Today’s Post

Religion, as a reflection of man’s attempt to make sense of his surroundings and understand his potential, is one manifestation of the way the process of evolution unfolds in the human.  The unfolding of science and philosophy are others.  Today we will begin to take a final look at the evolution of religion in the context of Teilhard’s insights into the continuing evolution of the human person and his society.

The Continuation of Evolution in the Human

The central theme of this blog has been and continues to be the perspective on evolution as developed by Teilhard de Chardin.  This perspective not only connects the three major phases of evolution,

• physical, as seen in the evolution of matter to complex molecules
• biological, as seen in the many branches of the tree of life
• personal, as seen in the appearance of consciousness aware of itself

but, more important to the objectives of this blog, it provides a context for understanding the continuation of evolution as it proceeds through the human person and his society.

As we saw in the February 19 post, “Looking at Evolution, Part 3: Continuation of Evolution Through the Human Person”, there is a tendency to see the process of evolution as coming to a halt in the present day: that humans have “arrived”.  The process of evolution seems to have stopped, or slowed to a snail’s crawl, and it is difficult to detect any further substantial changes.  Indeed, viewing evolution from the perspective of biological “Natural Selection”, shows only the slightest rate of change in our physical make up.

As Teilhard points out, it’s much more probable that the process of evolution which got us here isn’t going to stop, but will instead continue.  This shouldn’t be a surprise: if you plot the continuous rise of complexity in the past, the continuing increase in the future is expected unless something drastically changes in the underlying process.  Therefore, we can expect the process of evolution to continue through the human person and the energies which unite him.

Ian Barber echoes Teilhard’s thinking in his book, “Religion and Science”, in which he recognizes both the continuation of evolution through the human person as well as the “change of state” that was addressed in the above referenced post:

“Today we can see that in the long history of the world, the emergence of humanity marks a genuinely new chapter- not one disconnected from previous chapters and yet one that involves factors not previously present.  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.”

If we see the evolutionary unfolding of entities and energy through Teilhard’s eyes, leading from more simple things to more complex things which have more capacity for interconnection, then we can extrapolate this continuation of evolution to ever more complex human persons and more conscious and skillful cooperation with the energies of human connection.

This ‘skillful cooperation” is the cornerstone of basic religion, one among the other skills that humans develop to continue to actualize their human potential: the skill of using the human brain to make sense of things and the acquired wisdom of doing so.

The Advent of the Human Person

So, what’s really different about the human person?  Considering the materialistic belief that “we are all molecules”, and the atheistic belief that “there’s nothing special about humans, they’re just a different form of animal”, what really changes (if indeed anything does) in the transition from ‘pre-human’ to ‘human”?  Are not animals conscious?  Are they not aware?  Do they not have feelings?  And if so, how can it be said that humans are different?

Teilhard observes that the single most important characteristic which separates humans from their non-human ancestors is their ‘redundant awareness’, which he refers to as ‘reflexive consciousness’.  In simpler terms, humans ‘know that they know’; they are aware of their awareness.

His use of the word ‘reflexive’ also carries a deeper meaning: the ‘rebounding’ effect that such consciousness has on the human person.  Knowledge of one’s knowledge contributes to personal growth, enhancing capacity for relationship, which enhances knowledge.  “The knowledge of knowledge builds knowledge”.  This iterative process can best be understood as a ‘spiral’ in the maturity of human persons in which each loop leads towards increased consciousness (a measure of increased complexity), and adds to the potential for the next loop of the spiral.

So, given the fact that evolution continues in the human person, how does religion come into play?

The Next Post

Next time we will continue our examination of religion through Teilhard’s perspective of evolution.

Today’s Post

Last week we addressed the issues which arise when translating from a language rooted in one brain hemisphere to one rooted in the opposite.  Jonathan Sacks suggests that these issues arise from the influence of the thinking that goes into the translation.  Today we will continue to follow Sacks as he identifies some of the differences between the Greek and Jewish concepts found in the confluence of thought which resulted in the new religion of Christianity.

Contrasting the Concepts

As Sacks points out, a simple observation on this unprecedented new religion is that “Christianity got its religion from the Hebrews and its rationale from the Greeks”.

The Christian New Testament consists of the Jewish teachings of Jesus as translated into the Greek language, under the Hellenic influences of Paul.  As the new church grew, and continued to be explained and interpreted by early Christian ‘Fathers’, such as Irenaeus and ‘Doctors’, such as Augustine and Aquinas, the influence of Greek thinking continued to increase.

As Christian theology began to develop, much of the thinking of the great Greek sages, particularly Aristotle and Plato following their rediscovery by way of the Arabs, came into play as the original sacred books were interpreted according to the Greek masters.

Sacks sees many strands of Greek left-brained thinking in the development of Christian theology which contrast with the way the right-brained way that the Jews read the Hebrew bible:

Universality: Jews combine the universality of God with the particularity of the ways that we relate to God.  Christians, however, stress that Christ came for all but have historically denied any other route to salvation.  Sacks sees in this the legacy of Plato who devalued particulars in favor of the universal form of things.

Dualism: 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.  Sacks 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.

The tragic view of the human condition: Jews do not believe that we are destined to sin.  Sacks sees this belief as leading to the concept of ‘inherited sin’, which is unique to Christianity.  Unlike Christianity, the concept of ‘existential deliverance from the grip of sin’ does not exist in Judaism.

Separation of ‘faith and works’:  Jews believe that faithfulness is a matter of how you behave, not what you believe.  Jews, according to Sacks, see faith and works as part of a single continuum and have equal weight.  Sacks sees the Greek influence of fate, and the futility of fighting against it, leading to the Christian primacy of acceptance over resistance, the characteristic stance of the Hebrew prophets.

God’s nature: the Greek translation of God’s identification to Moses is, “I am who am”.

• The Christian understanding is that God is “Being itself, timeless, immutable, incorporeal, and understood as the subsisting act of all existing”.
• Augustine interprets the statement ontologically. He sees God as “that which does not and cannot change”.
• Aquinas sees God as “true being, that is eternal, immutable, simple, self-sufficient and the cause and principal of every creature”.

Sacks see these interpretations as the “God of Aristotle, not Abraham and the prophets”.  The Jewish translation of God’s identification to Moses is, “I will be where or how I will be”, adding a ‘future tense’ omitted in the Greek translation.

God’s Relationship with Man:  Far from being timeless and immutable, Sacks sees the Jewish understanding of God in the Hebrew bible as active, engaged, in constant dialogue with his people.

Sacks sees Aquinas’ God of ‘pure being’ as being so remote- the legacy of Plato and Aristotle- that the distance is bridged in Christianity by a figure that has no part in Judaism, the ‘Son of God’, a person who is both human and divine.

Sacks understands Judaism as seeing all human persons as both human and divine, and sees its contrast to Christianity as an issue of ‘immanence’.

Sacks also sees the influence of Greek thinking in the writings of the ‘Doctors’ of the Church, such as Augustine and Aquinas, many years later, such as:

• The philosophical proofs for the existence of God, derived ultimately from Plato and Aristotle
• The concepts of ‘Natural Law’, derived from the Greek Stoics.
• The idea that ‘purposes are inherent in creation’, that nature is ‘teleological’, derived from Aristotle

So, according to Sacks, in Christianity we see an unprecedented merging of the right-brained teachings of Jesus with the left-handed rationality of the Greeks.  However, as Sacks observes, this merging was not accomplished without contradictions between the essentially Jewish tone of the gospels (the base of religion) and the Greek influences (the base of reason) on the theology which continued to evolve from it.

Sacks nonetheless sees Christianity as a “wondrous creation, a monumental step toward relating to reality with the ‘whole brain’ “:

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

While identifying areas of what he sees as right-left brain imbalance in Christianity, Sacks does not address the potential of this ‘wondrous creation’.  With its resonance in both right and left modes of human thinking, Christianity carries within itself the potential for continuing to respond to the human need for actualizing its potential.   We will explore this in the third section of the blog as we look at the potential of reinterpreting the legacy beliefs of Christianity in the light of Teilhard’s insights into evolution.

The Next Post

Having looked at religion from the perspectives of history, modes of Western thinking, neurology and Christianity,  the next three posts will begin a look at the evolution of religion from the last perspective, that of evolution itself.

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the evolution of language was either precipitated by or led to increased use of the left brain hemisphere to make sense of things differently in Athens than in Jerusalem.

These two major modes of thought can be seen to re-merge in many ways with the advent of Christianity.  As Sacks points out, a simple observation on this unprecedented new religion is that “Christianity got its religion from the Hebrews and its rationale from the Greeks”.  Today we will begin to address this confluence by addressing the issue of language.

Why Greek?

The gospels, the stories of the life and teachings of Jesus, never appeared in the Jewish dialect, Aramaic,  that Jesus spoke.  They first appear in Greek, so would not have been understandable to Jesus.  Sacks considers this to be very important in understanding the unprecedented dual foundations of Christianity:

“Jesus spoke Aramaic and Hebrew, but every book of the New Testament was written in Greek.  Jesus wouldn’t have been able to read the New Testament”, therefore, “We have here a unique phenomenon in the history of religion: a religion whose sacred texts are written in what to its founder would have been a foreign and largely unintelligible language.”

Sacks sees the key influence here as Paul, who was not only Greek educated, but had the objective of carrying the message of the gospel to the Gentiles.  He saw Greek scriptures as more suited for dissemination into a wider non-Jewish, Greek-educated culture.

The story of how Paul succeeded in pursuing his objective is told in the Epistles of the New Testament.  These ‘epistles’ tell of the struggle with James and Peter, who considered the followers of Jesus to be a new Jewish sect.  Had Peter and John succeeded in this struggle, the Gospels would probably had been first documented in Jewish or Aramic.

As Sacks sees, using Greek translations of the gospels, Paul

“..found a ready audience among the Hellenistic Gentiles of the Mediterranean, especially those who had already shown an interest in elements of Jewish practice and faith.  It was the Greek- not the Hebrew/Aramaic speaking population that proved to be the fertile soil in which Christianity took root and grew”

The Issues of Translation

The resulting action of translating the Gospels into Greek thus reflected Paul’s goal of making them available to the world at large, but not without issues. As James Barr, Christian Biblical scholar (Biblical Faith and Natural Theology), remarks on the Bible in Greek:

“The attempt, at one time popular and influential, to argue that though the words might be Greek, the thought processes were fundamentally Hebraic, was a conspicuous failure.”

Sacks explains why:

“Had the languages in question been closely related, part of the same linguistic family, this might have been of little consequence.  But first-century Greek and Hebrew were not just different languages.  They represented antithetical civilizations, unlike in their most basic understanding of reality.”

Sacks agrees with Barr that you can’t translate a right-hand text to a left-handed one without changing some of the meaning.  The resulting translation will be different in small, but important, ways.  As we saw in an earlier post, many of the wonderful concepts developed by the Greeks have no counterpart in Jewish thinking, and vice versa; their different understandings of reality are, as we saw earlier, orthogonal.

The results are not necessarily contradictory, but effect new understandings of the original Aramaic gospels, and ultimately of the whole of the ‘Old’ Testament (also translated into Greek), due to the influence of the left brain as it reads the texts originated in the right brain.

The Next Post

Many issues arise in the translation from a left-handed language to one oriented on the right.  The larger issues arise from the coupling of Jesus’ Jewish right-brained thinking, to Paul’s left-brained, Greek thinking, and eventually to that of the ‘Fathers of the Church’ who followed him.  We will address this unfolding of thinking in the next post.

Today’s Post

In the last few weeks, we have followed Jonathan Sacks’ insights on the emergence of Greek thinking from Mid-East thinking via an evolution in the way written ideas were expressed, particularly in the evolution of the alphabet.  The alphabet, in its evolution from a right-to-left orientation to one oriented in left-to-right form opened a new mode of human thinking.  Further, the Greek introduction of verbs into their language rendered the text less ambiguous and more suited for expressing empirical thought.

Last week we followed Sacks into his insight of how these two changes influenced Greek thinking in ways that resulted in their radically new ideas of philosophy and science.

Today we will take a brief look at the way the human brain is understood to function to expand Sacks’ insights of the two distinct cognitive styles which emerged in the period in which the near- East language evolved from the Sinaitic  to that of the Greek.

The Two Brain Hemispheres

Over the past hundred and fifty years, since Pierre Paul Broca discovered that the language-processing skills were located in the left hemisphere of the brain, neuroscientists have explored the marked difference between the way information is processed in the two hemispheres.  Sacks lists a few of these:

   Left Brained Functions

• Thinking linearly, analytically, atomistically and mechanically
• Breaking things into component parts, and treating them sequentially
• Focusing on details
• Emphasizing objective observation
• Dealing with information empirically and objectively

   Right Brain Functions

• Thinking integratively and holistically
• Considering things in a context of the higher organization in which the thing is a part
• Focusing on the ‘big picture’
• Emphasizing empathy, meaning and emotion
• Treating information intuitively, instinctively, with ambiguity and metaphor

Sacks relates the two modes of human understanding, typified by the actions of the two hemispheres of the brain, to the manipulation of the alphabet:

“A language with vowels, where the words can be understood (unambiguously) one by one, can be processed by the linear, sequential left brain.  We read these languages from left to right, moving our head to the right, thus engaging the left brain.”

Languages without vowels (where words are more ambiguous) make demands on the context-understanding, integrative functions of the right brain, so we read them from right to left, moving our head leftwards and engaging the right brain”

So, the two hemispheres are thought to function in different ways.

• One is the ability to break things down into their constituent parts and see how they mesh and interact.
• The other is the ability to join things together so that they make sense as a whole. Sacks sees this ability as the one necessary to join people together so that they form relationships.

Sacks warns of over-emphasizing the distinctions.  He suggests ‘right’ and ‘left’ not be thought of as ‘precise neuroscientific descriptions’ of brain activity, but rather as ‘metaphors for different modes of the brain’s engagement with the world.’  He also sees a balance between the two types of activity as necessary for us tto be able to ‘think with our whole brain’.

From ‘Right’ to ‘Left’ Brained Thinking

The ideas of most of the thinkers of the Axial Age (September 17 – The Evolution of Religion, Part 2- The ‘Axial Age’), in general, represented ‘right brain’ thinking.  They took a less empirical approach to thinking about the universe and the place of the human person in it, and more about an intuition of how these relationships must take place for “enhancement of their humanity”.  The great body of thinking which began to lean in the direction of the ‘left brain’ was, as Sacks sees, that which emerged in Greece in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries, BCE.

Therefore, Third century Greek and Hebrew were not just different languages with different alphabets.  At the thinking level, they represented orthogonal civilizations, unlike in their most basic understanding of reality.  Greek philosophy and science- the Greece of Tales and Democritus, Plato and Aristotle- was a predominantly left-brain culture; the Israel of the prophets a right-brain one.  At precisely the time Greek came to be written left-to-right and Athens evolved to a literate from an oral culture, it became the birthplace of science and philosophy, the two supremely left-brain, conceptual and analytical ways of thinking.

Greece, at the time the alphabet was changing from right-left to left-right, was becoming the world’s first, and to Sacks, its greatest, left-brain civilization.  It was not only left-brained.  As Sacks sees it, “There was greatness, too, in the more right-brain fields of art, architecture and drama”.  But, as we shall see in the next post, the later attempt to reconnect this great mode of thinking with its right-handed predecessor was to have significant impact on the evolution of Western thought.

The Next Post

Having seen the evolution of language which led to the two great cognitive processes found in Greece and Jerusalem, as a rise in the skill of applying left-brained thinking to the seeking of answers to the mystery of life, we can now take a look at their confluence in a third great expression of belief, that of Christianity.

Today’s Post

In the last post, we followed Jonathan Sacks in his mapping of the alphabet from the near-East cultures (Hebrew, Canaanite and Phoenician).  He traces the shift of their use of the alphabet and their modes of thinking to that which emerged in Greece about 500 BCE.

Today we will continue to follow Sacks into the new modes of thought which emerged in Greece as a result of this evolution.

The Rise of Greek Thinking…

Sacks sees the change in perspective which arose from the shift in order of the alphabet as giving rise to the unique thinking that appeared in Greece during this same time frame.  He observes that Greeks were the first to think systematically and objectively about nature, matter, substance, the ‘element and principle of things’, and the relationship between what changes and what stays the same.  He enumerates examples of the beginnings of western thought:

• Thales in the sixth century BCE, who, in seeing water as the fundamental element, gave birth to the scientific way of thinking
• Anaximander, Thales’ pupil, who understood all things as deriving from, and ultimately returning to, ‘the boundless’
• Heraclitus, whose understanding of the constant state of flux in nature contradicted the conventional belief that nature was ‘fixed’
• Pythagoras, who was the first to see the universe as reflecting mathematical harmony
• Parmenides, whose vision of reality as eternal led to the belief that the changes that we sense are unreal and superficial
• Democritus, who first understood that everything is composed of elementary particles that he called atoms

This same era (4th and 5th centuries BCE) also saw the birth of philosophy, with the ‘great triumvirate’ of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.  Plato in particular left his mark for future thinkers in his preference for the universal over the particular, the timeless over the time-bound, the abstract over the concrete, and the impersonal over the personal.  As we shall see in a later post, these perspectives were to hold great weight in the evolution of religious thinking.

As Saks sees it:

“It is impossible to overstate the significance of all this for the development of Western civilization.  We owe virtually all our abstract concepts to the Greeks.”

… From the Hebrew

Such basic Greek concepts have no counterpart in the Jewish thinking as represented in the Hebrew bible, which preceded this shift.  As the bible was written in the Hebrew manner of right-to-left, without vowels,  it represented a completely different mode of thinking from the Greeks.  Sacks lists some examples:

• The Hebrew creation narrative contains no theoretical discussion of the basic elements of the universe.
• There is not just one account of creation at the beginning of Genesis, but two, side by side; one from the point of view of the cosmos, the other from a human perspective. This is seen as an example of how Hebrew thinking as found in the Bible does not operate on the principles of Aristotelian logic with its ‘either/or’ and ‘true/false dichotomies. It sees the development of multiple, ‘open-ended’ perspectives as essential to understanding the human condition.
• As a result of the shift, the more inclusive Hebrew ‘either/and’ set of possible choices is replaced by the Greek ‘either/or’ hard choice. Inclusion is replaced by exclusion.
• The story of the birth of the Israel monarchy contains no discussion (such as found in Plato and Aristotle) of the relative merits of monarchy as opposed to aristocracy or democracy. This story is more a series of portraits of the people involved (Solomon, Saul, David) than an analysis of their actions with conclusions to be drawn.

Sacks points out that when the Hebrew bible wants to explain something, it tells a story.  Entire subjects are dealt with from multiple perspectives, at a level of subtlety and ambiguity closer to great literature than either philosophy or political science.  Hard stands are seldom taken, as can be seen in the story of Job in which several perspectives are offered as to the existence, nature and source of evil, but none are proposed as ‘correct’.

The biblical scholar, Bart Ehrman, in his book, God’s Problem, sees this ambiguity as a failure of Jewish scripture, and cites it as a factor in his own ‘loss of faith’.  In doing so, Ehrman reflects the Greek either/or influence in Western thinking, while Sacks sees merely the Jewish either/and approach to addressing a difficult subject.  On the whole, the Jewish bible offers more ‘either/and’ conclusions than ‘either/or’ ones.

Saks points out that Greece and ancient Israel were the first two cultures to make the break with myth, but that they did so in different ways: The Greeks by philosophy and reason and the Jews by monotheism and revelation.  As we shall see, these two different approaches were eventually to ‘remerge’ with significant consequences for Western thought.

The Next Post

The next post will take another approach to the evolution of religion, and that is from the perspective of neurology: how the Hebrew-Greek transition can be seen from the neurological understanding of the bicameral brain, how the brain works in the ‘left’ and ‘right’ hemispheres, and how this affects the evolution of religion.

 Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the Axial Age ushered in a new, much more personal approach to understanding the human person and his place in the scheme of things.  The goal of religion had begun to move from propitiation of the gods and influence over nature.  It also had begun to move from a means of insuring stability in society to understanding the person, his potential for growth and his relationships with other persons.

As Karen Armstrong observes, there were many streams of thinking which developed during this brief period of time, concluding that,

 “The fact that they 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”.

Two of these streams would weave their ways into a common expression which would prove to be a major influence on the human perception of self, the understanding of human relationships and a rebound in the evolution of society.  Today’s post will begin a brief look at this weaving.

The Contribution of the Alphabet

Jonathon Sacks, in his book, The Great Partnership, Science, Religion and the Search for Meaning, sees the path of this weaving as well mapped by the development of the alphabet.

He sees the emergence of Greek thinking as rooted in the evolution from the historic near-Eastern cultures (Hebrew, Canaanite and Phoenician) to the thinking which emerged in Greece between the seventh and fifth centuries BCE.  He credits the major factor in this evolution as the birth and evolution of the alphabet which occurred during this same brief period.

Writing was invented originally in Mesopotamia more than 5000 years ago.  As Sacks sees it,

“The birth of writing was the birth of civilization, because it enabled the growth of knowledge to become cumulative.  Writing enables more information to be handed on from one generation to the next than can be encompassed in a single memory.”

Writing seems to have been invented independently seven times: Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Indus Valley script, the Minoan script known as ‘linear B’, Chinese ideograms and Mayan/Aztecan pictograms.  Writing first appeared in the form of pictograms, simple drawings of what the symbols represented. They evolved into ideograms, which were more abstract, then as syllables as people began to realize that words were not just names for things but also sounds.  The sheer number of symbols in these early forms prevented their wide spread, however, with 900 in cuneiform and 700 in hieroglyphics, for example, and restricted their use to the elite.

In the near-Eastern cultures (Hebrew, Canaanite and Phoenician), about 1800 BCE, the ideographic representation of ideas began to be replaced by the ‘alphabet’, in which the symbol set was reduced to a small enough number to be able to be understood by anyone.

The alphabet seems to have been invented only once.  The first alphabet seems to be the ‘proto-Sinaitic’ more than a thousand years BCE, and was used by the Hebrews, Canaanities and Phoenicians.  It was imported by the Phoenicians to the Greeks about 900 BCE, and became the basis for the Hebrew alphabet.

The Greek Alphabetic Evolution

The first four letters of the Greek alphabet are alpha, beta, gamma and delta, showing its evolution from the Hebrew aleph, bet, gimmel and dalet.  In the move to Greek, over time the Greek alphabet acquired vowels (not found in Hebrew), and evolved in its order of words:

• from the Hebrew order of writing from right-to-left
• through an intermediate order of right-to-left-and-back-again
• finally to left-to-right.

By the fifth century BCE it seems to have completed this evolution.

The inclusion of vowels was an important addition, in that it reflected a change in the way that the language was interpreted:

• Languages without vowels (right-to-left, as in Hebrew) require a greater understanding of the context of each word, and through this ambiguity offer the possibility of many meanings to the written statement.
• Those with vowels (left-to-right, as in Greek, Latin and English) are less ambiguous, and contain their own meaning.

Therefore, as Sacks points out, the significance of this evolution doesn’t lie in the simple physical act of the two different methods, but in the two different mental activities which are paramount in the two types of languages:

• serial mental processing in the vowelled languages
• holistic understanding in the vowell-less languages.

Saks places great importance on this shifted manner of thinking which resulted from the migration of the order of writing and the inclusion of vowels.  He cites the belief of Walter Ong, that “Writing restructures consciousness”, indicating that this shift of writing order either resulted from or precipitated the way that humans made sense of themselves and their environment.  This shift was to open new vistas for thinking, as we shall see.

The Next Post

As we shall see in a later post, this difference in approach to thinking is the result of the activities of the right and left hemispheres of the brain, but in the next post we will take a look at the unprecedented thinking that arose in the Greek culture as a result of this shift.

Today’s Post

Today’s post will continue to address the evolution of religion from the historical perspective, as it evolves from laws defining the behavior necessary for order in society to a focus on the human person, his potential and his relationships.

The Axial Age

Karen Armstrong’s study of the birth of the major religious traditions, “The Great Transformation”, addressed the ‘Axial Age’ (900-200 BCE), which she sees as “..one of the most seminal periods of intellectual, psychological, philosophical and religious change in recorded history”.  During this period, expressions of belief came to be expressed in terms that were equally applicable to both the common person and the elite.  They not only addressed those concepts which held society together, but also addressed both the nature of the individual himself as well as his potential for ‘fuller being’.   The integrated ideas of ‘person’ and ‘love’ began to emerge.

The Axial age saw the rise of many approaches to the understanding of the reality in which we live:

• Confucianism and Daoism in China
• Hinduism and Buddhism in India
• Monotheism in Israel
• Philosophical rationalism in Greece.

In this relatively brief span of time, six profound lines of thought emerged in four parts of the world.  This was the period which saw such Axial sages as the Buddah, Socrates, Confucious and Jeremiah, the mystics of the Upanishads and Mencius and Euripides.  Armstrong sees these great thinkers as those whose insights are still relevant because “they show us what a human being should be.”

She also saw the birth and articulation of basic and universal beliefs during this period, such as:

• The supreme importance of charity and benevolence
• Reluctance to be dogmatic about a transcendence that was essentially undefinable
• Recognition that the transformative effect of ritual was far more important than manipulation of the gods
• Belief that egotism is largely responsible for human violence
• A movement from sacrifice to a focus on the essential and eternal core of the human person, that which made him or her unique
• The further belief that this essential core was of the same nature as the ultimate principle 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 further belief that this ultimate principle was an immanent presence in every single human being

She saw that during this formative era:

“…they (the Axial sages) all concluded that if people made a disciplined effort to re-educate themselves, they would experience an enhancement of their humanity.  In one way or the other, their programs were designed to eradicate the egotism that is largely responsible for our violence and to promote the empathic spirituality of the Golden Rule.”

“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” “

“When warfare and terror are rife in a society, this affects everything that people do.  The hatred and horror of war infiltrates their dreams, relationships, desires and ambitions.  The Axial sages saw this happening to their own contemporaries and devised an education rooted in the deeper, less conscious levels of the self to help them overcome this.  The fact that they 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”.

The axial age introduced the concept that there were modes of human behavior which could lead to the fuller being of the individual person at the same time that his relationships were strengthened; even that the deepening of these relationships were key to such fuller being.  Armstrong sees this as the basic nature of morality.  Teilhard terms it the ‘articulation of the noosphere.”

The Next Post

While the Axial Age may have laid the foundation for the major expressions of belief, the transition to contemporary Western religious thinking would take two more major turns.  The next post will begin to explore the first of these: the evolution of Greek thinking from Near Eastern modes to that which was to be the foundation of Western philosophy and science.

Today’s Post

As a second step towards reinterpreting religion, we will briefly overview the history of religion from the vantage point of evolution.  As Teilhard noted, nothing can be well understood unless it is placed in an evolutionary context, therefore in keeping with the blog’s secular approach to God and religion that is what we will do in the next several posts.  This segment of the blog will look at the evolution of religion from three perspectives:

• As history
• As the evolution of thought processes influenced by language
• As the evolution of thought processes influenced by neurology

While the first perspective will look at religion in the wider sense, the second two will concentrate on the great confluence of Jewish, Greek and Christian thinking that happened in the birth of Western theology.

The Roots of Religion

Religion over many thousands of years can be seen to have accumulated insights and intuitions that are inextricably entwined with ancient beliefs and myths.  Matthew Kneale, in his book “An Atheist’s History of Belief” sees evidence of religious belief in the very first stirrings of human thought.  He notes three objectives present in the earliest religions:

• healing the sick
• controlling the movements of hunted animals
• improvement of weather

He saw religion as, “A way of lessening life’s frightening uncertainties”.  Further, he saw in it the appearance of attitudes which were unique to the human, such as:

• the ability to deal with the viewpoints of others
• recognizing and fending off danger from other humans
• supporting the making of alliance and friendships
• supporting collaborative activities in such things as protecting and feeding themselves and their children

Kneale saw one manifestation of evolution proceeding through the human as ‘improved quality of life’.  Life improves first for the elite as they begin to speculate about life after death. Their view of it changes from something to fear to something as positive, even if only reserved for the elite.  With the new tier of elite in society, the afterlife begins to be understood as also open to those who merit it.  Kneale sees this as a key thread of evolution: that of ‘morality’.  “Worrying more about the afterlife becomes possible as one worries less about life in this world.”  To him, the invention of the concept of an afterlife is evidence that life is improving.

The Evolution of Laws

Emerging civilizations evolved the need to regulate human relationships as a prerequisite for social order.  As human society began to evolve from small nomadic “hunter-gatherer” clans to larger groups settling near centralized crops with the beginnings of ruling hierarchies, the need for “codes” began to take shape to provide rules for coexistence.  These codes or laws were mostly enacted by the recognized ruler, who also took on the person of the ruling God to insure supernatural authority.

The earliest such set of laws seems to have emerged in the 24^th century BCE, and is known as “The Code of Urukagina”. Urukagina was a Mesopotamian ruler, but knowledge of his laws is second-hand, and is derived from later references to it.  Other rulers of the “fertile crescent” also promulgated their laws, such as The Code of Ur-Nammu (Sumerian- 1900-1700 BCE) and The Code of Hammurabi (Babylonian, approximately 1740 BCE).  By the tenth century BCE, rulers were expected to document their rules for societies through such promulgations, leading to the many examples preceding the Mosaic Law as addressed in the Old Testament.

The “Law of Moses” in Ancient Israel is distinguished from other legal codes in the ancient near East by its reference to offense against a deity rather than against society.  This contrasts with the other codes, most of which concern laws dealing with society, regulating the transactions among the citizens, and defining their obligations to the state.  The books of Deuteronomy, Exodus and Kings all offer a version the story of Moses receiving the “laws” (or “commandments” or “words” or “judgments” or “tables of testimony”).  While the details of the stories differ in the four different treatments in Deuteronomy and Exodus, they all include prescriptions for ritual, behavior and worship.

As societies continued to evolve, and distinct classes began to appear, the rules of society evolved with them.  One of the first of this new type of code was “The Law of the Twelve Tables” (Roman, 450-449 BCE), which was written as a result of the long social struggle between the Roman classes of ‘patricians’ (the elite class) and ‘plebeians’ (the working class).  While the patricians ruled society, they were dependent on the plebeians to run the machines of state, who were increasingly unhappy with their treatment.  This code became the foundation of Roman law, and was one of the first appearances of a “constitution”.

These codes, however, while addressing human interchanges at the level of society, as laws of behavior, addressed to a much lesser degree the underlying nature of the human person and the basis of personal relationships.   This was to change in the “Axial Age” (900-200 BCE) in which thinking about the nature of the human person and his relationships began to emerge.

The Next Post

The next post will address the ‘Axial Age’ and its profound impact on the history of religion.

Today’s Post

Last week we introduced the belief system of Deism as one which Richard Dawkins would have identified as a natural consequence of “stripping the conventional ’baggage’ of God from the concept of a ‘ground of being’ “.  He agreed with Thomas Jefferson that while the basic moral principles of Jesus have value, the rest of the New Testament contained only “so much untruth, charlatanism and imposture”.   Today we will look more closely at Deism but factor in scientific findings that were unavailable to the venerable founders of our country, and thus permitting a deeper development of Deism than that available for their consideration

So, What Happened to Deism?

Deism, while recognizing that there could be a rational basis for belief in God, had one significant weakness.  Deists believed that the Cosmic Designer, who started the world-machine and left it to run on its own, was impersonal and remote.  This was not a God who cares for individuals and actively relates to human life or a being to whom prayer would be appropriate, and with whom relationship was possible.  This was unlike the potential of traditional Western religion (despite all its shortcomings) to inform human life and offer hope for personal fulfillment, and therefore was rich in meaning to the average person.

Also, in their disdain for institutionalized religion, Deists attacked the institutional church: traditional Christianity was pictured as the enemy of the religion of reason.  In effect, the baby was thrown out with the bath.  With no means of connecting to the human psyche, Deism eventually became extinct as a movement.

So Why Isn’t This Blog Deism?

The thinkers of the Enlightenment, unfortunately, did not live to see the rise of one of the most important ideas in science: that of evolution.  In addition to providing a valuable frame of reference to biologists, the theory of evolution also gave rise to the concept of the universe, and everything within it, as “becoming”.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment saw the universe, and our world, as static, essentially unchanged since its creation.  It was a world capable of being built once, then abandoned by its builder who saw no need for continued connection.  Seeing the universe in the dynamic light of the twentieth century introduced an entirely new way of understanding the basic ground of being.

The idea of a basic principle of the universal framing force as one which would eventually evolve to beings conscious of their awareness would have seemed incomprehensible to them.  With it, as we have seen, the basic intuition of the Deists takes on new potential.

So, it seems, the Deists were on the right track.  Their idea of a universe fabricated by a creative force in which all parts mesh together in a unified reality was a good starting place.  Their view is quantified by Science’s understanding of the Six Cosmological Constants (June 11 – The Framing of the Universe, Part 1: Science’s Basic Perspective) which go much further in articulating how the universe holds together.  The missing piece of both Deism and the Six Cosmological Constants, as we have seen, comes into play when the dynamic, evolutive nature of the universe is recognized.  Seeing the universe as dynamic naturally leads to seeing it as increasing in complexity, else it would stall, becoming static.

Acknowledging this phenomenon of emerging complexity not only explains the upward momentum of evolution, it adds the missing piece to Deism.  Yes, the ground of being, first principle, or whatever name we give to the creator, can certainly be reasoned into the basic fabrication of the universe.  With the addition of the phenomenon of complexity, however, this creative force now can be seen to expand from the maker of the building blocks to the ongoing dynamic force which unites them in such a way as to power the expansion of the universe.  The addition of complexity extends Deism’s domain of creation to Theism.   

Deism, and the idea of Rational or Natural religion can therefore be seen as a first step to approaching the underlying truth of the human person and the universe surrounding him.  Even with all the perceived evils of religion, Jefferson’s belief that basic human “moral precepts” are contained in “great purity” in the teachings of Jesus suggests a way forward to the eventual “divestment of baggage” suggested by Dawkins.

Seeing these moral precepts as values which provide meaning to life and contribute to human growth and continued evolution through improved relationships therefore gives rise to the possibility of informing religion and improving its relevance to human life.  Our approach in this blog as we proceed with the reinterpretation of religion is therefore to “Throw out neither the baby nor the bath, rather restore to them their basic functions.”

As Karen Armstrong remarks in her book, ”The Great Transformation”:

“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.”

The Next Post

This week we have seen how Deism can be understood as a first cut at the “Secular Side of God”, and how the understanding of the universe as ‘becoming’ can offer new life to this venerable concept.   In the next post, we will turn our inquiry to rethinking many of the aspects of religion to explore the possibility of its potential for “relevance to human life”.

Today’s Post

As we saw last week, Richard Dawkins himself, arguably one of the most eloquent apologists for atheism, points the way for this third phase of the blog, reinterpreting religion. Undoubtedly he believed that stripping the conventional ’baggage’ of God from the concept of a ‘ground of being’, or a ‘first cause’, would strip any religious meaning from the concept of God as well. The thought that the opposite might occur, that such reinterpretation might actually add relevance to the concept of God and the meaning of “person”, evidently did not cross his mind. The remainder of this blog will address such reinterpretation in the light of Teilhard’s secular, scientific approach to evolution and the framing of the universe taken in the first two phases. This third phase of the blog will consist of six parts:

• Distinguishing the approach of this blog from Deism (this post and the next)
• A brief history of religion
• What’s unique about Christianity?
• Some thoughts on a definition of religion
• Approaches to ‘reinterpreting’ religion
• Reinterpretations of common Western religious beliefs in the light of Teilhard’s insight into a more cohesive view of science

So far, this blog has identified a personal aspect of the “first cause’, as manifested in the integrated and unified ‘framing’ forces of the universe. This would not seem to lend itself to anything which possesses the traditional attributes of God found particularly in Western theology. Understanding God as “a manifestation of force” would not seem to equate very well with the God of the bible, or the God to which one prays, or the God with whom one could have a relationship. To this statement, Professor Dawkins would certainly agree. He would suggest that this particular perspective is just another type of Deism.

Deism

As a system of belief, the rise of Deism reflected the distinctive new eighteenth century viewpoint of the intellectual leaders of the Enlightenment: that religion should be based on reason. Deism, then, was the approach that “adapted Christianity to reason”, as Dawson puts it, by “divest(ing) it of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers.” Such ‘divesting’ resulted in a Natural Theology in which reason replaced revelation as a basis for belief. Effectively, the thinkers of the Enlightenment considered reason alone as sufficient to understand reality.

Deism therefore didn’t fall into the categories of ‘a-theism’ (non-belief in God); ‘anti-theism’ (against religion); or ‘agnosticism’ (neither belief nor denial of God). Instead, Deists believed that there is indeed a God, that he created the universe as we see it, but since then has left it alone. In the world of Deism, God created but is no longer involved.

Many, if not most, of the founders of the American nation were Deists. They were very aware of the horrors and aftershocks of religious wars in Europe, extending back several hundred years, and had a healthy respect for the potential dangers of institutionalized religion to society. The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, while granting freedom of religion, by its wording,

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”

also guaranteed ‘freedom from religion’. In addition to an aversion to the miraculous, supernatural and generally non-rational content of Western Christianity, the framers of the constitution had a healthy fear of the ills of religion when it becomes iestablished as a political entity.

Jefferson, Deism and Christianity

Thomas Jefferson is undoubtedly the best known of the framers of the constitution, and like most of them, a Deist. His views on religion in general and its influence on society are succinctly summarized by Wikipedia:

“On one hand Jefferson affirmed, “We all agree in the obligation of the moral precepts of Jesus, and nowhere will they be found delivered in greater purity than in his discourses”, that he was “sincerely attached to His doctrines in preference to all others” and that “the doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend all to the happiness of man”. However, Jefferson considered much of the New Testament of the Bible to be false (containing “so much untruth, charlatanism and imposture”). In a letter to William Short in 1820, he expressed that his intent was to “place the character of Jesus in its true and high light, as no imposter himself”, but that he was not with Jesus “in all his doctrines”. “

From his study of the Bible, Jefferson concluded that Jesus never claimed to be God.

While living in the White House, Jefferson began to piece together his own version of the Gospels…from which he omitted the virgin birth of Jesus, miracles attributed to Jesus, divinity, and the resurrection of Jesus – among many other teachings and events. He retained primarily Jesus’ moral philosophy, of which he approved. This compilation was completed about 1820, but was not published after his death and became known as the Jefferson Bible.

Deism also had an anti-religion content. Many of the constitutional founders beside Jefferson, such as Franklin, Adams, Madison and Paine harshly criticized the Christian establishment of their day, as “perverted” (Jefferson), “useless” (Franklin), “frightful” (Adams) and “of prideful and arrogant clergy” (Madison).

The Next Post

So this week we have seen how the approach to God as reflected in all the framing forces of the universe has historically led to a naturalistic but impersonal belief system which is further somewhat hostile to traditional organized religions. Is Dawkins correct when he predicts that this is the inevitable outcome of “stripping the conventional ’baggage’ of God from the concept of a ‘ground of being’ “? Next week we will take a closer look at Deism to see what was missing from the viewpoint of the intellectual leaders of the Enlightenment, and situate Deism more clearly in the spectrum between atheism and theism.