Category Archives: Science and Religion

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?

October 31 Understanding Religion In the Context of Evolution

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Today’s Post

After seeing last week how religion can be seen as an evolving phenomenon, this week we will begin an overview of the eleven posts that look at this evolving phenomenon in the light of Teilhard’s insights into how evolution continues its rise of complexity through the human species. If we are evolving, what role can religion be seen to play in the process?

Our treatment of this subject can be seen in the posts from 10 December2015 (The Continuation of Evolution in the Human) to 14 April, 2016 (Religion and Stability).

The Continuation of Evolution in the Human Species

Before looking at religion’s role in human evolution, it is necessary to see this evolution holistically. Teilhard’s insights into such a comprehensive view place evolution at the heart of the ‘coming-to-be’ of the universe from the ‘big bang’, some fourteen billion years ago, to the present day. As we saw previously, the phenomenon which unites the three major phases of the universe’s evolution, matter, life and reflective life, is that of increasing complexity. In every step of each of these three major stages, and in the transition of each stage to the next, more complex products emerge from the unification of ancestral products in such a way as to increase their complexity.

The key to understanding how evolution continues through the human, he asserts, is simply to recognize how the rise of complexity can be seen to take place in human history.

The problem, of course, is that any observations that we make about ourselves is, by definition, relative to ourselves, and hence subjective in nature, and this subjectivity makes it difficult to stand back and observe with any amount of objectivity. This hesitation can be clearly seen in science’s insistence that not only is evolution absent in the scientific theories of changes of matter leading up to the cell, but that evolution after the cell is the result of ‘Natural Selection’, which itself is driven by ‘chance’ and ‘necessity’. Further, this narrow view of evolution in which the agency of ‘complexification’ is ignored, reduces science’s treatment of the human person to either an ‘epiphenomenon’ or perhaps predicated on a ‘non-existent’ consciousness which is merely the result of random neuron firings.

As Ian Barbour puts it in his book, “Religion and Science’:

“Something radically different takes place when culture rather than the genes becomes the principal means by which the past is transmitted to the future and when conscious choice alters that future.”

   Thus, something new comes into play with the human: the capability of being aware of consciousness, and this results in the ability to choose, and this ability manifests itself in the two emerging styles of human thinking, science and religion.

Teilhard and many others (such as Jonathan Sacks, whom we saw last week) also point out that these two evolutionary branches of thinking at first seem to be just other ‘branches’ on the tree of life, similar to those occurring for millions of years. Teilhard and Sacks both note that at their bifurcation points, the two branches are indeed different, but that they emerge as a result of evolving skills of thinking. Sacks notes how they are related to the more recent evolution of left brain activity, and both point to the potential of ‘reconnection’, or as Teilhard puts it, “confluence after fluorescence”.

Thus, as Teilhard sees it, science’s understanding of atomic and molecular structure, and biology’s understanding of Natural Selection aren’t incorrect, simply incomplete. While these clearly play a part in cosmic evolution, once the phenomenon of ‘complexification’ is factored in, they can now be seen as ‘harmonics’ of a ‘fundamental’: second order effectors riding on top of the first order of increasing complexity.

With The Rise of the Left Brain, is Religion Still Relevant?

With Teilhard’s perspective of human evolution as a subset of cosmic evolution, and Sacks’ insight into the bicameral brain’s evolution, what sense can be made of religion?

Detractors of religion offer much to defend their stance. Richard Dawkins in his book, “The God Delusion” offers a sobering but undeniable picture of the ills to be found in the history of organized religion. The most prevalent attitude of these detractors seem to favor a future shorn of all religious belief: one of complete dominance of the ‘left’ brain, with disdain for any thought rising from intuition experienced by the ‘right’ brain. Such right- brained modes of thinking, such as those found in art and music, are sort of ‘patched in’ to these beliefs, but are strictly prohibited from affecting legal or scientific thought. Governments in which this ideal has been prominent, such as the communist regimes of Russia and China offer proponents of religion much to argue against.

Supporters of traditional religious modes of thinking, those who would eschew ‘left’ brain modes and rely exclusively on the intuitional modes of the ‘right’, with their fundamentalism, supernaturalism and ‘anti-intellectual’ approach to thinking, give the materialists much ground for opposition.

Add to this the frequently publicized polls that show a distinct decline of religious belief in the West, and it would seem that religion as an evolutionary phenomenon has passed its prime’. How can it be seen as relevant today?

Understanding Religion From the Perspective of Evolution

Teilhard understood religion’s role in evolution when he stated:

“To explain the workings of the universe we must understand the forces and process by which it comes to be, and this understanding must include the human person.”

   With that simple statement, the relationship between the two modes of thinking is established: a complete understanding of the universe requires an understanding of how the human person fits into it. This perspective isn’t limited to Teilhard; many thinkers have intuited that since there is only one reality, all modes of thought must be brought into confluence if they are to address it.

In the beginning, as we saw last week, humans have always attempted to understand their part in life so they would know how to negotiate it. The earliest insights manifested themselves in beliefs, rituals and laws which not only helped each person to better understand themselves, but insured the connection to a society which would in turn support their existence. This wasn’t as much a ‘left vs right’ brained activity, as it was one to support the development of thinking which could be protected from instinctual impulses from the ‘lower’, reptilian and limbic, impulses that had served our nonhuman ancestors so well. As Richard Rohr puts it

“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.”

This “proceeding from the lower stages’ is indeed the action of continuation of universal evolution in the human species.

Religion, for all its imperfections, can certainly be seen to be a belief system which supports just that. But, given these many and obvious imperfections, as well documented by detractors of religion, how can religion be seen as specifically contributing to the process of our evolution?

The Next Post

This 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, next week we will articulate this role in a little more detail.

October 24 The Evolution of Religion

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Today’s Post

This week we continue the recap of the blog, “The Secular Side of God” with an overview of the posts which address the evolution of religion.

We left off last week with an overview of evolution itself, seeing through Teilhard’s eyes how the unfolding of the universe can be seen in the increase of complexity over time. Therefore this universal context, since it includes both the infinitesimally small at one end and the consciously personal at the other end, it seamlessly encompasses humans as well as atoms.

Our treatment of this subject can be seen in the posts from 6 August 2015 (Isn’t This Just Deism?) to 26 November 2015 (Part 7- The Rise of Christianity)

Looking at Religion From the Vantage Point of Evolution

This blog assumes Teilhard’s basic hermeneutic that most things can be better understood when put in the context of religion, and his context included the entire universe over the entire span of time to the present. Therefore it is appropriate to approach the complex and multifaceted subject of religion as one of the products of evolution if we are to make better sense of it.

We took a look at such evolution from three perspectives:

  • From the vantage point of history
  • As the evolution of thinking
  • As influenced by human neurology

As history

From the perspective of history, we noted how Matthew Kneale, An Atheist’s History of Belief, saw it: we have evidence of religious belief in the very first stirrings of human thought, addressing healing, controlling the environment, enhancing relationships and coordinating group activities. These four values, articulated in the many diverse and manifold beliefs, were understood as contributing to the quality of early human life.

He traces the evolution of these intuitions at the tribal level to the formation of regulations seen as necessary for the social order of the emerging civilizations. The earliest of such formal guidelines seems to have appeared as early as the 24th century BCE. The first ‘laws’ to address a relation between humans and deities appears later, and includes prescriptions for rituals, behavior and worship (Judaism).

As The evolution of thinking

It was not until the fourth century BCE that laws begin to appear which addressed relations among different societal groupings that took the place of distinct tribes. The first comprehensive example of which can be found in the Roman laws, which begin to appear as early versions of what we know today as ‘constitutions’.

During this same period, however, a new way of thinking emerged in the East which addressed both human nature and relationships separately from regulating society. The ‘Axial Age’, summarized eloquently by Karen Armstrong in her book by the same name, introduced such concepts as ‘person’, ‘love’, and ‘human potential’. Such intellectual stirring can be seen in Chinese Confucianism, Indian Buddhism, Israeli Monotheism and Greek Rationalism, all of which addressed the basic nature of the human person and explored ‘his’ potential for a fuller life.

All the great concepts of contemporary religion were born during this period, such as the importance of charity, the danger of egoism, the existence of the transcendent and the importance of the human person in the scheme of things.   With such new ideas, humans were becoming ‘self conscious’, aware of their consciousness, and therefore planting seeds in the garden of collective consciousness that would flower a few centuries later in societies which treated all members as ‘equal’.

Other seeds were planted at this time, such as the Greek break from Eastern modes of thinking, as seen in the rise of objectivity and rationality, and the Jewish understanding of the ‘ground of being’ as not only ‘one’ but ‘personal’.

As Influenced by human neurology

Jonathan Sacks, in his book, “The Great Partnership” goes beyond seeing such evolution simply as the development of ideas. He notes that the human brain is made up of two hemispheres, referred to as the ‘right’ and ‘left’ brains. While a neurological fact, it is common to impute human thinking to one or the other, resulting is a general association of ‘emotion’ to the left brain, and ‘reason’ to the right. While he correctly identifies the necessity of the whole brain working cohesively to achieve ‘rationality’, he does acknowledge each hemisphere’s contribution as distinct.

With this approach to human thinking in mind, he sees the historical record prior to the ‘Axial Age’ as more influenced by the ‘right’ brain, and hence more ‘intuitional’. This can be seen in the preponderance of the religious beliefs, which themselves were the basis for what was understood to be the norms of society.

With the Greeks, he theorizes, a movement to thinking with the ‘left’ brain can be seen. As an example of this, he proposes that the shift in writing of the Greek alphabet from ‘left-to-right’ to ‘right- t- left’ was caused by this shift in brain hemisphere thinking.

He further takes note that as a result of this shift, by the third century BCE, Greek and Hebrew (still ‘left-to-right) were not just different languages with different alphabets, they represented orthogonal civilizations, very unlike in their most basic understanding of reality. Departing from the prevalent mode of ‘right brained’ thinking to one more influenced by the ‘left brain’, he sees

“Athens evolved to a ‘literate’ from an ‘oral’ culture”, and in doing so “it became the birthplace of science and philosophy, supremely left-brain, conceptual and analytical ways of thinking”.

The Rise of Christianity

Having established a pathway of the evolution of human thought from the ancient ‘right-brained’ mode to the branching of the ‘left-brain’ mode about six thousand years ago, Sacks goes on to look at how these two great branches continue to evolve. In particular, he notes how, in five steps, these two branches demonstrate their potential for eventually becoming a single branch.

First he notes how in the passages from ‘the stories of Jesus’ seen in the first three gospels (the synoptic gospels), the teachings of Jesus are expressed in typical Jewish lexicon: Jesus makes points by telling stories, as had the many ‘authors’ of the Old Testament.

Then we find Paul restating them into Greek formats: lists, analysis, and most importantly, philosophy. He summarizes Jesus’ teachings into such things as ‘Theological Virtues’ (faith, hope love) and the eight aspects of the ‘Fruit of the Spirit’. He goes on to develop the nascent gospel concept of ‘Jesus as the Son of God’ into his concept of ‘The Universal Christ’. Then, we find that under the Hellenistic influences of Paul, the first ‘New Testament’ emerges in Greek, not Hebrew. Finally, the continued development of Christian theology occurs at the hands of the ‘Fathers’ and the ‘Doctors’ of the Church, all classically trained in Greek philosophy.

Thus, Sacks notes,

“Christianity combined left-hand brain rationality with right-brain spirituality in a single, glorious overarching structure.”

   However, he goes on to see several problems with this attempt to remerge the two branches. He finds that as Christianity develops, while it might carry the evolving insight of human personal and societal potential for continued evolution, its burdensome hierarchy, insistence on its exclusive understanding of truth and creation of many dualities weakens it. He sees these as

“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. “

As a result, he sees modern Christianity as having effected an increased loss of relevancy as well as an increase in the perceived distance between the human person and the ‘ground of being’. These problems also contribute to the well-known contention between science and religion today.

We will explore this division and the potential for overcoming it later in the blog, but at this stage, how can we take one step back to establish a clearer picture of how these two major currents of thinking are active in human life? How can they be better understood in Teilhard’s hermeneutic of using the context of universal evolution to make sense of things?.

The Next Post

This week we overviewed the six 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 established this look into religion’s evolution, next week we will apply Teilhard’s unique perspective on universal evolution to Sacks’ insights.

October 17 Summing Up “Understanding Evolution”

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Today’s Post

This week we sum up the first three parts of the blog, which deal with Teilhard’s unique view of evolution and how this view not only extends science’s understanding of biological evolution into the distant past of the ‘big bang, but extends it forward into the present day. In other words, Teilhard’s vision not only encapsulates science’s ‘Standard Model’ of physics, and biology’s Darwinistic concept of ‘Natural Selection’ but addresses the continuation of evolution in the human person, a subject of both the science of psychology and the benumbing swirls of religious belief.

Our treatment of this subject can be seen in the posts from 29 October 2014 through 23 July 2015. 

Complexity: The Starting Place

Before Teilhard, and in many minds still applicable today, these three domains of universal existence Remain heavily compartmentalized, with no hermeneutic or phenomena to connect them.   Natural Selection pays scant attention to the atoms and molecules addressed by the Standard Model at one end, and the human person, with his attribute of ‘consciousness aware of itself’ conforms poorly to the ‘laws’ of Natural Selection at the other.

Teilhard’s approach to this perennial disconnect is to simply derive a ‘centristic’ approach to evolution in which the validity of both points of view are recognized. He begins with the undeniable fact of ‘complexification’ (his term) as the underlying metric of evolution which the three stages. Once this is understood, what is left is to identify the ways that complexity can be seen to have occurred in the history of the universe and to plot its rise to the level seen in the universe today.

This method of placing everything into the ‘context of complexification’ overcomes several problems. Most scientists understand evolution in terms of Physics (for small particles) and Natural Selection (for living things). Physics, with the ‘Standard Model’ addresses how quarks, protons and atoms work their way up the complexity chain to molecules. The Darwinian process of ‘Natural Selection’ addresses how living things evolve. However, at the point of formation of molecules, particularly the highly complex nucleic acids, proteins and DNA (which underlie all life), neither approaches seem to work.

We see this discontinuity again at the appearance of ‘reflective consciousness’ (consciousness aware of itself). As a result, science offers little to address the human person.

The problem can be seen at the level of religion as well. While all religion addresses the human person directly, it is rife with such a degree of the supernatural, superstitious and fancy that it becomes more difficult to see as relevant as science reveals more about the building blocks of reality.

Teilhard simply takes a step back and views this universal journey from pure energy at the big bang to the ‘reflective consciousness’ unique to humans as single journey in which the ‘stuff of the universe’ (his term) simply reveals itself in shades of increasing complexity over time. In this view, neither the laws of physics nor Darwinian evolution are contradicted, they are simply seen as stepping stones by which the universe ‘complexifies’.

The Action of Complexity in Universal Evolution

If the universe is a single thing, and evolves according to a single agency, how can it be understood to be active in all stages of universal evolution? Teilhard answers this question with the assertion that each element of ‘the stuff of the universe’ comes into being with two potentials: Unity and Complexity.

The potential for Unity simply refers to the tendency for elements of this ‘stuff’ at the same rung of evolution to unite with each other to produce new ‘stuff’. The potential for Complexity refers to the product of such union: it can be more complex than either of its ‘parent’. This is relatively self-proving; if such complexity did not result from such unions, the universe would remain at the level of complexity found at the ‘big bang’: an undifferentiated plasma of energy.

Following his insight, we can see the agency of complexification active in the evolution from energy to quarks, quarks to electrons, electrons to atoms to molecules to highly complex molecules (such as DNA) with leads to cells, then multicell animals, then neurons, brains, consciousness and finally, in ourselves, consciousness aware of itself.

Teilhard acknowledges that there are several ‘discontinuous’ steps in this story, such as the appearance of cells from molecules and consciousness from neurons, but notes that the process of complexification can be seen to continue through them. We many not yet understand how nucleic acid, proteins and DNA can ‘gang up’ and suddenly produce a cell, nor understand how neurons can pool their resources to produce an idea . Neither do we understand the mechanism of a human group producing an invention, but it happens frequently enough to be beyond simple conjecture.

He also acknowledges that the ‘rules’ change with each stage: with molecules we have the capability of producing millions of molecules from a hundred or so atoms, which themselves come from a handful of smaller components (outlined in the “Standard Model’). Then, with cells, the capacity to fill huge ‘trees of life’ with unique living entities (Outlined in biology’s “Natural Selection”). All these sequences not only seem to follow different ‘rules’, but the rules, as the entities, are themselves more complex.

While the ‘rules’ may change, Teilhard asserts that they can be seen as ‘harmonics’ riding on the fundamental wave of ‘complexification’.   All such rules give rise to the increasing complexity of the entities which they describe.

Further, he notes that such enfolding occurs at an increasing rate. Further still, humans can be considered in the infancy of discovering their ‘rules’. Even further still, most thinkers consider the universe, hence the processes, hence the ‘rules’, to be intelligible.

The Next Post

This week we overviewed the first three segments of the blog, consisting of the first twenty posts on Teilhard’s widening the concept of evolution from biological to universal, and from impersonal to personal.

Since Teilhard believed that properly reinterpreted, religion offers a unique understanding of

the human person’s place in the universe, next week we will overview how the subject of religion can be understood from his ‘context of universal evolution’.

October 10 An Overview of the Blog “The Secular Side of God”

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Today’s Post

For the past five years I have been publishing this blog, “The Secular Side of God”. I embarked on this undertaking as an exploration of a non-religious approach to the ‘ground of being’ (AKA God) and hence human life. This approach appealed to me as a ‘cradle Catholic’ as I found myself finally giving myself the freedom to explore the many aspects of Catholicism which I had greeted with skepticism even as a child.

This, of course, didn’t happen overnight. My education as a physicist and my lifelong experience as an aerospace engineer only deepened the sense that, as stated, many of the teachings of Catholicism became harder to accept.

By the same token, however, many didn’t. I was fortunate to have insightful spiritual mentors who pointed out many expressions of Catholicism which articulated its many beliefs differently than those to which I had been exposed. The most influential of these were those of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French priest and paleontologist who sought to reinterpret the classical foundations of Christianity in terms of the recent and revolutionary scientific awareness of the depth, span, richness and age of the universe.
To him, such awareness could be applied to traditional Christian teachings not only to show how they fundamentally resonate with scientific insight, but as ‘principles of reinterpretation’ that would restore the urgency, immediacy and intimacy of the original gospels.  By such reinterpretation, he felt that a more relevant Christianity could be brought to contemporary life as an antidote to the apathy and anxiety which often accompany us on our ‘road to the future’.

For the next few weeks I would like to recap this long string of posts which mark my own search for such antidotes.

Overviewing the Blog

By way of an overview, I’d like to summarize the key points from the twenty-two part blog.These are, in order of their appearance:

Understanding Evolution This first segment presented the concept of universal evolution as seen from Teilhard’s unique and revolutionary view of evolution, which extends the biological concept of ‘Natural Selection’ to evolution in the eras before life and after the appearance of the human species. Not only is this groundbreaking perspective inclusive of the entire universe, from its history from the ‘big bang’ to the present day, it opens the door to a ‘worldview’ in which the insights of science and religion can be seen as collaborative rather than conflicting.

Biological Evolution  This section applies Teilhard’s expanded view of evolution to integrating Darwin’s ‘Natural Selection’ into the context of ‘universal evolution’. This expanded view also opens the door to placing the human person into the scope of science at the same time that it opens the restricted religious concept of the human person to the insights of science.

Human Evolution   Being able to understand the human person in the context of both universal evolution and an expanded understanding of biological evolution permits human evolution to be understood in terms of what is new with the human: “conscious become aware of itself”.

Universal Evolution With these new insights into how the process of evolution proceeds through its pre-life, life, and human life phases, we returned to another look at the ‘structure of the universe’ and how the understanding of science is expanded by recognizing the process of ‘complexification’

The Evolution of Religion  Since religion is part of reality, it is therefore a product of evolution. Applying the insights of Teilhard and Jonathan Sacks, former chief Rabbi of London, we looked at religion as an evolving ‘universal story’.

Understanding Religion From the Perspective of Evolution We continued our look at religion from the insights of Teilhard to understand how its concepts have unfolded and the part it has played in Western History.

Reinterpreting Religion From Teilhard’s insights we looked at how the traditional teachings of Western Christianity can be ‘reinterpreted’, and how such reinterpretation offers new meaning, relevancy and immediacy to them.

Relating to the ‘Ground of Being’    Having applied Teilhard’s ‘principles of reinterpretation’ to religion we looked at how the resulting concept of ‘God’ is echoed in secular science as well as how our relationship to ‘Him’ can be better understood.

Who or What is God?  With Teilhard’s understanding of God, how it possible to comprehend ‘Him”?

Who or What was Jesus?  How does Teilhard’s ‘reinterpreted’ understanding of God, map into the central Christian person of Jesus? How is Jesus different from ‘the Christ?’

Who or What is Spirituality? Considering Teilhard’s unique grasp of evolution at a universal level, his understanding of how we fit into it, and more importantly, how his ‘Axis of Evolution’ is present in each of us, how does this play out in the concept of ‘spirituality’?

Reinterpreting Christian Teachings   Having offered a ‘reinterpretation’ of the fundamentals of Western religion in the light of Teilhard’s ‘universal evolution’, how can its traditional teachings be understood in a way not tied to traditional religious statements? This segment looks at Sacraments, Morals and Virtues in this light.

Understanding Evolution in the Human Species With Teilhard’s revolutionary understanding of evolution and how religion has attempted to map the terrain of human existence, this section takes a second look at how evolution can be seen to proceed in the human species today, offering several distinct and empirical examples.

Understanding and Managing the Risks of Human Evolution With the clearer understanding of universal evolution and our part in it, this section looks at the ‘downside’: If our evolution, in contrast to the evolution of our nonhuman predecessors, is now dependent on our choices, what are the risks and how can we manage them?

Science and Religion  Long seen as mutually hostile, this section takes a first look at their need for each other as well as the possibility of a productive synergy.

The Cosmic Spark   With Teilhard’s clearer understanding of cosmic evolution and the action of the ‘ground of being’, this section offers a second look at how Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’ is present in all products of evolution, and how understanding its presence in the human person can lead to fuller being.

Pessimism In a second look at what can hold us back from such ‘fuller being’, this section takes a look at how the negativity of pessimism can impede both our personal evolution as well as the evolution of society.

Universal Evolution This second look at Teilhard’s universal concept of evolution shows how his clearer understanding of our place in the universe offers the possibility of not only understanding science and religion as compatible, but discovering the ‘terrain of synergy’ which results when we begin to see ourselves and our universe more holistically.

Happiness With all of the positive aspects of human evolution outlined by Teilhard, human evolution, departing so drastically from the dynamic enjoyed by our evolutionary predecessors, comes with difficulty. This section looks at the idea of human happiness from several perspectives and outlines how science and religion, working from the ‘terrain of synergy’ can offer a path to happiness.

The Next Post

This week we began finalizing the blog, “The Secular Side of God” with an outline of the twenty-two part series in which we looked at universal evolution, and humanity’s part in it, through the eyes of Teilhard de Chardin.

Next week we will begin a summary of each of these topics, beginning with “Understanding Evolution”

October 3 Summing Up Human Happiness

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Today’s Post

For the past nine weeks we have been exploring the phenomenon of ‘human happiness’ from reaction to the ‘pain of convergence’ caused by the facets of our evolution to outlining the eight facets of happiness that occur when we manage to open our lives to it.

This week I’d like to sum up these nine posts.

Why Pain?

We concluded exploration of the preceding subject, the ‘Terrain of Synergy’ by identifying the recognition of such terrain as a step to ‘reconnecting our individual parts to the whole’. Richard Rohr frequently mentions this as a very basic goal of religion, ‘re-ligio’.

The problem arises, however, when such a connection becomes difficult, seemingly impossible, and we are caught up in what is often referred to as ‘existential angst’, pain which is unfocussed and leaves us feeling alienated and lonely. In such a state, ‘better’ is always the enemy of ‘good enough’, “yesterday was the best day of the rest of our life”, and the ability to feel satisfied is denied us.

In addition, we are caught up in the inevitable side effect of human evolution: convergence. With the crowding that we see increasing every day, on our streets, in our schools, in our neighborhoods our personal space increasingly dwindles.   The need for re-connection is countered with the need for isolation.

As Yuri Harari points out, these articulations of our existential angst can be traced to our breaking of the ‘evolutionary covenant’ that ancestors enjoyed in their millions of years on this planet: the evolution of their species proceeded at the same pace as the evolution of their environment. Yuval notes that, distinct from our pre-human ancestors, we have evolved much faster than our skills of accommodation with the environment could develop.

With humans, in contrast to ancestors, our evolution proceeded much faster than that of our environment. To make matters worse, we exacerbated this disconnect by degrading the environment itself.
According to Harari, this has robbed us of the evolutionary balance that our ancestors enjoyed with their environment, and thus opening us up to a future of continued disconnect with not only our environment but to ourselves as well. This ‘evolutionary singularity’, as he sees it, prevents us from experiencing true happiness.

Toward Happiness

We went on to consider this dystopian conclusion in the light of three perspectives on happiness that show a different outcome to our evolution:

  • Happiness from the material perspective

There is much in contemporary society, news, religious lore and scientific theory which address the human experience of ‘happiness’, but as we noted on August 8, very little of it is consistent, and much contradictory. Other than that it is highly subjective, and subject to physiological stimulation, one does not come away with a comprehensive understanding of what it is and how to come by it.

We noted that if Teilhard’s perspective on evolution is applied, and the ‘rise of complexity’ from the big bang to the present is still active, then some optimism in the future can be merited. Therefore, such an insight into the process of evolution is a facet of ‘being happy’. Just ‘belief in the future’ alone contributes to our happiness.  As Patricia Albere, author of “Evolutionary Relationship”, puts it, this long history of rising complexity suggests that we have only to allow ourselves to be “lifted by the evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”. To do this, “we only have to begin to pay attention”.

We noted that Teilhard’s use of this term differs considerably from that of traditional religion, and spent more time on this particular perspective than the other two. Key to this perspective is the ‘terrain of synergy’ in which the insights of science and religion overlap. As we have seen many times in this blog, science and religion have much to offer each other, and the subject of happiness is no exception.

We also noted the insights from John Haught which clearly delineates this terrain from that of traditional religion and science. Such delineation also opens the subject of happiness to understanding it from the perspective of Western religion. This insight provides further articulation to how Albere’s suggestion of ‘paying attention’ can take place.

We ended this segment by proceeding with the process of ‘reinterpretation’ of traditional Christian tenets, first addressed back in May, 2016. Once again, we saw how Teilhard’s ‘principle of evolutionary context’ makes it possible to understand anew how our religious lore can become more relevant to our lives, and hence our continued evolution.

We first looked at how Teilhard’s three ‘vectors’ of universal evolution: ‘forward’, ‘inward’ and ‘upward’, manifested in every step of evolution from the big bang to human persons, can be seen as active in human persons in reinterpreting Paul’s essential actions of ‘faith’, ‘hope’ and ‘love’.

Finally, we continued reinterpreting Paul with his ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ into articulations of eight facets of human life which underlie the dimension of human happiness. While the subject of human happiness might well be a ‘slippery subject’, the nine facets of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control certainly offer a scaffolding for a relationship to life that brings us ‘happiness.

In this search for Harari’s ‘accommodation to evolution’, we have generally taken two approaches to Patricia Albere’s suggestion to ‘pay attention’ so that we can learn to trust evolution, one from Maurice Blondel and the other from John Haught.

From Blondel,

“In the light of evolution, religious tenets can be reinterpreted in terms of human life.”

Then Haught,

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

Therefore we have seen, using Teilhard’s evolutionary hermeneutic, how happiness is not only possible in our species, to a large extent it is both necessary for our continued evolution and the payoff for the finding of our place in it. .

The Next Post

This week we wrapped up our look at the experience of human happiness, tracing it from “The Terrain of Synergy’ to a practical way to relook at our religious lore and reinterpret it in the light of Teilhard’s hermeneutic of cosmic becoming.

Next week we will do another ‘wrapup’, this time of the overall blog, “The Secular Side of God’ over its five year run.

September 26, 2019 – The Dimensions of Happiness

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Today’s Post

Last week we began a final look at happiness by recognizing that in spite of the confusing, often negative and frequently irrelevant nature of our Western religious lore, much can still be found that provides insight into both our personal development and our social welfare.

Over the past several weeks we have looked at the concept and experience of personal happiness from three viewpoints: material, evolutionary and ‘spiritual’. As we have seen, this term, ‘spiritual’, loses its religious connotation when put in the secular evolutionary context of Teilhard de Chardin and seen in the daily posts of Richard Rohr. In this context, spirituality is simply the agency of continued complexity, the sap of the tree of cosmic evolution, as it manifests itself in the branches of our own human and societal evolution.

Last week we looked a little deeper at how Paul’s ‘repacking’ of Jesus’ teaching, while couched in the religious vernacular of the time, can be reinterpreted into secular terms which reflect the presence of the ‘agency of continued complexity’ in our lives. We saw how Teilhard’s essential mapping of the three fundamental ‘vectors’ of cosmic evolution (forward, upward, inward) are succinctly captured in Paul’s ‘Theological Virtues’ of Faith, Hope and Love.

This week we will look into another example of such exploration.

The “Fruit of the Spirit”

As we discussed above, the term ‘spirit’ is used here to refer to that current which rises through cosmic evolution in which all things increase in complexity as they evolve Restating Teilhard’s understanding of ‘spirituality’,

“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.”

   Thus ‘spirituality’ can be seen, as Paul Davies puts it, as the ‘software’ by which the ‘hardware’ of matter increases in complexity over time.

This is the ‘hermeneutic’ which we have used throughout this blog to ‘reinterpret’ the tenets of Western religion as we approach the ‘filtering’ of it in search of how this ‘software’ is at work in our lives.

That said, the ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ is Paul’s term that sums up nine attributes of a person or community living ‘in accord with the Holy Spirit’, which of course in our lexicon is reinterpreted as ‘in accordance with the evolutionary agency of complexification’.  As Paul lists the facets of this ‘fruit’: “..the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”  Among the many attempts to objectively quantify the attributes of a ‘full’ or complete human life, one in which some degree of happiness could be expected, these seem high on the list. From our approach to the concept of human happiness, such completeness is an essential factor.

Love –  We have addressed the attribute of love several times in this blog, contrasting the traditional understanding of it as the emotion by which we are attracted to each other and Teilhard’s insight that it is a manifestation of the universal evolutive energy by which things become more complex, and hence more united over time in such a way to recursively become more complete.  By participating in love we become more complete, more whole, and as we do we increase our capacity for love. Love is the evolutionary ‘glue’ that unites us in such a way that we ascend the spiral of evolution.

Peace –  It is hard to imagine anything more conducive to happiness than peace, which comes from the recognition that our efforts to grow more complete are underwritten by a universal energy which rises unbidden and unearned within us.  From this standpoint, God, as Blondel understood ‘Him’, is on our side. Life, as it is offered to us as a gift, is guaranteed to be open to our strivings, and welcoming to our labors.  As the Ground of Being is uncovered as active in our own personal ground of existence, it is understood more as father than as fate.

Patience – Patience becomes more than long-suffering, teeth gritting endurance necessary for ‘salvation’, but the natural acceptance of what cannot be changed in light of Teilhard’s “.. current to the open sea” on which we are carried when we “…set our sails to the winds of life.” As we have seen, John Haught sets great store on patience as a stance or attitude that we begin to master as anticipation replaces dread as our sense of the future. Recognition of the Cosmic Spark within us, the ‘gifted’ nature of it, and confidence in where it is taking us, can instill in us a patience with the vagaries of life that would have been previously considered to be naive.

Kindness – As an essential building block of both society and personal relationships, kindness is prescribed by nearly every religion as the basis of the ‘Golden Rule’.  Beyond this prescription is the natural emergence of kindness as a recognition that not only are we underpinned by the Cosmic Spark, but others are as well.  Treating others as we would be treated requires us to be aware of how our own Cosmic Spark is the essence of being by which we all participate in Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’.

Goodness –  Goodness, of course, is that tricky concept which underlays all the ‘fruits’ of Paul.  In Paul, as echoed by Teilhard, that which is ‘good’ is simply that which moves us ahead, both as individuals and members of our societies.  If we are to have ‘abundance’ of life, whatever contributes to such abundance is ‘good’.

Faithfulness – As we saw in our look at the Theological Virtues, faith is much more than intellectual and emotional adherence to doctrines or dogmas as criteria for entry into ‘the next life’.  Faith has an ontological character by which we understand ourselves to be caught up in a ‘process’ which lifts us from the past and prepares us for a future that while unknown is nevertheless fully manageable and completely trustworthy.

Gentleness – As a mirror to ‘goodness’, gentleness, once we have become aware of the Cosmic Spark not only in ourselves but in all others, becomes the only authentic way of relating to others.

Self-Control – Self-control acknowledges that while we might be caught up in a process by which we become what it is possible to become, its continuation is dependent upon our ability and willingness to choose.  Being carried by Teilhard’s ‘current’ (‘Patience’, above) still requires us to develop the skills of ‘sail setting’ and ‘wind reading’.  The instinctual stimuli of the reptilian and limbic brains do not dissipate as we grow, but the skill of our neocortex brains to modulate them must be judiciously developed. As we develop the skill of ‘thinking with the whole brain’ (6 July) our responses to the many stimuli of life become more appropriate to a universe which evolves as ‘the elaboration of more eyes in a world in which there is always more to see”.

Thus Paul’s ‘fruits’ aren’t independent. They represent the kaleidoscope of facets of being that emerge when we are ‘in synch’ with the ‘axis of evolution’. As Yuval Harari would have it, they result from our finding a ‘better fit’ into the milieu of human evolution, and overcoming the ‘existential angst’ resulting from our speedy departure from pre-human evolution. (August 1).

The Next Post

This week we took a second look at how traditional Western religious insights in to human life can be extracted from their traditional religious vernacular and understood in a secular context. This week, just as we saw last week, those insights proposed by Paul are easily placed in a secular evolutionary context when seen from the perspective of Teilhard’s evolutionary world view.

This, of course, is another example of Blondel’s approach to religion: in the light of evolution, religious tenets can be reinterpreted in terms of human life. Or, as John Haught puts it

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

   This permits us to move, as John Haught suggests, from the “nonnatural mode of causation” fostered by traditional religion to one which not only is “linked..to the scientific story” but retains traditional religion’s emphasis on the human person (as understood by Thomas Jefferson). This emphasis can, in turn, sharpen the focus with which the human person is treated by traditional science.

Next week we will sum up our exploration of the human attribute of ‘happiness’.

September 19, 2019 – Can Religion Offer a Secular Basis for the Ground of Happiness?

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Today’s Post

Last week we returned to the idea of a ‘Terrain of Synergy’ in our continuing search for the ground of happiness. We looked this time from the perspective of John Haught, who compares and contrasts the legacy religious and scientific ‘Cosmic Stories’, but opens the door for an overlap. In his perspective, what is warranted as we participate in the flow of human evolution, is a spirit of ‘anticipation’: less a hand-wringing, indignant demand for faster progress than a realization of the progress that is being made and a recognition that such progress is in fact underway in our lives as well as our societies.

This week we will begin a search for nuggets of such overlap in our traditional Western religious lore, referred to by Haught as ‘analogy’, to sift its ore for the jewels of insight that it offers.

The Three Virtues Model

In the series of posts ((March, 2018) in which we looked at reinterpreting the concepts of Western theology, we addressed the idea of the ‘Theological Virtues’. Although they were first presented as such by Paul, in Teilhard’s spiral model they can be seen to offer much more relevance.

Just as we addressed the unique quality of the energy of human evolution as ‘spirituality’ in the context of secular phenomenon, we saw these three familiar ‘virtues’ as three ‘stances’ or ‘attitudes’ that we can take as we go about trying to live our lives in cooperation with Teilhard’s “winds of the Earth.”  And in the same way that Teilhard’s model of the convergent spiral can be applied to better understand universal evolution, the so called ‘theological’ virtues can be seen as fitting into this model as a secular guide to applying it to human life

As we have seen, the ‘spiral’ model applies equally throughout the process of universal evolution.  It works at the level of the atom just as it does at the level of the human, and as Teilhard insists, it can be trusted to be active in human evolution as it continues to unfold.

The ‘virtues Model’, however, works uniquely at the level of the human, but is nonetheless an example of how universal processes can be seen to continue to work in the ‘noosphere’.  These three ‘virtues’ are the equivalent of the three universal attributes of the spiral as active in the human person:  unity, response to evolutional energy and the resultant rise in complexity.

The first of the three human components of this converging spiral is ‘Love’, the component of unity.  As we have addressed in many places in this Blog, Teilhard’s assertion that the idea of love must be freed from its popular understanding as a strong emotion and allowed to flower as the energy of evolution which unites its products in ways that increase their complexity and thus completes them.  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.  To Teilhard, love is ‘ontological’: to love is to become.  It is the energy which unites us in such a way as to move us forward on the spiral.

The second component is that of ‘Faith’.   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 might sound religious, let me offer a secular example. Imagine if Newton had not begun his inquiry into the workings of matter with the belief that there was some objective, measurable and most of all ‘intelligible’ force which moved material objects from their static state before he formulated his theory of gravitational attraction. His extrapolation to the belief that nature itself was ‘intelligible’ was an essential step towards the ‘Prinicpia’.

Faith therefore 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’, which encourages us on our journey toward our potential for increased complexity as we move forward 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, based on our understanding of the past.  If our look into the future is pessimistic and without hope, such negativity saps our energy and inhibits our movement up the spiral, toward a future in which we perceive the results of our growth as bleak, the fruit of our love as rejection, and sees us 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.

John Haught’s concept of ‘anticipation’ as the most fruitful ground of belief addresses all three of these ‘virtues’, but Love and Hope resound the clearest. If we are to face the future with ‘anticipation’ we must first have faith that there is something to indeed anticipate and hope that it will live up to our anticipation.

The Next Post

This week we saw how Teilhard’s three ‘vectors’ of evolution: Forward, Inward and Upward, present in every stage of evolution, can be seen to be at work in the human person. Further, we saw how the ‘humanization’ of these three vectors can be seen in Paul’s idea of the “Theological Virtues”. As seen by Paul and stressed by Teilhard, forward, inward and upward manifest themselves in human life as Love, Faith and Hope.

This, of course, is another example of Blondel’s approach to religion: in the light of evolution, religious tenets can be reinterpreted in terms of human life. Or, as John Haught puts it

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

   This permits us to move, as John Haught suggests, from the “nonnatural mode of causation” fostered by traditional religion to one which not only is “linked..to the scientific story” but retains traditional religion’s emphasis on the human person (as understood by Thomas Jefferson). This emphasis can, in turn, soften the vagueness with which the human person is treated by traditional science.

Next week we will continue our search for nuggets of noospheric insight among the teachings of religion.