Today’s Post

Last week we addressed how the actions of the neocortex brain have played out in the invention and evolution of moral communities that extend the cohesiveness of natural communities (such as families) to the level of society at large, enabling the continuing maturation of civilization.

However, even the most casual read of current events shows that such evolution still has a long way to go.  My suggestion that the key aspect of human evolution can be found in the moderating actions of the neocortex brain must be offset with the observation that such actions can work in the opposite direction.  The reasoning power of the human brain is a two-edged sword.

This week’s post will address this other side of the coin.

Religion and Stability?

With all the turmoil in the middle-East, a very common perspective is that the West is ‘at war’ with the religion of Islam.  Add to this the incivility that exists among the many expressions of Christianity, especially as can be seen in this year’s political tumult, and there is a common opinion that religion itself is a perpetual source of conflict within society.

The ‘New Atheists’, represented by such authors as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, are convinced that the future of human evolution requires that the metaphors, mythology and other ‘right brained’, ‘non-scientific’ beliefs of traditional religion become replaced by ‘left brain’, empirical facts which are scientifically and objectively verifiable.  In this way, according to their thinking, the ‘core of violence’ represented by religion can be overcome and the full potential for a mature society can be realized.

While Jonathan Sacks, as summarized last week, points out the unifying and stabilizing aspects of religion in history, he is quick to point out those aspects which work against such noble goals.  While it is clear that humans possess the power to moderate the instinctual stimuli of the lower brains, they also have the capability of using their powers of reason to reinforce such stimuli.

Dualism, Evil and Altruistic Evil

Last week we saw how the influence of religion permitted a bridge between the reciprocal altruism so necessary for the stability of the ‘natural group’ and the trust of strangers so necessary to the stability of the ‘moral group’ which comprises society at large.

Constantly in opposition to this bridge, however, is the dualism that also occurs in this dichotomy between the natural group and the moral group.  ‘We’ are natural members of the natural group, in comfortable relation with our lower brains, but it takes the actions of the neocortex brain in concert with the evolving standards of the culture of our moral group to effect the stability required by civilization.

We are never free of the tendency to see ourselves as ‘we’ and others as ‘they’.  The difficulty of breaking out of this dualism speaks to the concept of ‘evil’ in our lives, and reflects the many aspects of dualism in our ancient beliefs.  Zoroastrianism, for example, saw the universe in perpetual struggle between the god of light and the god of darkness.  Many Greek pantheons reflect this dichotomy, and dualism has even been reflected in the Christian dichotomies of body/soul, this life/the next, God/Satan and perfection/corruption.

While, as Sacks observes, our need for identity and formation of groups may indeed lead to conflict and war, the phenomenon of dualism leads to a deeper level of violence:

“Violence may be possible whenever there is an Us and a Them.  But radical violence emerges only when we see the Us as all-good and the Them as all evil.  That is when altruistic evil is born.”

To get to ‘altruistic evil’, Sacks sees three steps:

• The ‘other’ must be dehumanized and demonized
• ‘We” must see ourselves as victims
• Once the ‘other’ has been demonized and we see ourselves as victims, we can then move on to seeing commission of evil as necessary and justified.

Once the first two steps have been negotiated, the neocortex can finally begin the process of rationalizing the act of evil.  As opposed to being a thoughtful moderation of the instinctual impulses of the reptilian and limbic brains, it has now been co-opted into reinforcing them.

Such reinforcement can actually be pleasurable.  The development of a moral sense in which the neocortex is consistently engaged in the modulation of the stimuli of the lower brains is a learned activity.  The lower brains introduce stimuli (fear, flight/fight) much quicker than the neocortex brain can respond, requiring the discipline of ‘counting to three’ before reacting.  Further, this modulating activity requires an effort.  Being able to rationalize the immediate reaction to the basic stimuli is to ‘remove the leash’, to remove the restrictive step of having to ‘think about the reaction’.

Studies have shown that one of the many efforts necessary to return military combatants to ‘normal’ society involves the reinstatement of this ‘leash’ and the consequent loss of the sense of freedom that came with its absence.

Religion and Duality

Thus, while religion can act as an agent of stabilization in society, bridging the gap between ‘natural’ and ‘moral’ communities by way of learned application of thought to instinct, the human brain is capable of doing the opposite: using thought to reinforce instinct.

The three monotheistic religions insist on a single, personal force at the basis of reality from which all things flow.   By its basic nature, as seeing all things as springing from a single, good source, this belief works against Sacks’ three steps to altruistic evil.  However, even the most casual readings of the three holy books of these religions show traces of the dualism that underlies the three steps.  The observations of the ‘New Atheists’ are not without insight. This speaks powerfully of the underlying ability of the lower brains to affect our lives at the personal and cultural level.

It also reinforces Teilhard’s insights into how human evolution must continue along the ‘axis of complexity’, which in the human is seen as ‘the axis of love’.  In his mind

“The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

The Next Post

Next week I would like to begin wrapping up this segment of the blog with a summary of the first two segments:

October 2014 to May, 2015: Evolution

June 2015 to August, 2015: Science

The post after next will summarize this segment:

September, 2015 to March, 2016: Religion

Today’s Post

Thus far we have explored a secular definition of religion, seeing it as

– a way of making sense of things
– a locus for our evolved understanding
– a basis for our acting
– a context for our sense of belonging
– a signpost to transcendence.

While all these aspects of religion contribute to our ongoing evolution as a species and as individual persons, one last venue of activity remains to be addressed, and that is the influence of religion on stabilizing society.

The Neocortex Brain Influence on Human Behavior

All human activities must fall along a fine line between anarchy and monarchy if society is to be stabilized.  We must have enough autonomy to be free to grow and produce, but not so much that our oft-human tendencies toward violence and disruption undermine our personal and cultural edifices.

I have proposed that the key activity of human evolution can be found in the mediating influence of the neocortex brain on the more primitive stimuli of the reptilian (aggression) and limbic (emotion) brains.  At some primitive level, these stimuli are critical to our survival, but they play a lesser role as human society becomes more evolved.

Nothing is more natural to us than the spurt of irritation which can result from social interactions.  As our society becomes more crowded, and the pace of life more hectic and chaotic, our instinctive reaction to the many interactions necessary to conduct our affairs becomes less trustworthy.  That’s where the neocortex can step in.

“Have I really been insulted, impugned, threatened?”  “Is anger the best response?”  “What outcome do I really want from this interaction?”  Holding off an instinctive negative reaction until the neocortex can deal with it is a universally acknowledged sign of maturity.  Using the powers of the neocortex brain to develop and codify cohesive standards of behavior is a universally acknowledged sign of stability in any society

Most of such universal standards of behavior have come about over long periods of cultural evolution captured in and transmitted through religious beliefs and practices.

Survival and Civilization

With insects and lower animals, the individual is lost without the society.  As consciousness raises in the mammals, the uniqueness of the individual also increases, bursting into the issues of belonging, becoming and trusting as played out in human society.  The many mechanisms of civilization are indeed necessary for our survival, but how are they themselves to be managed.?

Religion and Civilization

Robin Dunbar, evolutionary biologist, finds a correlation among species between brain size and the average size of ‘natural’ groups.  Based on this he finds that the optimum human group size to be about 150 persons.  He sees this metric borne out in the first historical stirrings of human groups, in the family, the tribe, the village and the clan.

At these smallest levels, the actions of belonging, becoming and trusting are easier to manage.  As it becomes more necessary for these small groups to federate into a larger state, the problem of ‘cohesion vs aggression’ begins to rise.

As Jonathan Sacks points out in his book, “Not in God’s Name”, the key to belonging to a group is the aspect of common identity.  This common identity assures the ‘reciprocal altruism’ necessary for competition for resources, group defense and the sustainment of culture required to assure that knowledge and wisdom are passed from generation to generation.

On the negative side, it also assures an element of duality in group thinking.  “Common identity” also fosters a sense of ‘we’ in ‘our’ group, against the sense of ‘the others’ in ‘their’ groups.  The ‘reciprocal altruism’ which underpins the cohesiveness of ‘our’ group is not matched by a natural sense of altruism with the ‘other’ groups.  As Sacks points out:

“Reciprocal altruism creates trust between neighbors, people who meet repeatedly and know about one another’s character.  The birth of the city posed a different and much greater problem: how do you establish trust between strangers?”

Sacks sees this as a pivotal point in history:  “The point at which culture took over from nature and religion was born”.  In this light, religion can now be seen as a basis for organized social structure:

“Regardless of whether we regard religion as true or false, it clearly has adaptive value because it appeared at the dawn of civilization and has been a central feature of almost every society since.”

By ‘sanctifying the social order’, Sacks finds that “the early religions created moral communities, thus solving the problem of trust between strangers.”  Religion at its base bridges the gap between the altruism practiced in natural groups and the behavior so essential to the interactions among such groups.  As Sacks asserts:

“Religion enters the equation only because it is the most powerful force ever devised for the creation and maintenance of large-scale groups by solving the problem of trust between strangers.”

Next Week’s Post

Today we have seen how the actions of the neocortex brain have played out in the invention and evolution of moral communities that extend the cohesiveness of natural communities to the level of society at large, enabling the continuing evolution of civilization.

That said, however, the dark side of such activity needs to be addressed.  Even the most cursory look at today’s headlines shows the many dimensions of incivility at work in the world today, in which the stability of civilization itself is threatened, and with which religion plays a part.  Next week’s post will address this.

Today’s Post

In the last three posts, we have taken a look at religion from three perspectives: as a way of making sense of things, as manifestation of human evolution, and as a basis for action.  Today I’d like to address another perspective: as a basis for ‘belonging’.

Finding Our Roots

A perennial fascination in human culture is the desire to understand our family tree, the roots from which we have sprung.  With the benumbing amount of data that increases every day, the tracing of our ancestry becomes ever more feasible, and more people are availing themselves of an increasing amount of tools and services which can help them do so.

We only have to go back a few generations before the difficulty of such activity becomes almost insurmountable.  For a very long time the understanding of lineage was possible only for the rich and noble, whose family lines were captured in such tangible and enduring things as paintings, sculptures and legal documents.  If we go back a few hundred more years, only those rulers and demi-gods whose legacy was written in stone are known to us.

The advances of science have offered new tools for such research.  It is now possible to subscribe to services which will analyze our genetic makeup, our DNA, to offer probable identification of the many threads of lineage which lead to us.  While we are limited in tracing our ancestry at the level of individual predecessors, it is nonetheless possible to determine such things as racial and national stock in helping us to determine our roots.

Putting Us In Context

Why this urge to understand where we come from?  Certainly, most of us come from a family in which our sense of ourselves is nurtured, and from which we get much of our self-image.  Most of us go on to establish deep relationships, from which spring our own families, and in this process our sense of self continues to evolve.  With all this, however, the longing for ‘more’ never ceases, and each link that we make to our past has the potential to add a small sense of ‘belonging’.

Carl Rogers, in his landmark book, “On Becoming a Person” addresses this phenomenon of the evolving human person.  In his extensive experience, he finds the human person’s capacity for maturity and growth to be assured:

“Gradually my experience has forced me to conclude that the individual has within himself the capacity and the tendency, latent if not evident, to move forward to maturity.  Each human has a tendency to reorganize his personality and his relationship to life in ways which are regarded as more mature.  Whether one calls it a growth tendency, a drive toward self-actualization, or a forward-moving directional tendency, it is the mainspring of life.”

He goes on to note that while this potential exists, to actualize it requires the overcoming of many barriers:

“This is a difficult concept to accept. … Christian tradition has permeated our culture with the concept that man is basically sinful, and only by something approaching a miracle can his sinful nature be negated.  In psychology, Freud and his followers have presented convincing arguments 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.”

And, as Richard Rohr notes, the negative content often seen in Christian theology:

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

According to Rogers, the increasing sense of alienation that we experience in our fast-moving society also contributes to the many barriers to personal growth.  As a result, we long for the sense of ‘belonging’ or ‘fitting into’  reality that we had when we were children.

Religion and the Sense of Belonging

At the most superficial level, religions, like many other social structures, offer a sense of belonging.  As Rogers notes above, however, it is not unusual to find religious thinking which not only does not nourish personal growth, it offers a ‘sense of belonging’ that requires denial of the potential of personal growth.  A review of the many doctrinal statements of western religion reveals much diversity, even contradictions, in the interpretation of scripture and practices of belief when it comes to understanding the human person and how he fits into reality.

In the final segment of this blog we will address such statements and practices to plumb their potential as a resource to human personal growth.  We’ll address one such statement here, which comes from the Gospel of John:

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

Thousands of interpretations and commentaries have been offered on this statement, but a simple interpretation, in line with the human need to ‘belong’ as one of the conditions of maturity, comes from two assumptions that that are embedded in this statement:

• First, whatever or whoever the human person consists of is deeply connected to whatever or whoever the ground of being consists of.  Whatever our ‘feelings’ of belonging and the ‘potential’ for our growth, we are deeply connected to the source of our being.
• Second, the deepest and most profound manifestation of this connection is found in the energy of love.

Another statement which speaks to our ‘belonging’ is that ‘God is Father’.  Maurice Blondel proposes a ‘principle of reinterpretation’ that seeks to interpret ‘statements about the divine’ in terms of ‘statements about human persons’.  He respins this basic Christian statement as:

“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”

Good religion, as Richard Rohr notes, “reconnects (‘re-religio’) us to what is ultimately real”.  Further, Teilhard identifies the human person as the latest product of evolution, and we are connected to each other by the most recent manifestation of the energy of evolution (love).

These two examples illustrate how religious statements can be reinterpreted into statements about reality which address our person, our deepest relationships and the growth by which both mature.

Through such reintepretations we can begin to understand ourselves as not only connected, but deeply ‘belonging’ to the grand sweep of ‘becoming’ manifested in the evolution of the universe, an evolution which yields to our longings if we but understand how to cooperate with it.  As Teilhard sees it:

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

The Next Post

The next post will provide a fifth and final approach to defining religion, that of “transcendence”.

Today’s Post

Having seen Teilhard’s unique insights into evolution and how it proceeds in the human person and his society, this week we will take a look at how these insights apply to the phenomenon of religion.

The Evolution of Religion

Teilhard’s approach to picturing evolution illustrates the evolutionary nature of belief.  Religion, like any other form of human activity, evolves.  Threads and streams of thinking branch off into new thinking, just as can be seen in the arms and branches of the biological tree of life.  However, as discussed last week, in human evolution these branches are not doomed to remain disconnected from each other.  As we have seen in the entwining of Greek and Jewish thinking which result in the new Christian stream, in human evolution each branch has the potential for reconnection.   In this particular mapping of modes of thought, we have also seen the double result of increased use of the neocortex brain:

Increase in the skill of using the left brain modes of understanding

Increase in the skill of thinking with the modes of both the left and right modes

The Evolutionary Perspective on the History of Religion

As we have seen here, an equally important measure of human evolution (in addition to the increasing skill of using the neocortex to modulate the stimuli of the ‘lower brains’) can be seen not only in the increase of right and left brain thinking but the use of them in balance.  For several thousand years, the religions of the world showed a preponderance of domination by right brain modes of thinking.  The skill of using the left brain increased more slowly, bursting into florescence with the flowering of Greek philosophy and science in about 500 BCE.

The convergence between Jewish thinking and Greek thinking in the new Christian religion in the early first century AD resulted in the first recorded synthesis between the two modes.   The right-brained thinking of the Jews began to be supplemented by that of Greek left brained thinking. We have followed Jonathan Sacks as he traced this thread through the evolution of language, thinking and the understanding of the increasing influence of the left hemisphere.

In the last post, we saw Teilhard’s observation that in the human, different branches of evolution are not doomed to the three options of continuing to evolve, stopping or dying, but are open to future convergence.  This observation is confirmed when we see the subsequent connection of the Hebrew right-brained modes of thought described above, and that of the Greek left-brained modes into the first human dual-brained mode of thinking, that of Christianity.

It should not be a surprise, then, that such a new connection of the two primary seats of consciousness would open the human person to a wider world of potential and thus result in the success which can be seen in Western civilization.  As Teihard remarks,

“The whole world is advancing through application of the thinking processes and ideas which took root in human enterprises as a result of this unprecedented turn of evolution”.

With the two hemispheres beginning to balance, the true potential of the human person increases from when one or the other was more influential.  Openness to the next step of human evolution becomes more assured.

The left brain influence in the new holy book of Christianity eventually resulted in the emergence of science in the seventeenth century.  That this rise of left-brained thinking, bolstered by the cohesiveness of society fostered by the Jewish right-brained precepts, should have continued into the flowering of Western science in the seventeenth century, therefore, should come as no surprise.

However, as Jonathan Sacks points out, conflict between this ‘new’ activity of the left brain and the traditional right-brained thinking as entrenched in institutionalized Western religion was eventually bound to happen.  The rise of empirical thinking slowly came in conflict with the old intuitive traditions marked by metaphors and myths.  Unfortunately, in his opinion, the emerging influence of left-brained empiricism ultimately opened the door to a materialism which denies right-brained humanistic values.  While resulting in a newer, stronger science, it also can be seen to attack the historical right-brain foundations of instinct, intuition and integration.

All 0f which leads us to the crossroad that we face today:  How can these two deeply rooted modes of thought be brought into better balance?

Teilhard addresses the need for balance between these two human modes of thought:

“To outward appearance, the modern world was born of an anti-religious movement: man becoming self-sufficient and reason supplanting belief.  Our generation and the two that preceded it have heard little but talk of the conflict between science and faith; indeed, it seemed at one moment a foregone conclusion that the former was destined to take the place of the latter.   But, as the tension is prolonged, the conflict visibly seems to be resolved in terms of an entirely different form of equilibrium- not in elimination, nor duality, but in synthesis.  After close on to two centuries of passionate struggles, neither science nor faith has succeeded in discrediting its adversary.  On the contrary, it becomes obvious that neither can develop normally without the other.  And the reason is simple: the same life animates both.”

 As can be seen in the social experiments of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and the Korean Kims, science and society without religion can become very anti-human, but as can be seen in the case of religious fundamentalism, religion without science can become, in its own way, antithetical to the human spirit.

The Next Post

If this blog is to address a secular approach to God, such a synthesis as proposed by Teilhard must address religion in its secular context.  Next time we will take one last look at the phenomenon of religion, and attempt to answer the question,” What is Religion?”

Today’s Post

This week we will continue to address religion in the context of evolution as understood by Teilhard, focusing on what’s unique about human evolution.

Modes of Human Evolution

So what happens in humans that constitutes continuing evolution?  As Ian Barber points out in last week’s post, culture, combined with the human activity of choosing begins to effect changes much faster than evolution at the genetic level (natural selection combined with chance).

As we postulated in the March 5 post, Looking at Evolution, Part 4: Evolution Through Human Neurology, it is probably not an oversimplification to trace the evolution of the human person in terms of developing the skill of using the neocortex brain (reason) to modulate the more primitive and instinctual stimuli of the limbic brain (emotions) and the reptilian brain (aggression).

But as we saw in the post of October 29, The Evolution of Religion, Part 5- The Neurological Perspective (which addressed the joining of Greek and Jewish thinking), evolution is also in play in the emergence of another skill, that of ‘left-brained’ thinking to objectively observe our surroundings and make secular sense of them.  As we saw, this was the beginning of the increasing skill of not only using the ‘right and left brain’ modes of thinking, but using them in balance.

For several thousand years, the religions of the world showed a preponderance of domination by right brain thinking.  The skill of using the left brain increased more slowly, bursting into florescence with the flowering of Greek philosophy and science in about 500 BCE.  With the later interconnection between Jewish thinking and Greek thinking in the new Christian religion in the early first century CE, from the standpoint of neurological evolution, the first attempt was made to supplement right brained thinking with that of the left brain.

Human Evolution Differs From Biological Evolution

Teilhard points out a third aspect of human evolution that is suggested in the last two posts: that of recombination of the branches.

As Teilhard notes, the first manifestation of each new wave of evolution is initially camouflaged by the appearances of the previous wave, such as the early cells more closely resembling (and responding to the laws of) the highly complex molecules from which they sprang.  In the same way it was difficult to distinguish early humans from the advanced animals which preceded them.  It was not until early man began to use the unique functions of his neocortex brain, and began to leave traces of his existence for paleontologists to uncover, that we begin to have evidence of humans as distinct from their predecessor.

Teilhard, however, notes a major difference between the process of evolution before and after the appearance of man.

Before:  In biological evolution, the ‘tree of life’ as drawn by biologists, anthropologists and paleontologists clearly shows a trunk with branches leading to a nearly endless array of living things whose ontology can be traced to the fork in the branch that separates them from other forms of life.  ‘Tree’ is a good analogy; as with very rare exceptions each limb ramifies into new limbs which stay separate from the parent, evolves on its own, and doesn’t reconnect with other limbs.

Branches of the tree of life ramify, in which the new limb can either continue to evolve, slow to a stop, or wither and die.  Whichever path is taken, it is done so in isolation.

After: Early in human history, these three options can also be seen to occur, but to a lesser degree.   As humans evolve, new aspects come into play, such as the increase of retention of learned behavior through oral traditions, then written documents, then deliberate education.  With each of these new human skills, communicated and supported through culture, the branches of the human evolution tree acquire more potential to re-engage after separation.

Often this is just the result of one civilization conquering another, in which the characteristics of each society influence another.  It can also be the rediscovery of lost lore at a later date through a third party, such as the West’s rediscovery of the great Greek thinkers through the documents preserved by the Arabs, or the discovery of an ancient civilization’s writings and beliefs through the results of archeology.  Many other methods open this door of confluence after florescence, such as intermarriage, international education, and most recently, the internet.

With the human, this is one of the ‘laws’ of evolution which changes.  Certainly the ‘tree of thought’, or the ‘tree of civilization’ can be mapped from early times to the present.  Most modes of thought, ideas, styles of society, governments and beliefs can be woven into a picture which shows precedents and antecedents, like the tree of life.

However, unlike the biological tree of life, each new branch, new idea, new way of thinking and writing, new social structure and style of government, are seldom completely new.  Ideas are borrowed from other cultures, styles of government.  While perhaps inherited, they still show the impact of separate styles.

The evolution of religion can be traced in such a way.

The Next Post

Given the perspective offered by Teilhard on the continuation of evolution through the human person and his society, next time we will apply this perspective to the unfolding of religion itself.