevitable. It is possible for ‘noospheric risks’ to undermine the continuation of human evolution, but as Teilhard asserts, the potential of science and religion, properly focused, conjoined and applied, are tools which will help us make our way.
This week we will look at the first three of his assertions to understand the potential for religion’s confluence with science to effect a tool for doing so.

The Evolutionary Potential of Religion

In “Human Energy”, Teilhard notes that Christianity, of all the world’s religions, in its fundamental teachings, is well placed for such a partnership with science in overcoming ‘noospheric risks’ and insuring the continuation of the rise of complexity in the human species.

In the first of these assertions, he cites the distinguishing feature which differentiates Christianity from the predominant Eastern beliefs: that of the primacy of the person:
“Like every other form of adherence to a cosmic hope, the doctrine of the personal universe has exactly those characteristics of universality and faith which are, in the broad sense of the term, distinctive of religion. But the religion it introduces has in addition two associated characteristics which seemed, to their mutual detriment, destined to be perpetual opposites in religious systems: personalism and pantheism. (This position) is already virtually realized and lived within Christianity.”
Like Teilhard, Jefferson recognized the personalistic focus of Christianity, but Jefferson saw it as necessary for the success of a democratic governmental progress, and hence as a necessary impetus to continued human evolution. Unlike Jefferson, who lived in a static universe, Teilhard recognized the value of attaching primacy to the concept of the person not only in human affairs, but as necessary for understanding the entire evolution of the universe. Teilhard first identifies complexity as the key metric of universal evolution, then observes how this complexity eventually manifests itself as person-ness in evolution’s most recent stages.

Second, he notes how this primacy of person can be seen in the Christian concept of ‘incarnation’, which can be seen through Teilhard’s insights as an impetus for the personal development that is the cornerstone to continued human evolution:
” The degree to which Christianity teaches and offers a prospect of universal transformation can never be sufficiently stressed. By the Incarnation God descended into nature to ‘super-animate’ it and lead it back to Him: this is the substance of the Christian dogma.”
Here the concept of God as the fundamental agent of the rise of complexity that powers universal evolution overlaps with the core Christian teaching of John that “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”. The Christian claim that the universal agent of life is somehow present in each of its manifestations is remarkable among all the world’s religions, and clearly shows the unique Christian belief that whatever is happening in our lives as we grow is powered by a universal agency for such growth.

Third, Teilhard also takes note of how the major elements of Christian theology are not only compatible with Science’s understanding of the ‘natural’ world, they can be enhanced by it. Teilhard, like Blondel before him, understood how the concept of evolution offered religion a more complete understanding of their ancient teachings:
“In itself, (Christian) dogma can be reconciled with many representations of the empirical world. So long, for example, as the human mind saw the universe only as a fixed arrangement of ready-made elements, the Christian had no serious difficulty in introducing the mysterious process of his sanctification into this static assemblage. But was not this, to some extent, a second best? Was a fundamental immobility of the cosmos the best imaginable framework for the spiritual metamorphosis represented by the coming of the kingdom of God? Now that the dust of early battles is dying down, we are apparently beginning to perceive that a universe of evolutionary structure- provided that the direction of its movement is truly located- might well be, after all, the most favorable setting in which to develop a noble and homogenous representation of the Incarnation.”
“Christianity would have been stifled by a materialist doctrine of evolution. But does it not find its most appropriate climate in the broad and mounting prospect of a universe drawn towards the spirit? What could serve as a better background and base for the descending illuminations of a Christogenisis than an ascending anthropogenesis?”
“Drawn towards the spirit” of course invokes Teilhard’s reinterpretation of ‘spirit’ as ‘increased complexity’, with Christogenisis as the personal aspect of this increased complexity. With this observation, Teilhard ‘closes the loop’ between a science which struggles to understand the fundamental force of evolution by which the intensity of its complexity is increased (“drawn towards the spirit’) and a religion loosed from its moorings of superstition, hierarchy and a spirituality which has become detached from the noosphere.

The Next Post

This week we have taken a first look at the possibility of bringing science and religion into a coherence which strengthens both of them and thus permits a clearer understanding of the noosphere; one which provides us with more effective tools for mitigating its risks and insuring the continuation of human evolution.
Next week we will continue this inquiry by seeing how Teilhard addressed this subject in his cornerstone book, “The Phenomenon of Man”.

December 13 – Religion and Science: Noospheric Tools?

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Today’s Post

In the last several weeks, we have been looking at religion’s concept of morality, ending in a look at how Teilhard’s five insights into morality offer a rethinking of traditional religion’s concept from proscription to prescription as we begin to recognize religion’s potential as a tool for insuring our continued evolution.  We saw how religion must recognize its role as a tool for understanding the noosphere to be able to assist us in living it in such a way that we maximize our potential for being fully and authentically human.

This week we turn our focus to the other great human enterprise, science, to begin exploring how a revitalized religion, better focused on an evolving noosphere, might better work with an obviously effective science in effecting such ‘maximization’ of potential. 

Evolution Everywhere

In this series, we have frequently noted that, as asserted and quantified by Johan Norberg (‘Progress’), it is possible for us, with properly focused eyes, to recognize threads of this evolution happening all around us.  Norberg offers, as the Economist identifies, “A tornado of facts” which quantify the many ways that human welfare proceeds by the correct application of human freedom, innovation and relationship throughout the world.  These examples of increased human welfare are without a doubt evidence of the ways the human species can be seen to continue its evolution.

We have also seen that Norberg considered human freedom, innovation, and relationships to be essential for such progress to proceed, which is why the earliest examples of this progress appeared in the West, with its unique emphasis on the three.

By the same token, we have noted that these three characteristics are treated poorly by science, and its companion secular ‘disciplines’ such as economics and politics.   Norberg’s three cornerstones of progress initially only occur in the West, as a slowly building consequence of society influenced by its Christian roots in the uniqueness of the person (more on this subject next week).

Jefferson’s claim that

 “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves”

was a claim to such uniqueness, and not derived from any empirical source.  His inspiration for such an unprovable concept was none other than the ‘teachings of Jesus’:

 “We all agree in the obligation of the moral precepts of Jesus, and nowhere will they be found delivered in greater purity than in his discourses.”

   Thus our claim that in religion, for all its creaky hierarchy, superstitions and contradictions, and even the many instances of hostility to Norberg’s three building blocks of freedom, innovation and relationships, we can still find threads of the current which must be maintained if it is to  carry us forward.

We have Jefferson to thank for both a clearer understanding of the noosphere, and how its structure in human affairs has evolved from Enlightenment principles intermixed with Christian values, initially “dripping” with the accouterments of medieval worldview.

As Norberg quantifies at length, this clearer understanding has given rise to the success of the West in providing a mileu which has effected a degree of stability not only unprecedented in Western history, but which has slowly permeated into the rest of the world.

Steven Pinker (“Enlightenment Now”) recognizes how this mileu is unfolding in the West in the form of a “tide of morality” which is pushing against “the historical erosion of racism, sexism and homophobia”.  It is not coincidental that these three negative aspects of society have all, at one time (and even continue today) been paramount in all religions.  Pinker sees in this tide the effect of ‘empiricism’s superiority over intuition’, a sentiment underpinning the beliefs found in the Enlightenment.  As do many thinkers influenced by the Enlightenment, he fails to recognize that in the essential beliefs of Jefferson, and thus of Jesus, the key kernel of belief which makes such a tide possible is the recognition of the essential goodness of the human person.  Without this belief, essentially unprovable and thus ‘intuitive’ rather than ‘empirical’, the tide would not surge, it would ebb.

Enter Religion

And this, of course, is where religion comes in.  We have taken a long look at ‘risks’ to the noosphere, and saw that even with the unconscious ‘tide’ that Pinker cites, there’s no guarantee that it will ultimately prevail over the ‘risks’ to the noosphere that we identified back in September.

At the basis of these ‘risks’ is the necessity for us to choose to continue to power this tide.  We saw that it is possible for humans to simply allow fear, pessimism and disbelief to weaken their will to continue.

Pinker notes, for example, that although the rate of suicide is declining everywhere across the world, it is increasing in the United States.  Increased welfare, it would seem, is no bulwark against despair.  This, of course, is the ultimate duality:  Faith in human progress seems to be declining in the first society to provide an instantiation of the progress itself.

We have looked at examples of how evolution is proceeding through contemporary secular events, as prolifically documented by Norberg and Pinker, but as many of their critics observe, they spend little time addressing the downside, the ‘evolutionary risks’ of these examples.  While this does not diminish the reality of the progress that they describe, neither does it address the risks.

Teilhard believed that religion, properly unfettered from its medieval philosophical shackles, its overdependence on hierarchy, and its antipathy towards science, is well suited to address these ‘downsides’.

We noted last week that Teilhard saw the need for religion, if it is to indeed rise to its potential as a tool for dealing with these ‘noospheric risks’, to enter a new phase of contribution to this process:

“At the first stage, Christianity may well have seemed to exclude the humanitarian aspirations of the modern world.  At the second stage its duty was to correct, assimilate and preserve them.”

We have taken a look at a key facet of religion,  that of ‘morality,’ to understand how this concept can be reinterpreted in terms of building blocks for continued human evolution.  How can religion itself be seen in this same way?  Teilhard’s answer to this question was to see that there is a way for religion and science to overcome the traditional religion-science duality:

“Religion and science are the two conjugated faces of phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge- the only one that can embrace the past and future of evolution so as to contemplate, measure and fulfil them.”

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at science and religion as ‘tools’ for managing the noosphere, particularly in managing the human-initiated risks to it, but recognizing that traditionally, they have been understood as opposites in a long-standing duality.

Next week will look a little deeper at how Teilhard understood the potential confluence between these two powerful modes of thinking, and how they could be brought into a fully and integrated human response to the challenges of evolution.

December 6 – Religion’s Seeds of ‘Articulating the Noosphere’ and How to Build Upon Them, Part 2

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Expanding On Teilhard’s View of Morality – Part 2

Today’s Post

Last week took a second look at Teilhard’s five insights into the religious concept of morality, focusing on the first two.  As we saw, putting the idea of morality into the context of evolution brought new depths of meaning into religion’s traditional understanding of morality as proscriptions for stabilizing society and qualifying us for ‘the next life’.

This week we will continue further on this subject, reviewing the last three of his insights for their potential to ‘construct the noosphere’ even as in turn we are ‘constructed’ by it.

Teilhard’s Last Three Insights on Morality

As we saw last week, the first two of these insights from his book, “Human Energy” addressed morality from the perspective of its role in human evolution and showed how the basis of morality is a building block for the noosphere, as well as an articulation which

“guide(s) (us) so effectively in the direction of (our) anticipated fulfillments that the ‘quantity of personality’ still diffuse in humanity may be released in fullness and security.”

   To Teilhard, the essential function of religion is as a tool for unlocking our potential as entities of evolution to continue the evolutionary ‘complexification’ of the universe as we ourselves become more complete.

His last three insights extend the first two into an understanding of how morals can help us ‘release’ our “quantity of personality…in fullness and security”.

The Morality of Balance (appropriate to a static universe) vs the Morality of Movement (appropriate to an evolving universe)

 “The morality of balance is replaced by the morality of movement.

–  (As an example) The morality of money based on exchange and fairness vs the goodness of riches only if they work for the benefit of the spirit.”

   A secular example of such a shift in perspective can be seen in the examples of human evolution in human affairs today, as enumerated by Norberg.  One of the facets that he identifies is a distinct correlation between the rise of human welfare in developing countries and their increase of GNP.  This is a concrete example of Teilhard’s insight into the potential of secular wealth to improve human welfare as a metric of human evolution.  Norberg echoes Teilhard’s belief that ‘the morality of money’ can evolve from seeing donated money as a measure of morality (charity) to understanding the application of personal freedom and improved relationships as necessary for a society to increase its wealth (GNP) and as a result, increase the welfare of its citizens.

– “Individual morality to prevent him from doing harm vs working with the forces of growth to free his autonomy and personality (person-ness) to the uttermost.”

   This is a direct corollary of the above insight, and reinforces his claim that morality must evolve from proscription to prescription if it is to fulfill its potential in fostering our personal evolution towards more completeness (autonomy and person-ness).  In Teilhard’s new insight, morality must now be recognized as a tool for increasing personal freedom and enhancing relationships, not as a hedge against evil.

Religion, Morality and Complexification

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

   Here Teilhard is delving into the most fundamental role of religion.  As technology certainly can be seen to improve human welfare, it has no expertise at improving the human unique characteristics of personal freedom and personal relationships which are necessary to insure the innovation and invention at the basis of its expertise.  He goes on to say,

“At the first stage, Christianity may well have seemed to exclude the humanitarian aspirations of the modern world.  At the second stage its duty was to correct, assimilate and preserve them.”

   The most appropriate role for religion Is as a tool for management of the noosphere.  The deepest claim to authenticity for a religion is to be recognized as a tool for the evolutionary advancement of the human person, and through him the advancement of humanity.

Morality As A Basis For Dealing With The Noosphere

“So as long as our conceptions of the universe remained static, the basis of duty remained extremely obscure.  To account for this mysterious law (love) which weighs fundamentally on our liberty, man had recourse to all sorts of explanations, from that of an explicit command issued from outside to that of an irrational but categorical instinct.”

   Here Teilhard is succinctly stating one of his basic tenets of understanding human evolution:  Once put in an evolutionary context, all concepts which are pertinent to human existence begin to present themselves as aspects of the single, unified and coherent thing that they truly are.   

The Tool Set

In the same way that government must establish and safeguard the building blocks of society, such as Jefferson seeing the person as the basis for society…

In the same way that medicine must understand physiology to diagnose illness to be able to prescribe treatment…

In the same way that technology must understand metal structure to build a bridge…

Religion must recognize its role as a tool for understanding the noosphere to be able to assist us in living it in such a way that we maximize our potential for being fully and authentically human.

The Next Post

This week we took a second look at the last three of Teilhard’s insights into the concept of morality, seeing how he extended his understanding in the first two (the evolutionary context) to the last three (how it is a tool for continuing our evolution as humans).

Next week we will begin to look at what has to happen to religion if it is to begin to realize its potential as ‘co-creator’ of the future with science.

November 29 – Religion’s Seeds of ‘Articulating the Noosphere’ and How to Build Upon Them Expanding On Teilhard’s View of Morality- Part 1

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a more detailed look at Teilhard’s insights into the concept of morality, how it has been taught in Western religion, and how putting it into the context of evolution can point the way to incorporating it as a tool for ‘articulating the noosphere’.

   This week I’d like to look at the five insights from last week that Teilhard offers from his book, “Human Energy” in the context of the multifaceted view that we have been building in our search for “The Secular Side of God”.  Each one of these insights is in reality just an outline, a starting point for these subjects, and offers a basis for considering the concept of morality to be a cornerstone for ‘articulating the noosphere’.

Rethinking Religion

As we have seen, one of Teilhard’s key insights was that to be able to manage our journey through the noosphere, we must first understand it. The entire history of religion shows it to be our first attempt to do so.  Born in an era which depended on intuitive insights , the early religions were simply extensions of the clans which formed the base for the societal structures that came into being.  They all reflected the need to stabilize the ever-increasing size, density and complexity of human society.  All of the early myths and stories reflected the common understanding that the world had always existed, and that it had existed in manifestations that had only superficially changed over the years.

As we have seen elsewhere in this blog, these early noospheric insights did not begin to rise from the highly subjective perspectives that had held sway for thousands of years until the “Axial Age”, some 700 years BCE.  These perspectives, while somewhat impacted by early Greek thinking, managed to remain as the prevalent mode of thinking until mid-1200’s, when more empirical and objective perspectives began to appear in the West.

When this happened, the highly metaphorical insights into the composition of the noosphere began to change, culminating in the growing understanding of first the noosphere itself and then the universe which surrounds it, from static to dynamic.

The clash between the neothink offered by the nascent scientific evidence and the prevalent static and intuitive beliefs which still reflected medieval scholasticism is well documented, and to some extent still goes on today.  They offer profoundly opposed insights into the composition of the noosphere, and reflect the significant dualism that underpins modern attempts to understand it.  So it comes as no surprise that today we find it difficult to unravel these two threads to find a way to respin them into a single strand.

  In such a single strand, the concept of morality moves beyond the dualistic secular basis for a secure society and a roadmap to successful entry into the next life, and into a set of guidelines which ‘articulate the noosphere’ in such a way that we insure our continued evolution into states of greater complexity.

Rethinking Morality

   It was in this vein that Teilhard, along with other thinkers such as Maurice Blondel, began to look at the tenets and structure of religion, particularly Western religion, in these new terms offered by science.  The five insights that we saw last week offer a summary of his understanding of how this new thinking not only could bring a new, secular and empirical meaning to the ancient teachings, but that Christianity, as one of the first attempts to see religion and reason as sides of a single coin, was well suited to do so.

Teilhard’s five insights into morality all offer opportunities to not only increase the relevancy of religious teaching, but in doing so increase its value to science.  Not only can religious teaching be better grounded in empirical facts, but in doing so can provide a much needed ‘ground of humanity’ to science.

Looking a little deeper into the first two of Teilhard’s five insights into morality:

The Evolutionary Basis for Morality

“If indeed, as we have assumed, the world culminates in a thinking reality, the organization of personal human energies represents the supreme stage (so far) of cosmic evolution on Earth; and morality is consequently nothing less than the higher development of mechanics and biology.  The world is ultimately constructed by moral forces; and reciprocally, the function of morality is to construct the world.”

   Here Teilhard asks us to recognize that what religion has been trying to accomplish, with its topsy-turvy, noosphericly-risky, ultimately very human approach is to ‘articulate the noosphere’, using the slowly accumulated understanding of the noosphere provided by intuition, metaphors and dreams, and impeded by egos, fears, and ambitions. 

   He attaches no particular stigma to the fact that we’re already some two hundred thousands of years into human evolution, and in many ways ‘we’re not there yet’.  Considering that evolution is ‘a work in progress’, the ultimate use of the tool of morality is to ‘construct the world’.  Conversely this calls for us to ‘construct morality’ even as we ‘articulate the noosphere’.

   Properly understood, morals are the building blocks of the noosphere, by which we ourselves are ‘built’..

The Evolution of Morality

“Morality has until now been principally understood as a fixed system of rights and duties intended to establish a static equilibrium between individuals and at pains to maintain it by a limitation of energies, that is to say of force.

Now the problem confronting morality is no longer how to preserve and protect the individual, but how to guide him so effectively in the direction of his anticipated fulfillments that the ‘quantity of personality’ still diffuse in humanity may be released in fullness and security.”

   Here Teilhard introduces two insights:  First the most tangible way that morality ‘constructs the world’ is by clarifying the structure of the universe so that we can better understand it.  Secondly, it offers a clearer understanding of how we are to make the best use of it in unlocking the fullness and security that is still diffuse in us.

   As we better understand morals, we better understand the noosphere, and become more skilled at cooperating with its forces to increase our personal complexification.

The Next Post                  

This week we took a second look at morality as a facet of religion which can be seen as a tool for helping us understand the structure of the noosphere as a step to managing its risks.  We did this by expanding on the first two of Teilhard’s synopses of the history and the place of ‘morality’ in the unfolding of the noosphere.

Next week we’ll continue this theme, taking a deeper look at the remaining three of Teilhard’s insights from his book “Human Energy” to see how the concept of morality can be enriched and more highly focused to enhance both the relevance of religion and offer a tool more finely honed for dealing with the noosphere’s inevitable risks.

November 22 – Religion’s Seeds of ‘Articulating the Noosphere’ and How to Build Upon Them Part 1: Teilhard’s View of Morality

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Today’s Post

Last week be began a look at religion as a tool for managing the noosphere, particularly in dealing with the risks that arise with evolution of the human.  We acknowledged the traditional ills that can be seen in various expressions of religion over its six or so thousand years of manifesting itself as a way to make sense of things, but opened the door to re-seeing it, at least in its Western manifestation, as simply an attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’.  In this sense, it can be seen as just the ‘right brained’ counterpart to the ‘left brained’ perspectives of science.

The question remains, of course: how can such an approach to religion be developed, with its historical attachment to such things as radical and fundamentalist expressions of Islam in the Mideast, as well as

fundamentalism, excessive hierarchical structures and pedophilia in the West?  Is there a way that the teachings that have led to such obvious ‘noospheric risks’ can be reinterpreted into teachings that will lead away from them?

   This week we will begin to look at the roots of Western religion to begin rediscovery of principles which will move us forward.

Morality

One such starting place for such an undertaking is the idea of morality.  We covered the concept of morality with its companion subjects of spirituality, virtues and sacraments last December, and I’d like to expand upon this brief series of posts by looking more deeply at how Teilhard himself saw it from his evolutionary perspective (From “Human Energy”. Parentheses and italics mine):

The Evolutionary Basis for Morality

“For the old-style spiritualist who regards the spirit as a meta-phenomenon, as for the modern materialist who chooses to see it only as an epi-phenomenon, the world of moral relationships forms a separate department of nature.  For different reasons, forces and connexions of a moral kind are for both less physically real than the energies of matter.  For us who see the development of consciousness as the essential phenomenon of nature (eg from an evolutionary perspective), things appear in a very different light.  If indeed, as we have assumed, the world culminates in a thinking reality, the organization of personal human energies represents the supreme stage of cosmic evolution on earth; and morality is consequently nothing less than the higher development of mechanics and biology.  The world is ultimately constructed by moral forces; and reciprocally, the function of morality is to construct the world.”

 

The Evolution of Morality

“Morality arose largely as an empirical defense of the individual and society.  Ever since intelligent beings began to be in contact, and consequently in friction, they have felt the need to guard themselves against each other’s encroachments.  And once an arrangement was in practice discovered which more or less guaranteed to each one his due, this system itself felt the need to guarantee itself against the changes which would call its accepted solutions into question and disturb the established social order.  Morality has till now been principally understood as a fixed system of rights and duties intended to establish a static equilibrium between individuals and at pains to maintain it by a limitation of energies, that is to say of force.

This conception rested in the last resort on the idea that every human being represented a sort of absolute term in the world, whose existence had to be protected from all encroachment from without.  It is transformed from top to bottom as one recognizes…that man on earth is no more than an element destined to complete himself cosmically in a higher consciousness in process of formation.  Now the problem confronting morality is no longer how to preserve and protect the individual, but how to guide him so effectively in the direction of his anticipated fulfillments that the ‘quantity of personality’ still diffuse in humanity may be released in fullness and security.  The moralist was up to now a jurist, or a tight-rope walker.  He becomes the technician and engineer of the spiritual energies of the world.

 

The Morality of Balance (appropriate to a static universe) vs the Morality of Movement (appropriate to an evolving universe)

(From this perspective) “The morality of balance is replaced by the morality of movement

-The morality of money based on exchange and fairness vs the goodness of riches only if they work for the benefit of the spirit

– The morality of love based on the material founding of a family vs loving in response to a personal creative force

– Individual morality to prevent him from doing harm vs working with the forces of growth to free his autonomy and personality to the uttermost

To the morality of balance (“closed morality”) the moral world might seem a definitely bounded real.  To the morality of movement (‘open morality’) the same world appears as a higher sphere of the universe, much richer than the lower spheres of matter in unknown powers and unsuspected combinations.”

Religion and Morality

“By definition, his religion, if true, can have no other effect than to perfect the humanity in him.”  In that case, if there was, as we have agreed, a deeply humanizing intuition in the idea which unfolded in the 18th century that each of us is a conscious and responsible unit in a universe in progress, it was inevitable that this intuition should sooner or later raise an amplified echo in the heart of Christian consciousness.  At the first stage, Christianity may well have seemed to exclude the humanitarian aspirations of the modern world.  At the second stage its duty was to correct, assimilate and preserve them.”

Morality As A Basis For Dealing With The Noosphere

“So as long as our conceptions of the universe remained static, the basis of duty remained extremely obscure.  To account for this mysterious law (love) which weighs fundamentally on our liberty, man had recourse to all sorts of explanations, from that of an explicit command issued from outside to that of an irrational but categorical instinct.”

The next Post                   

This week we took a second look at morality as a facet of religion which can be seen as a tool for helping us understand the structure of the noosphere as a step to managing its risks.  We did this by looking at Teilhard’s synopsis of the history and the place of ‘morality’ in the unfolding of the noosphere.

Next week we’ll continue this theme, taking a deeper look at each of Teilhard’s (above) insights from his book “Human Energy” to see how the concept of morality can be enriched and more highly focused to enhance both the relevance of religion and offer a tool more finely honed for dealing with the noosphere’s inevitable risks.

November 15 – Religion as a Tool for Understanding the Noosphere

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a second look at Teilhard’s first step of managing the Noospheric Risks by better understanding it.  We saw how a deeper understanding of the structure of the Noosphere involves recognition of and cooperation with the universal agent that for fourteen billion years has invested itself in the continuation of complexity that has eventually given rise to humans.

As we have seen over the past several weeks, this rise is no longer based on instinctual, biological and physical processes: it must be consciously grasped and capitalized upon if it is to continue in the human species.  The ‘noospheric risks’ which we have identified must be consciously overcome if evolution is to continue through our species.

A major step in understanding the noosphere so that those risks can be managed, as Teilhard suggests, is to ‘articulate’ it, to understand how it works to effect our continued evolution, both in ourselves as well in our societies.

One such tool is, properly understood, religion.  This week we will take a first look at religion to understand how it can be seen as a tool to achieve such a goal.

Why Religion?

One of the foundational concepts that the great Western awakening known as “The Enlightenment” introduced was the diminishment of religion’s role in society and government.  One of the results of this diminishment was the rise of atheism, which placed many of the world’s ills (eg ‘Noospheric risks’) at the doorstep of organized religion.  Both the leading Enlightment thinkers, and the atheists which ensued, valued objective, empirical thinking over the subjective and intuitive intellectual processes that had informed medieval Western thinkers.  As we have discussed many times, the rise in ‘left brain’ thinking began to surpass that of the ‘right brain’ as a method of ‘articulating the noosphere’.

Given the many ills of religion that can be seen today in the Mideast governments infused with radical and fundamentalist expressions of Islam, as well as Western religions weighted down by fundamentalism, excessive hierarchical structures and pedophilia, It would seem that these post-Enlightenment perspectives are indeed superior to legacy religion in helping us make sense of what’s happening in the noosphere, and how to navigate our way through it.

Can there be a way that religion can be seen as a tool for helping us ‘articulate the noospere’ or is it destined to end up on the dust pile of history: a perspective that has ‘seen its day’ but is no longer relevant in this new and technical mileu?

One way to look at this question is to see it as evidence of yet another, very fundamental ‘duality’.  We have looked at the concept of ‘dualities’ through the eyes of Jonathan Sacks previously in this blog.  He, like Teilhard, saw such dualities as a way of seeing things as opposites, such as ‘this world’ vs ‘the next’, or ‘human’ vs ‘divine’.  In Teilhard’s insight, most dualities simply reflect an inadequate understanding of a situation, and can be overcome with the proper perspective.

From the traditional perspective, science and religion are often seen in terms of a duality.  This viewpoint reflects a mode of seeing in which ‘right brained’ and ‘left brain’ perspectives are understood as ‘opposites’.  To see them thusly is to forget that there is only a single brain, although it may have many modes of operation.

Teilhard’s method of resolving ‘dualities’ is simply to put them into a single context, as he does with ‘evolution’.  In such a context, the ‘opposites’ now appear as ‘points in a single spectrum’.  By this method, the continuation and coherence between the ‘opposites’ can now be understood.

So, the question above now gives way to a second question: “How can the legitimate ‘right brained’ perspective offered by religion be seen to help us, like the ‘left brained’ perspectives of the Enlightment have done, “make sense of what’s happening in the noosphere, and how to navigate our way through it.”

As we saw in our series on Norberg’s ‘Progress’, the human actions of innovation and invention, obviously the fruit of ‘left brain’ activity, nonetheless turned on the pivot points of personal freedom and human relationships, which are much more the domain of the ‘right brain’.  So, on the surface, it would seem essential for these two modes of human thought to operate less like the commonly understood ‘opposites’ than as the two facets of a single thing that biology shows us that they are.

Earlier in this blog, I have suggested that one measure of increasing human evolution is the skill of using the neocortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of the lower (reptilian and limbic) brains.  Just as important is the corollary of using the whole neocortex, both left and right hemispheres, intuition and empiricism, in making sense of things.

As the above example from Norberg shows, articulating the ‘right brained’ concepts of personal freedom and relationships, while essential to our continued evolution, is not something we can request from science.  Requesting it from religion, as religion is commonly understood, is neither up to the task.  Traditional Western religion has only slightly evolved from its medieval perspectives, and as such would seem to offer little to a partnership with science in the enterprise of ‘articulating the noosphere’.  Extending Teilhard’s approach of understanding difficult questions by putting the subject into an evolutionary context, for religion to be germane in the answering of questions, it must evolve.

The Evolutionary Roots of Western Religion

Re-reading the Christian New Testament with Teilhard’s evolutionary context in mind offers a starting place for such evolution.  There are many concepts that appear with no precedent in the NT, that have been poorly carried forward as Christian theology developed, such as:

–          Understanding the presence of God in all created things (Pau) ,and particularly in the human person  (John), which is contrary to a God eventually taught as ‘external’ to creation

–          Understanding that we are bound together via a force which fosters our personal growth (Paul)

–          Recognizing that this growth enhances our uniqueness while it deepens our relationships

–          Recognizing that this uniqueness gives rise to the characteristic of human equality (Paul)), as opposed to the imposition of hierarchy

So a first step toward maturing religion would be to return to its evolutionary roots, many of which have sprouted anew in secular organizations, as so brilliantly seen in Thomas Jefferson’s reinterpretation of these evolutionary roots in purely secular terms.

       

The next Post                   

This week we took a first look at religion as a tool for helping us understand the structure of the noosphere as a step to managing its risks.  Next week we’ll continue this theme, taking a look at how religion has traditionally ‘articulated the noosphere’, and how the seeds for a more evolved articulation can be found among them.