Monthly Archives: February 2018

February 15 – From Values to Attitudes

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Today’s Post

   Last week we saw how Science’s discovery of the immensity of time and the process of evolution offers a new perspective on the statements of meaning that have evolved with both science itself and religion.  We also saw how, as John Haught asserts in his book, “The New Cosmic Story” a third, holistic, approach emerges from these discoveries which can bring these two traditional schools of thought into increased coherence.  As Teilhard predicted:

“Like the meridians as they approach the poles, science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.”

   We have been exploring the topics of sacraments, morals and values over the past several weeks.  This week we will move on to ‘attitudes’, the stances which we take in relation to life, and by which such ‘articulations of the noosphere’ can be lived out.

Attitudes

There are few things more important to the way we live our lives than the attitudes we assume as we go about our daily enterprises.  This has nothing to do with religion: even secularists have attitudes, and our attitudes have immense impact on our actions.   They are also strongly rooted in our underlying beliefs.  The difference between the influence of pessimistic and optimistic attitudes on quality of life, for example, has been well documented in psychological journals, but by what ‘hermeneutical’ principle is one’s attitude determined?  Are attitudes chosen by each of us in an intellectual process by which we reason to them, or are they a result of biological pressures over which we have no control?  Are they a result of our neocortex activity or imposed on us by the stimuli of our reptilian and limbic brains?  Are they empirical or intuitional?

One of the most common underlying principles of all religions is the impetus to believe and act in accordance with some defined hermeneutics.  Often the actions are proscribed in spite of beliefs.  Examples of this can be found in the more conservative Christian expressions, in which faith can be more important than reason in deciding how to act.  Nearly all contain the teaching that ‘proper’ belief is more necessary for salvation (passing successfully into the afterlife) than ‘proper’ action.  The role of ‘attitude’ in the comportment of life, while not absent in these teachings, does not seem to be paramount.  Christianity addresses attitudes in its concept of ‘virtues’.  While traditional teaching treats virtues as ‘dispositions by which we live good lives’, the traditional implication is that the ‘good life’ is the one which ends in our salvation.

At the other end of the spectrum, in the materialistic scheme of things, attitudes are seen as those dispositions which continue the materialistic process of evolution: ‘survival of the fittest’.  In this scheme, many traditional religious beliefs are captured in their secular support of continued evolution, but the ultimate ‘hermeneutic’ as discussed last week, is to be found in the interaction among elementary particles as increasingly understood by science.

As discussed last week, both approaches are rooted in the past:  religion with its doctrines of ‘truth’ firmly rooted in divine pronouncements of long ago, and science with its belief in meaning to be found at the bottom (and hence in the past) of the evolution of matter.

The Dangers of the Past

Why should such perspectives be seen as problematic?  On the one hand, hasn’t religion proven its value to society with the building blocks it has offered to civic stability?  And hasn’t the incessant search for the ultimate understanding of how matter holds together led to advances in human quality of life that would have been the stuff of dreams to our grandparents?  So, why should such traditional principles be called into question?  What’s wrong with either of these perspectives?

To answer these questions, a starting place can be found in the waning influence of religion in the West.  Most surveys, particularly the Pew polls, seem to show a correlation between declining levels of traditional church participation and increasing levels of education.  The materialists gleefuly interpret this as evidence that religion is less necessary for societal stability as society becomes more educated.  This attitude is reflected in the scientific community, which seems to claim that scientific discoveries are gradually eliminating a place for God in the universe.  This perspective sees that traditionally, God is only ‘found in the gaps’, and as these gaps are filled by science, there is a decreasing need for God.

But science also faces a danger in looking for meaning in the composition of the simplest matter.  As we have seen, it’s been difficult for science to include the human person in its understanding of reality.  There is no “Standard Model” for the human person like there is for pre-biological matter.  In our exploration of psychology, in which science turns its lens on the human, we have seen that there is considerable dualism. (10 Nov 2016, “Relating to God: Part 5- Psychology as Secular Meditation- Parts 1-5” http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=201611).  Add to this the belief that real meaning is only to be found in the “behind and below”, and a truly bleak picture of the future of human evolution begins to emerge.  As one atheist put it, “life’s a bitch, then you die”.  Instead of seeing human evolution as a process which can increase the level of complexity of its products (which it has so far for billions of years), it is now seen with a future more of decay than enrichment.  As Haught puts it:

“The typical scientific materialist…takes decay to be finally inevitable because the totality of being is destined by what-has-been to end up in a state of elemental, lifeless disintegration.”

Further, Haught notes that traditional science and religion, with their sights fixed firmly rearward, seem complicit in their disdain for universal potential.  He notes that:

“The cosmic pessimism of so many modern intellectuals, it turns out, is a cultural by-product of the implicit despair about the physical universe that had been tolerated for so many centuries by otherworldly, religious readings of nature.”

   It is this pessimism that is at the root of the ‘dangers of the past’.  As science opens our eyes to the immensities of time and space, the seemingly impersonal processes of how they relate, and the ultimately material basis of matter, those traditionally spiritual (Haught: ‘otherworldly’) beliefs of religion which have underpinned a positive stance to life in the past can become increasingly irrelevant.  What can replace our traditional hermeneutic?

As thinkers such as Blondel, Teilhard, Rohr and Haught suggest, it’s not that the underlying precepts of science and religion are wrong, and hence must be replaced, it’s more that their wisdom becomes immediately more rich and relevant when reoriented from the past to the future.  This reorientation occurs with the simple recognition that the universe as unfinished, in which, as Haught sees:

“(Science) professes to be highly empirical and realistic, but leaves out of its survey of nature the fact that the cosmos is still in the process of becoming.  …the fullness of being, truth and meaning are still rising on the horizon.”

The Next Post

This week we have explored the phenomenon of ‘attitudes’, and saw how the traditional approach of science and religion can lead to not only the increasing irrelevance of religion but the pessimism of science.  Next week we will take another look at how reorienting our scientific and religious perspective from past to future offers an additional ‘principle of reinterpretation.

February 1 – Values, Morals and Sacraments- From ‘Either-Or’ to ‘Either-And”

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Today’s Post

For the last several posts we have been exploring the religious concepts of sacraments, values and morals as ‘articulations of the noosphere’: structures of the reality in which we live that when cooperated with can lead us to Karen Armstrong’s “greater possession of ourselves” and Teilhard’s “current to the open sea”.

This week we will continue this exploration into modes of human life which capitalize on these structures: ‘ways to be what we can be’.

The Holistic Perspective

Last week we saw how both the traditional scientific, materialistic, even atheistic perspectives on human existence can be brought into confluence with traditional religious perspectives with a few changes in interpretation.

–            If science expands its understanding of evolution from terrestrial biological phenomena (Natural Selection) to a universal perspective, evolution can be seen in three distinct phases united by a continuing increase of complexity in its products (pre-life, life, life conscious of itself).  In this more comprehensive perspective, there are indeed ‘articulations of the noosphere’ which foster our continued evolution.

–          The theist assertion that morals are absolute imperatives issued from a divine source thousands of years ago requires that these standards of behavior are, as the materialists assert, intelligible, but also that our quest for understanding them is still ongoing.

Or, as Teilhard puts it:

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

   So putting evolution into an unfolding cosmic context leads to, as John Haight asserts in his book, “The New Cosmic Story” a third, holistic, approach.

 The Third Way

Haught notes that at their roots, both the traditional theistic traditions and materialistic interpretations most often associated with science are rooted in the past.

Science, for its part, continues to search for understanding of the cosmos in the increasingly particulate components of matter and energy.  In science’s ‘Theory of Everything’, success will be declared when we understand every step of the evolution of matter from its initial state of pure energy (the ‘big Bang’) to its current state of highly complex combinations of atoms and molecules.   As Jonathan Sacks puts it, “Science takes things apart to see how they work”.  Such beliefs as random determinism (our thoughts are the result of random firings of neurons precipitated by molecular activity) lead to a denial of human free will.  In other words, meaning is to be sought from, as Teilhard puts it, “The behind and below”.  In this perspective, the future is indeterminate; it is only in the past that we can understand the universe.

Religion posits the validity of its beliefs in revealed truth, usually contained in ‘sacred scripture’ written eons ago.  In simpler terms, humans have been given the ‘law’ but consistently fail to live up to it.  from this perspective, the human species will fail in its enterprises, requiring an eventual imposition by God of a theistic and divine government.  While Sack’s observation that ‘Religion puts everything together to see what it means’, is correct, the criteria by which it does so assumes a perfect past from which we are ‘fallen’.

Haught notes that Teilhard (and as I have noted, Blondel and Rohr) recognizes that the scientific concept of evolution (when freed from its biological constraints) offers religion a freedom from its ‘chains of the past’, and permits these two classical modes of thinking to have a level of coherence that the traditional modes deny.  He also notes that the single strongest component of this new approach is simply the clarity that which is brought by understanding the stuff of science and religion in the light of a comprehensive, universal evolutionary process.

Again, from Teilhard:

   “Under the influence of a large number of convergent causes (the discovery of organic time and space, progress in the unification or ‘planetization’ of man, etc), man has quite certainly become alive, for the last century, to the evidence that he is involved in a vast process of anthropogenisis, cosmic in plane and dimensions.”

   So, if we are to find new ways of ‘employing our neo-cortex brains to modulate the instincts of our limbic and reptilian brains’, or more prosaically, ‘becoming what we are capable of becoming’, understanding and living life in terms of the sacraments, morals and values that we have explored can take on new meaning when we begin to understand that we are part of an evolutionary process by which we are brought into ‘greater possession of ourselves’ when we engage in these activities.

To see ourselves caught up in Teilhard’s process of ‘anthropogenisis’ is to recognize that meaning is always to be sought in the future.  No doubt that our bodies can be boiled down to masses of molecules and that the insights of the past are worth our attention, but recognition that we are ‘borne on a current to the open sea’ requires us to look past the ”explicit commands issued from the outside… and … irrational but categorical instincts” to a future that, to our opening eyes, is truly open.

The shift in our stance with respect to life that Haught explores is one that turns our expectations, hopes and actions, as Teilhard says, “Towards the future”.  This leads us to the religious concept of ‘the virtues”.

The Next Post

This week we have explored how Teilhard’s understanding of cosmic evolution can bring new clarity to both the meanings proposed by materialists as well as those proposed by theists.  Next week we will extend this exploration to the stances that we take when we seek to apply the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ (sacraments, morals and values) to our life.  It makes a difference whether or not we see such articulations as rules to be followed to achieve ‘salvation’,  or the acceptance of the fate of a faceless, indeterministic universe, and we will take a look at such stances in the light of religion’s ‘theological virtues’.