Category Archives: Science and Religion

October 27 – Relating to God: Part 4- The Steps of Secular Meditation

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Teilhard de Chardin described his journey into himself in which he, without aid of conventional religious thinking, begins to unfold the leaves of his being to find the bud, the kernel, of his person.  While overtones of Christian belief obviously color this description, this week we’ll take a look at some of the steps that he describes for their secular basis.

We will be exploring the idea of secular meditation.

The Steps of Teilhard’s Journey

The poetic nature and religious overtones of Teilhard’s description of his meditation belie the secular nature of the five basic steps he describes:

Step 1: Recognizing the facets of our person

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

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

Step 2: Accepting where we are

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

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

Step 3: Acknowledging our powerlessness

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

This is a difficult step for most of us.  As Teilhard puts it, “My self is given to me far more than it is formed by me.”  Whatever skills I have learned, tactics that I have developed and beliefs that I have forged, I have no control over the basic person I am or the energy of cosmic becoming that flows into me.

Step 4: Accepting powerlessness

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

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

Step 5: Trusting the ground of being

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

                                                      “It is I, be not afraid.”

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

Secular Meditation

There is nothing religious about these five steps.  The assumptions about the nature of the universe (The Framing of the Universe, parts 1-4, 11-23 June) that science and biology assert, once the phenomenon of increasing complexity is added, are all that is necessary to state them.  As these posts discuss, the addition of this phenomenon, while not a specific scientific theory, not only is necessary for inclusion of the human person in the scope of scientific enquiry, it is also necessary for the process of evolution itself.  A universe without increasing complexity would not evolve.

Many readers will note the similarity between these five steps and the very successful “Ten Steps” of Alcoholics Anonymous.  The foundational step of exploring and learning to trust one’s self is at the basis of much of Western thinking.  Psychology, as we will see in the next few posts, can therefore be seen as ‘secular meditation’.

The Next Post

This week we explored Teilhard’s approach to meditation as a skill through which we can make contact with our ‘core of being’, and through this with God, and identified five basic steps which emerge from our general search for the “Secular Side of God”.

Next week we will take a look at how psychology can be seen as a form of “secular meditation”.

Relating to God: Part 3- Connecting

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the recognition of the ‘core of person’, and the realization that such a core was also a manifestation of the ‘immortal spark’ which connects us to the universal agent which ‘sustains and gives life to the entire cosmos’ was introduced during the Axial Age.  While this recognition may well bring us closer to a ‘Secular Understanding of God’, it still does not address how a relationship with such a God is possible.  Today’s post will begin to address this.

 Meditation

All religions include rituals that are intended to put us in touch with the ultimate ground of being, be it the Eastern Brahman or the Western God.  One practice common to most of them is ‘meditation’, the goal of which is both increased awareness of ourselves and of this ultimate life force which lies at our core.

Of course, while each expression may have the same goal of finding ourselves and this core, each brings its unique presuppositions to the practice.  As a result, the word ‘meditation’ often brings with it a presumption of some religious dogma, hence introducing this concept here might be seen as distinctively contrary to our ‘secular’ approach.  As we will see, however, paralleling Richard Dawkins, “the divesting of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries” works equally well for a method for the experience of God as it did for the definition.

We’ll start with the thinking of Teilhard de Chardin, who closely followed Maurice Blondel in understanding God as the ‘ground of being’.  Teilhard described in his book, “The Divine Mileu”, his own experience of meditation which is independent (“divested of the baggage”) of most traditional religious assumptions, and demonstrates a framework for a ‘personal contact’ with God as we are exploring.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                      “It is I, be not afraid.”

In this short but very personal description of the journey into ourselves, Teilhard offers an outline of meditation that is ‘secular’ but addresses the full gamut of a personal relationship to the ‘ground of being’ that we call God.

The Next Post

This week we began to explore the undertaking of the missing piece of our exploration: the connection to God.  Next week we will look into Teilhard’s journey in some detail, and examine it for its secular components

Relating to God: Part 2- Opening the Door

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Today’s Post

Last week we began to think of God as the agent of the universal phenomenon of ‘rising complexity’ as such agent continues the process of evolution through the development of our person, and how the acknowledgement of and cooperation with this fundamental agent is necessary to our growth and fulfillment of our potential.

This week we will beg to address the idea of a relationship to this agent by taking a look at the many approaches that the ancient sages have taken in the search for this universal thread which runs through our lives.

The Search for the ‘Basic Spark’

Last week we saw that if Teilhard’s assertion is true that

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

then our search for God begins with a search for ourselves.  Most of the ancient sages, including Jesus, point to the belief that the most essential core of our being must be uncovered for us to attain our most authentic expression of being.  This isn’t necessarily the ‘happiest’ or ‘most powerful’ state, but rather one in which we are ‘more complete’ and more aware of and able to achieve our full potential as persons.

Karen Armstrong, in her sweeping narrative, “The Great Transformation” identifies several areas of common ground among the six lines of thought in four parts of the world that constituted a new understanding of God and Self in the ‘Axial Age’ (900-200 BCE).  She describes one of the earliest such insights in the Upanishads as:

“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.  This was a discovery of immense importance and it would become a central insight in every major religious tradition.  The ultimate reality was an immanent presence in every single human being.”  (italics mine)

Armstrong saw this emerging realization as

“For the first time, human beings were systematically making themselves aware of the deeper layers of human consciousness.  By disciplined introspection, the sages of the Axial Age were awakening to the vast reaches of selfhood that lay beneath the surface of their minds.  They were becoming fully ‘Self-conscious’.  This was one of the clearest expressions of a fundamental principle of the Axial Age.  Enlightened persons would discover within themselves the means of rising above the world; they would experience transcendence by plumbing the mysteries of their own nature, not simply by taking part in magical rituals.”  (italics mine)

From our perspective as seeing God as the upwelling of complexity in evolution that leads to the ‘person’, we can begin to see how ‘plumbing the mysteries or our own nature’ is a primary means of connecting to the ‘mystery of all nature’.  It opens the door for a secular approach to “Finding God”.

Each of these six lines of thought (Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, Monotheism in Israel and philosophical rationalism in Greece) brought their own practices to this undertaking.  Further, with the seemingly inevitable duality that emerges in each new philosophy (as addressed in 14-Apr What is Religion?  Part 6: Stability Part 2) many different and often contradictory practices emerged even within each of the lines.  Within Christianity, as we saw, the influence of Greek thinking led to seeing God as ‘other’, as opposed to an agent of being and growth at the basis of our person.

So, as it is easy to see, the path towards developing a connection to this inner source of life that is recognized by nearly all religions is not a simple thing.  Finding a way to do so without being bound by the scaffolding and facades which abound in the canons of traditional religion is a very difficult undertaking.

The Next Post

This week we began to address the search for God as an active, immanent agent of our personal life.

But this does not answer the second part of our question: what does it mean to say that we can have a ‘relationship’ with such a God?   Having now seen how we are connected to God by participating in this cosmic upwelling of complexity, next week we will address the undertaking of such a relationship.

Relating to God, Part 1

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Today’s Post

Last week we moved from a working secular definition of God to seeing how this God is manifest in the roots of our personal development, and how these roots are extensions of the upwelling of complexity that underpin cosmic evolution.  This week we will move on to explore how the concept of a ‘personal relationship with God’ emerges naturally from these insights.

Looking For God

Thus far, we have come to a ‘secular’ concept of God without recourse to scripture, dogma or miracles.  While this may well be consistent with Professor Dawkins’ recognition that such a non-supernatural force is indeed at work in the ”raising of the world as we know it into its present complex existence”, it does not address having a personal relationship with such a force.

We can start with Teilhard’s assertion that

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

If Teilhard’s assertion is true, it seems clear that the very act of being a person is the starting point for experiencing such a God.  If the God that we have defined is the essential center of our existence, and this essential center lies along the axis of the unfolding of the universe, it would seem that finding such a transcendent source of ourselves would be very straightforward.  The myriad and oft confusing and contradictory methods offered by the many world religions are evidence that this isn’t necessarily the case.

A case in point can be seen in the many aspects of ‘dualism’ which can be found in our own Western expressions of Christianity.  This was addressed in the post of Nov 26, The Evolution of Religion, Part 7: The Rise of Christianity: The Issue of Concepts:

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

As Sacks points out, this duality tends to move God from the intimacy found in Judaism (and in the teachings of Jesus) to a distance that can only be overcome through the bewildering matrix of rituals of atonement, forgiveness and salvation which have characterized expressions of Christianity.  This point of view, captured in Blondel’s fear that we should regard our relationship with God as ‘we are here and God is there’, sabotages our search for God at the very outset.

Not that Christianity only expresses such distance.  If one takes John at his word, “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”, Blondel’s statement that “It is impossible to say, “I am here and God is there”” makes much more sense.  It acknowledges that the act of God’s creative energy in me is necessary for me to make such a statement.

Blondel, Teilhard, Sacks and the contemporary theologian Richard Rohr all decry how this message of John, a logical conclusion from the teachings of Jesus, is frequently lost in the subsequent evolution of the Greek-influenced Church.  Thomas Jefferson, an early practitioner of Dawkins’ goal of “stripping the baggage” from traditional Christianity, sought to extract the essential morality of Jesus from the webs of duality which grew as Christianity was increasingly influenced by Greek philosophy.

This duality undermines the search for God within.  If we start with the assumption that “We are here and God is there”, the search is hobbled at the start.

All such searches begin with the facades and scaffolding that we inherit from our beginnings, which become frameworks which make it safe for us to act in a world so full of unknown and potentially dangerous consequences of those actions.  They keep us safe in a dangerous world, but like all walls, keep us enclosed at the same time.   To discover our inner reality requires negotiation and selective discarding of these artifacts.

This requires an open mind, and as is universally acknowledged, a mind is a difficult thing to open.

This is not a new problem.  The subject of searching for our inner core has been the subject of religious thought for many centuries.  While the approaches developed by the many religious expressions might be bewildering and often contradictory, there are nonetheless many common aspects.

The Next Post

This week we began to address the search for God as an active agent of our personal life with which we could have a personal relationship.  Next week we will continue this exploration by addressing the universal belief, expressed in nearly all religions, that there is within each of us this extension of the force by which the universe comes to be.

Reinterpreting God- Part 4, Is God a Person?

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Today’s Post

Last week we addressed the phenomenon of ‘personization’ in evolution, recognizing that the evolution of the person is a natural outcome of the increase in complexity that can be seen in, and indeed is necessary to,  the unfolding of evolution.

This week we will continue this topic of personization in light of our working definition of God:

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

Personization and God

Although we began our inquiry on God with a statement from Richard Dawkins, he doesn’t go too much further before he states the basis of his belief that such a God as we posit here cannot possibly be reconciled with traditional religion.  He quotes 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.”

Of course, Sagan is right.  Once we limit the laws governing evolution to those found in the Standard Model of Physics and Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection, both Sagan and Dawkins are spot on.  However neither of them acknowledge that limiting evolution to those influences found in Physics and Biology prohibit the fact of evolution at all.  It is only through inclusion of the agent of increasing complexity that the forces identified by Physics and Biology begin to account for the observed phenomenon of evolution.  As we have pointed out previously, a universe without complexification would not evolve.

However, Dawkins is correct in one respect: the definition we are considering and the six characteristics of our outline in the post of July 21, as stated, do not yet point to a God suitable for our personal relationship.  It is indeed ‘emotionally unsatisfying’.  To find this missing piece we must return to the characteristic of personness.

From the point of view that we have presented thus far, God is not understood as a person, but as the ground of person-ness.  Just as the forces of gravity and biology in the theories of Physics and Evolution address the principles of matter and life, the additional 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

“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.”

So, 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 which 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.

This unique human capability of being aware of the energy of the unfolding of the cosmos as it courses through our person, empowering our growth and assuring our potential for maturity, is neither earned nor deserved.  It has the same ‘gratuitous’ nature as gravity and electromagnetism: it is woven into our warp and woof.  We can neither summon nor deny it.  Our only appropriate response to it is to recognize it and explore the appropriate response to it.

Teilhard commented both on our cosmic connection and our cooperation with it:

  “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 born by a current towards the open seas.”

So, Is God A Person?

We have seen how Teilhard understands the concept of ‘person’ from both the concept of God as evident in the agent of complexity and the concept of the human person as an evolutionary product.

But to answer the question, “Is God a person?”, we return to Maurice Blondel.   As part of his objective to reinterpret Western theology, he posits that:

“Every sentence about God can be translated into a declaration about human life.”

Resonating with Teilhard, Gregory Baum paraphrases Blondel:

“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.”

The Next Post

This week we have seen how our working definition of God, while totally consistent with of Dawkins, is still open to the concept of God found in traditional Western theology, once it has been ‘stripped of its baggage’.  We have also seen how the element of ‘person’ is not compromised by our working definition once the potential for increasing complexity is understood as manifesting itself in the process of personness.

But this does not answer the second part of our question: what does it mean to say that we can have a ‘relationship’ with such a God?   Having seen how we are connected to God by participating in this cosmic upwelling of complexity, next week we will address how such a relationship can be achieved.

Reinterpreting God- Part 3, God and the Phenomenon of Person

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Today’s Post

Last week we addressed the uniquely Western concept of ‘the person’, and asked the question: “Given the perspective of Teilhard and science in general, how can the phenomenon of ‘person’ as understood in the West be brought into resonance with our working definition of God?”:

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

Is God a ‘person’?

This week we will address this question.

The Process of ‘Personization’

In Teilhard’s understanding of evolution, the ‘person’ is a product of evolution which emerges as an effect of increasing complexity over long periods of time.   If we are to understand God in terms of the definition proposed above, where does the characteristic of ‘person’ come in?

To Teilhard, the phenomenon of ‘complexification’ (increasing complexity over time) is essential to the cosmic upwelling that we refer to as ‘evolution’.  Once the agent of complexity is added to the scientific canon of forces as found in the Standard Model of Physics and Biology’s theory of Natural Selection not only does evolution as we know it become possible but this increase in complexity can be seen to lead to the advent of ‘personness’ as found in the human.

As any educated atheist would point out, isn’t this teleology?  In teleology, one reasons from an endpoint (the existence of humans) to the startpoint.  In teleology, for example, creation exists for the purpose of making humans.  Teleology therefore seeks to rationalize history in terms of what has emerged.  Teleology is frequently used by fundamental Christianity, which sees God as intending man as the goal of his creation.  This accusation was discussed in the post of April 15, 2015 “Looking at Evolution, Part 7: Natural Selection in the Human Person”. 

This post noted the statement by Stephen Jay Gould, noted atheistic anthropologist, who asserted that “rewinding the tape of evolution” would not necessarily result in the emergence of the human.  He believed that the many accidents which have occurred in history, such as asteroid impacts which, by effectively wiping out entire species, cleared the way for the rise of mammals.  He suggests that other, different, accidents would have had different outcomes, which would not have necessarily led to the emergence of humans.

We saw how Gould’s statement nonetheless reflects his belief that evolution would still have proceeded through any combination of such disasters, and would therefore have continued to produce new and advanced species, just not necessarily mammals.  It does not take into account that such continuation of life would have also have required a continuing rise of complexity in order to proceed.  Therefore, conditions permitting, evolution would still have had the potential to produce an entity of sufficient complexity to have been aware of its consciousness.

A different play of the tape of evolution which does not produce a human person is only part of the picture.  Recognizing that the creature which would have inevitably emerged could have been one endowed with some sort of ‘neurology’ which permitted consciousness is the other part.  This potential for ‘rising complexity’ to eventually lead to consciousness is a phenomenon of the universe itself.  While entities recognizable as ‘human persons’ may not be evolving elsewhere in the universe, the probability of the appearance of entities aware of their awareness is not insignificant.

Teilhard, therefore, sees the agent of complexity at work everywhere in the cosmos, and given the appropriate conditions, will raise its constituent matter to higher levels of awareness:

 “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)

Evolution, therefore, requires complexification, which results in personization.

So if God is to be understood as the ‘sum total of all forces’ (as proposed in our working definition), and the essential force is understood as that of ‘complexification’, then, among all the other forces (gravity, electromagnetism, chemistry), God can be seen in the force of ‘personization’.

The Process of ‘Personization’

So, from this perspective we can see that the human person emerges from evolution not in a single discontinuous step, but instead from a slow accretion of characteristics layered one upon another over a long period of time.  Cells evolve from single-cell to multiple-cell, adding sensory and mobility characteristics which communicate with increasingly complex centers of activity via increasingly complex neural circuits.  There is not a single step in this long line of development that does not proceed from a less-complex precursor.

There are two seeming discontinuities in this process.  The first is seen in the appearance of the cell itself.  At one instance in the evolution of our world, it is swimming in a primordial soup of very complex molecules.  At the next, many of these molecules are functional parts of an enclosed and centered entity, the cell.  As Teilhard notes:

“For the world to advance in duration is to progress in psychical concentration.  The continuity of evolution is expressed in a movement of this kind.  But in the course of this same continuity, discontinuities can and indeed must occur.  For no psychical entity can, to our knowledge, grow indefinitely; always at a given moment it meets one of those critical points at which it changes state.”

The advent of the cell is such a ‘change of state’ in which increasing complexity results in something totally different from its predecessor, but still composed of the same basic elements.

The ‘person’ is the second example of such ‘change of state’.  Materialists argue that the differences between humans and their non-human ancestors are too small to be of significance, denying any uniqueness to the human person.  This is true at the levels of morphology and supported by the evidence of DNA. It is just as true that human persons, through their unique ‘awareness of their consciousness’, are clearly separate from the higher mammals.  They represent the same significant type of ‘change of state’ as seen in the advent of the cell.

Therefore, while human persons are clearly a ‘product of evolution’, their level of complexity has increased from ‘consciousness’ to ‘awareness of consciousness’.

The Next Post

This, of course, does not answer the question “Is God a person?”, much less address the issue of a human-God relationship.

Next week we will address this side of the question of personness, and explore how the concept of God as an agent of ‘personization’ can be extended to that of a force of evolution with which we can have a relationship.

Reinterpreting God- Part 1, A Starting Place

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Today’s Post

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

Where to Start?

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) (”The Evolution of Religion, Parts 1-10,  Sept 3, 2015 to Jan 7, 2016), 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.

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 simple basis for a ‘self-bootstrapping crane’ which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence.”

Here we find an excellent outline of the nature of the ‘fundamental principle of existence’:

–           It must be the first cause of everything

–          It must work within natural processes

–          It must be an active agent (“a ‘self-bootstrapping crane’ ”) 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 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, he fails to grasp how acknowledging the existence of a “first cause” which raises everything to its current state is indeed at the core of all religion and offers an excellent place to begin this reconciliation.  Our process for this ‘reconciliation’ is of course that of ‘reinterpretation’.

For an example of such reinterpretation, in our preliminary outline above we find a reflection of Pope John Paul II’s statement on science’s relation to religion:

“Science can purify religion from error and superstition.”

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

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

But What About the Baggage?

Both John Paul II and Richard Dawkins recognize that Christianity has developed a complex set of statements about God.  How is it possible to put these statements into a context which is consistent with the simple outline offered above: to ‘divest them of their baggage’?  This is the objective of this last section of the blog.

The way to go about it?  We will use those ‘principles of reinterpretation’ which we identified in the last two posts to ‘divest the baggage’ in which the traditional statements about God are frequently wrapped.

A Preliminary Definition of God

To start this process, I offer a simple working definition of God:

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

The question could be asked, “But isn’t this just Deism?’  We addressed this question in the posts, “But Isn’t This Just Deism?”-  6-20 August, 2015”, and noted the differences between our definition and that of Deism.  In summary, the Deists, most notably represented by Thomas Jefferson, conceived of a ‘ground of being’ which was responsible for everything which could be seen at that time.  In their minds, in order to strip “the baggage” from the religious expressions of their time, God had to be understood as a designer and builder of the world, but once having built it, retired from the project.  Theirs was a static world and in no need of continued divine involvement.  As they saw it, Man, given his intelligence by God, was capable of operating the world independently from its creator.

The Deists were off to a good start, but without the grasp of the cosmos and its underlying process of evolution that we have today, they were unable to conceive of a continuing agent of an evolution which continually manifests itself in increasing complexity.  Their static world postulated either an uninvolved God or (as they saw traditional religion’s belief) a God continually tinkering with his creation.

The Next Post

Next week we will begin to examine conventional conceptions of God, starting with that of ‘person’.

Reinterpretation, Part 3 – Reinterpretation Principles, Part 2

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a relook at the insights of Teilhard de Chardin, extracting seven principles which we will employ as we move on to reinterpreting religious teaching for their relevance to human life.  This week we will look at principles from other sources.

The Reinterpretation Principles from Maurice Blondel

As we discussed in the post of May 26, In his book, Man Becoming, Gregory Baum describes the work of Maurice Blondel in reinterpreting the traditional teachings of Christianity.  In summary, Blondel saw the Catholic Church’s approach to theology as becoming less and less relevant to human life.  Blondel was one of the first Catholic theologians to call for ‘reinterpreting’ church teachings, and in doing so proposed several ‘Priniciples of Reinterpretation’.  Some of these are:

–          Since we cannot know ‘God as He is apart from man’, we must understand that each statement that we make about God carries with it an implied assumption about humans and the reality in which they live.  By seeking that implied assumption, we can reinterpret a teaching in terms of our lives.

The Principle:  “‘Every sentence about God can be translated into a declaration about human life”

–          As Teilhard was later to expand upon, the energies of evolution which have effected ‘Man’s Becoming’ continue to be active in his continued personal evolution.  The onset of complexity that began in the ‘Big Bang’ continues to be present in human life and manifests itself in our potential for increased understanding and becoming.  Most religious teachings seek to put us in touch with this current of energy by which we grow.

The Principle:  “There is no standpoint from which a human person can say, “I am here and God is there”.  The presence of God is an essential agent in his saying of it”.

The Principle:  “(Religious teaching) is not a message added to our life from without; it is rather the clarification and specification of the transcendent mystery of humanization that is fundamentally operative in our life.”

–          Any teaching must be relevant to be able to have an effect on our lives.

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

The Principle: “Man cannot accept an idea as true unless it corresponds in some way to a question present in his mind”

–          Our response to reality is a factor in our personal growth

The Principle: “A person is not a determined being, defined as it were by its nature.  A person comes to be, in part at least, through his own responses to reality.”

Reinterpretation Principles From Karen Armstrong

–          In keeping with Blondel’s insistence on elements of value in religious teaching, Karen Armstrong also offers a principle for reinterpretation

The Principle:  “Instead of jettisoning religious doctrines, we should look for their spiritual kernel.  A religious teaching is never simply a statement of objective fact: it is a program for action.”

–          Echoing both Teilhard and Blondel, she addresses attempts to make sense of God on human terms, which can introduce anthromorphism into the concept of God.  She agrees with the Eastern approach to understanding God differently.

 The Principle:  “It was unhelpful to be dogmatic about a transcendence that was essentially undefinable”

Reinterpretation Principle From Jonathan Sacks

–          All religions contain dualisms that undermine their ability to map the road to human growth.

The Principle:  “Any teaching that departs from the underlying unity of the universe will be detrimental to successful application to human life”

Reinterpretation Principle from Richard Rohr

–          Good religion always acts as a unifying principle in our lives

The Principle:  “Whatever reconnects (re-religio) our parts to the Whole is an experience of God, whether we call it that or not.”

An Overarching Principle

–          And finally, a principle which is echoed by each of these thinkers:

The Principle:  ”The underlying truth of a teaching, and the key to its relevancy, can be found in its power to bring opposing points of view into a cohesive whole”

The Next Post

This week we completed our collection of ‘principles of interpretation’, eighteen principles that we will use in the final section of this blog as we examine the precepts, concepts and teachings of Western religion for their relevancy to human life.  It should be noted that in keeping with the subject of this blog, “The Secular Side of God”, these principles are not derived from traditional religious thought.  They are general principles, secular in nature, which can be applied to religious thought.

Next week we will begin our inquiry by addressing the basic cornerstone of all religions, the fundamental ground of being which underlays the universe: God.

Reinterpretation, Part 3 – Reinterpretation Principles, Part 1

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Today’s Post

Last week we addressed the need to reinterpret our traditional beliefs and identified the need for guidelines, ‘principles’ which can be applied as we begin this journey.

The Teilhardian Approach

The insights of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin have provided a basis for our search for “The Secular Side of God”.  Teilhard’s unique approach to the nature of reality provides insights into the fundamental energies which are at work in the evolution of the universe and hence are at work in the continuation of evolution through the human person.  His insights compromise neither the theories of Physics in the play of elemental matter following the ‘Big Bang” nor the essential theory of Natural Selection in the increasing complexity of living things, but rather brings them together in a single, coherent process.

While expanding and integrating these two powerful explanations of nature into a single vision, his was one of the first to include the undeniable phenomenon of ‘reflective thought’, the ‘knowledge of consciousness’ which makes the human person both unique in the biological kingdom and yet rooted in the cosmic scope of evolution.  This uniqueness, unfortunately, has been often addressed by science as an ‘epi-phenomenon’ or just as a pure accident.  Teilhard instead places it firmly on the ‘axis of evolution’, that of increasing complexity, thus affording us a lens for seeing ourselves as a natural and essential product of evolution.  Understanding evolution, therefore, is an essential step toward understanding the human person, how we fit into the universe, and how we should react to it if we would maximize our human potential.

Principles of Reinterpretation

Teilhard’s unique approach to evolution is addressed in more detail in the eight posts, “Looking at Evolution” January-April 2015”.  His approach offers a basis for principles which will be valuable in our search for reinterpretation and relevance of traditional religious thought:

–          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

–          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 added to 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 that we become more human.

The Principle:  Just as atoms unite to become molecules, and cells to become neural system, so do our personal connections enhance our personal growth

–       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:

  • Reptilian: Basic instinctual life sustaining functions: breathing, vascular management, flight/fright reaction
  • Limbic: Appearance of instinctive emotional functions necessary for the longer gestation and maturation of mammals
  • Neo-Cortex: Appearance of the potential for mental processes independent of the stimuli of the ‘lower’ brains.

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 this skill.

–          “We must first understand, and then we must act”.  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 Teilhard puts it,

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

Or, As Richard Rohr puts it, “Our lives must be grounded in awareness of the patterns of the universe.”

The Principle:  Authentic religion helps us to be aware of and cooperate with the creative energies which effect the universal phenomenon of evolution

Richard Rohr sees our growth as human persons as taking place in a series of Order > Disorder > Reorder. As he sees it, “Most conservatives get trapped in the first step and most liberals get stuck in the second”. His insight is that healthy religion is all about helping us get to the third, ‘Reorder’.  In this third stage we begin to demand that teachings must be both relevant and capable of helping us find the basic human threads of growth, the

 “ tides in the affairs of men, which, when taken, lead us to new life, but when omitted, all our voyage is bound in shallows and miseries” (apologies to Shakespeare)..

The Next Post

This week we looked at principles of reinterpretation that were derived from Teilhard’s insights.  Next week we will consider other principles that we will employ as we examine religious teachings for their relevance to human life.

Reinterpretation, Part 2 – What’s Involved?

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Today’s Post

Last week we identified the need for relevancy as the driver for reinterpretation.  With that recognized, how do we go about it?  This week we will take a look at some strategies for reinterpreting long-held beliefs.

The Process of Reinterpreting

From the earliest days of human thought, man has attempted to understand the workings of his environment, to make sense of it, to put it in a context from which he could better react or relate to it, or control it to his satisfaction.  The whole of human history, from both scientific and religion viewpoints, contains a record of such activities.  Human artifacts such as legal and moral codes document our attempts (in Teilhard’s words) to “articulate the noosphere”.

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

Robert Irwin, artist, suggests four stages in this journey:

 –  First there’s the recognition that things don’t quite work using the old insights

– That’s followed by the stripping of conventional mental artifacts, the ways that we’ve become used to in dealing with our world

  – Then there’s the finding of the ‘core’, the basis, the essence of things,

 –  And finally there’s the replacement of the discarded mental artifacts with new, more appropriate ones

With religion, according to Blondel, the stripping consists of throwing out all the mythological, superstitious, anthropomorphic and emotional statements of belief.   The resulting perspective simply sees God as the ‘core’, the “ground of being”, as that which underlies everything as it comes to be.   In Blondel’s process, this leads to new artifacts: statements which are made from the perspective which comes from our understanding that we are part of this ‘coming to be’:  we are not static, we are  ‘becoming’.

Teilhard adds to this approach by seeing the essential act of ‘becoming’ as the result of increasing complexity over time, as we discussed in the post of 30 April 2015,  Summing Up: Human Evolution – Basic Teilhard Insights.  His insight provides the single thread which ties the three eras of evolution (pre-life, life, conscious life) together, and which is the key explaining how humans ‘naturally’ emerge from it.

So, while Irwin may have been focusing on art, there is considerable universality in his vision.  His four step process reflects Teilhard’s ‘centration’ and ‘excentration’ dialogue (the essence of human maturation).  In this maturation process, we must constantly address those things which don’t work under our previously acquired worldview, strip out those perspectives, find a better vantage point, and build new constructs.  The essence of our relationships – all which require degrees of love – constantly work to effect the first step, support us in the second and third, and reward us in the fourth.

The Principles of Reinterpretation

So, if we can agree on the process, what about the guidelines?  What guidelines can we use when we go about ‘stripping our conventional artifacts’?  What principles do we employ when we take on the very difficult job of attempting an objective perspective on our inner prejudices and attitudes?  As mentioned in the last post, many of these perspectives are so fundamental as to be nearly instinctual.  We didn’t develop them consciously: they came with the subconscious acceptance of the beliefs and practices of parents, teachers and society in general during our formative years.

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

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

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

The Next Post

This week we have addressed the process of reinterpretation and identified the need for guidelines, ‘principles’ which can be applied as we search traditional statements of religion for their ‘cores’.  Next week we will offer a set of such principles, as extracted from our first three segments.