Monthly Archives: May 2020

May 28– Religion and Science: Different But Compatible Evolutionary Tools?

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Today’s Post

Last week, we looked at religion’s concept of morality, and saw how these insights offer a rethinking of traditional religion’s potential as a tool for ‘stitching together’ the fabric of society. Teilhard sees morality evolving from proscription to prescription for religion to realize its potential as a tool for insuring our continued evolution. He saw how rethinking morality is one way for religion to recognize its role as a tool for understanding the noosphere, and by doing so to be able to assist us in living it in such a way that we can become fully and authentically human.

This week we turn our focus to the other great human enterprise, science, to begin exploring how a revitalized religion, better focused on an evolving noosphere, might better work with an obviously effective science in realizing our human potential.

Evolution Everywhere

In this series, we have frequently noted that, as asserted and quantified by Johan Norberg (‘Progress’), it is possible for us, with properly focused eyes, to recognize threads of this evolution happening all around us. Norberg offers, as the Economist identifies, “A tornado of facts” which quantify the many ways that human welfare proceeds by the correct application of human freedom, innovation and relationship throughout the world. Norberg’s examples of increased human welfare are without a doubt tangible evidence of the ways in which the human species can be seen to continue its evolution.

We have also seen that Norberg considered human freedom, innovation, and relationships to be essential for such progress to proceed, which is why the earliest examples of this progress appeared in the West, with its unique emphasis on all three.

By the same token, we have noted that these three characteristics are addressed poorly by science, and its companion secular ‘disciplines’ such as economics and politics.   Norberg’s three cornerstones of progress initially only appear in the West, as a slowly building consequence of society influenced by its Christian roots in the uniqueness of the person.

Jefferson’s claim that

“I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves” was a recognition of such uniqueness, but it was not an insight derived from any empirical source. His inspiration for such an unprovable concept was none other than his own excerpts from the New Testament, known as the “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth”:

“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.”

Thus our claim that in religion, for all its creaky hierarchy, superstitions and contradictions, and even its many instances of hostility to Norberg’s three building blocks of freedom, innovation and relationships, we can still find threads of the current which must be maintained if it is to carry us forward.

We have Jefferson to thank for both a clearer understanding of the noosphere, and how its structure in human affairs has evolved from Enlightenment principles intermixed with Christian values, even though it can be seen as initially “dripping” with the accouterments of medieval worldview.

As Norberg quantifies at length, this clearer understanding of the unfolding of human evolution clearly articulates the success of the West in providing a milieu which has effected a degree of stability not only unprecedented in human history, but which has slowly permeated into the rest of the world.

Steven Pinker (“Enlightenment Now”) recognizes how this unfolding can be seen in the West as a “tide of morality” which is effecting an “historical erosion of racism, sexism and homophobia”. It is not coincidental that these three negative aspects of society have all, at one time (and even today) been paramount in all religions. Pinker sees in this tide the effect of ‘empiricism’s superiority over intuition’, a sentiment underpinning the beliefs found in the Enlightenment. However, as do many thinkers influenced by the Enlightenment, he fails to recognize that in the essential beliefs of Jefferson, reflecting those of Jesus, the key kernel which makes such a tide possible is the recognition of the essential importance of the human person. Without this belief, essentially unprovable and thus ‘intuitive’ rather than ‘empirical’, the tide would not surge, it would ebb.

Enter Religion

And this, of course, is where religion comes in. We have taken a long look at ‘risks’ to the noosphere, and saw that even with the unconscious ‘tide’ that Pinker cites, there’s no guarantee that it will ultimately prevail over the ‘risks’ to the noosphere that we identified a few weeks back.

At the basis of these ‘risks’ is the necessity for us to choose to continue to power this tide. We saw that it is possible for humans to simply allow fear, pessimism and disbelief to weaken their will to continue.  When this happens, the ills of “racism, sexism and homophobia”, always lurking in the background, will resurge.

Pinker notes, for example, that although the rate of suicide is declining everywhere across the world, it is increasing in the United States. Increased welfare, it would seem, is no bulwark against despair. This, of course, is the ultimate duality: Faith in human progress seems to be declining in the first society to provide evidence of the progress itself.

We have looked at examples of how evolution is proceeding through contemporary secular events, as prolifically documented by Norberg and Pinker, but as many of their critics note, they spend little time addressing the downside, the ‘evolutionary risks’ of these examples. While this does not diminish the reality of the progress that they document, neither does it address the risks.

Teilhard believed that religion, properly unfettered from its medieval philosophical shackles, its overdependence on hierarchy, and its antipathy towards science, is well suited to address these ‘downsides’.

We noted last week that Teilhard asserted that religion, if it is to indeed rise to its potential as a tool for dealing with these ‘noospheric risks’, must find a way to enter into a new phase of contribution to this process:

“At the first stage, Christianity may well have seemed to exclude the humanitarian aspirations of the modern world. At the second stage its duty was to correct, assimilate and preserve them.”

We have taken a look at a key facet of religion, ‘morality,’ to understand how this concept can be reinterpreted in terms of building blocks for continued human evolution. How can religion itself be reinterpreted in this same way? Teilhard’s answer to this question was to see a way forward for religion and science to overcome the traditional religion-science duality:

“Religion and science are the two conjugated faces of phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge- the only one that can embrace the past and future of evolution so as to contemplate, measure and fulfil them.”

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at science and religion as ‘partners’ for managing the noosphere, particularly in managing the human-initiated risks to it, but recognizing that traditionally, they have been understood as opposites in a long-standing duality.

Next week we will look a little deeper into how Teilhard understood the potential confluence between these two powerful modes of thinking, and how they could be brought into a fully and integrated human response to the challenges of evolution.

May 21, 2020 – Religion’s Tools for Human Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week be began a look at religion as a tool for managing the noosphere, particularly in dealing with the risks that arise with evolution of the human. We acknowledged the traditional ills that can be seen in various expressions of religion over its six or so thousand years of manifesting itself as a way to make sense of things, but opened the door to re-seeing it, at least in its Western manifestation, as simply an attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’. In this sense, it can be seen as just the ‘right brained’ counterpart to the ‘left brained’ perspectives of science, which, too, does the same.

The question remains, of course: how can such an approach to religion be developed, weighted as it is with its historical attachment to such things as found in the radical and fundamentalist expressions of Islam in the Mideast, as well as fundamentalism, excessive hierarchical structures and dogmatism in the West? Is there a way that the teachings that have led to such obvious ‘noospheric risks’ can be reinterpreted into teachings that will lead away from them?

This week we will begin to look at the roots of Western religion to begin rediscovery of principles which will move us forward.

Rethinking Morality 

   It was in this vein that Teilhard, along with other thinkers such as Maurice Blondel, began to look at the tenets and structure of religion, particularly Western religion, in terms of the new insights offered by science.   Blondel was one of the first Catholic theologians to recognize that science’s discovery of both the depth of universal time and the nature of evolution provided an insight which understood not only the universe but the human as well as ‘dynamic’, as opposed to the medieval worldview which understood both as ‘static Teilhard substantially expanded this insight, understanding how this new thinking not only could bring a new, secular, empirical and more relevant meaning to religion’s ancient teachings, but that Christianity, as one of the first attempts to see religion and reason as sides of a single coin, was well suited to do so.

Teilhard offers five insights into morality as opportunities to not only increase the relevancy of religious teaching, but in doing so increase its value to science. Not only can religious teaching be better grounded in empirical facts, but in doing so can provide a much needed ‘ground of humanity’ to science.

The Evolutionary Basis for Morality

“If indeed, as we have assumed, the world culminates in a thinking reality, the organization of personal human energies represents the supreme stage (so far) of cosmic evolution on Earth; and morality is consequently nothing less than the higher development of mechanics and biology. The world is ultimately constructed by moral forces; and reciprocally, the function of morality is to construct the world.”

   Here Teilhard asks us to recognize that what religion has been trying to accomplish, with its topsy-turvy, noosphericly-risky, ultimately very human efforts has simply been to ‘make sense of things’. In this attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’, it has used the slowly accumulated understanding of the noosphere provided by intuition, metaphors and dreams, but impeded by egos, fears, and ambitions.

He attaches no particular stigma to the fact that we’re already some two hundred thousands of years into human evolution, and in no way are we ‘there yet’.

While considering that evolution is ‘a work in progress’, he sees morality as a tool to ‘construct the world’. Conversely this calls for us to ‘construct morality’ even as we ‘articulate the noosphere’.

Properly understood, morals are the building blocks of the noosphere, by which we ourselves are ‘built’.

The Evolution of Morality

“Morality has until now been principally understood as a fixed system of rights and duties intended to establish a static equilibrium between individuals and at pains to maintain it by a limitation of energies, that is to say of force.

   Now the problem confronting morality is no longer how to preserve and protect the individual, but how to guide him so effectively in the direction of his anticipated fulfillments that the ‘quantity of personality’ still diffuse in humanity may be released in fullness and security.”

   Here Teilhard introduces two insights: First the most tangible way that morality ‘constructs the world’ is by clarifying the structure of the universe so that we can better understand it. Secondly, it offers a clearer understanding of how we are to make the best use of it in unlocking the fullness and security that is still diffuse in us.

   Put another way, as we better understand morals, we better understand the noosphere, and become more skilled at cooperating with its forces to actualize our potential.

The Morality of Balance (appropriate to a static universe) vs the Morality of Movement (appropriate to an evolving universe)

“The morality of balance is replaced by the morality of movement.

– (As an example) The morality of money based on exchange and fairness vs the goodness of riches only if they work for the benefit of the spirit.(advance human evolution)”

A secular example of such a shift in perspective can be seen in the examples of human evolution in human affairs today, as enumerated by Norberg. One of the facets that he identifies is a distinct correlation between the rise of human welfare in developing countries and their increase of GNP. This is a concrete example of Teilhard’s insight into the potential of secular wealth to improve human welfare as a metric of human evolution. Norberg echoes Teilhard’s belief that ‘the morality of money’ can evolve from seeing donated money as a measure of morality (charity) to understanding the application of personal freedom and improved relationships as necessary for a society to increase its wealth (GNP) and as a result, increase the welfare of its citizens.

As a direct corollary of this insight, Teilhard reinforces his assertion that morality must evolve from proscription to prescription if it is to fulfill its potential in fostering our personal evolution towards more completeness (autonomy and person-ness). Effectively he sees the need to move

“Individual morality (from) preventing him from doing harm (to) working with the forces of growth to free his autonomy and personality (person-ness) to the uttermost.”

   In Teilhard’s new insight, morality must now be recognized as a tool for increasing personal freedom and enhancing relationships, not as a hedge against evil to ensure our salvation.

Religion, Morality and Complexification

“By definition, his religion, if true, can have no other effect than to perfect the humanity in him.”

   Here Teilhard is delving into the most fundamental role of religion. As technology certainly can be seen to improve human welfare, it has no expertise at improving the unique human characteristics of personal freedom and personal relationships which are necessary to insure the innovation and invention at the basis of its expertise. He goes on to say,

“At the first stage, Christianity may well have seemed to exclude the humanitarian aspirations of the modern world. At the second stage its duty was to correct, assimilate and preserve them.”

The most appropriate role for religion Is as a tool for management of the noosphere. The deepest claim to authenticity for a religion is to be recognized as a tool for the evolutionary advancement of the human person, and through him the advancement of humanity.

Morality As A Basis For Dealing With The Noosphere

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

   Here Teilhard is succinctly stating one of his basic tenets of the understanding of human evolution: Once put in an evolutionary context, all concepts which are pertinent to the continuation of human existence begin to present themselves as aspects of the single, unified and coherent thing that they truly are.

The Tool Set

In the same way that government must establish and safeguard the building blocks of society, such as Jefferson’s assertion of the person as the basis for society…

in the same way that medicine must understand physiology to diagnose illness to be able to prescribe treatment…

in the same way that technology must understand metal structure to build a bridge…

religion must recognize its role as a tool for understanding the noosphere to be able to assist us in living it in such a way that we maximize our potential for being fully and authentically human.

The Next Post

This week we took a look at Teilhard’s insights into the concept of morality andhow it can be seen as a tool for continuing our evolution as humans.

Next week we will begin to look at what is needed by religion if it is to begin to realize its potential as ‘co-creator’ of the future with science.

May 14, 2020 – Religion as a Tool for Understanding the Noosphere

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a second look at Teilhard’s first step of managing the Noospheric Risks to human evolution by better understanding it. We saw how a deeper understanding of the structure of the Noosphere, the milieu of human enterprise, involves recognition of and cooperation with the universal agent that for fourteen billion years has invested itself in the continuing rise of complexity that has eventually given rise to humans.

As we have seen over the past several weeks, this rise is no longer solely based on biological and instinctual processes, it must now be consciously grasped and capitalized upon if it is to continue in the human species. The ‘noospheric risks’ which we have identified must be consciously overcome if human evolution is to continue.

A major step in understanding the noosphere so that those risks can be managed, as Teilhard suggests, is to ‘articulate’ it, to understand how it works to effect our continued evolution, both in ourselves as well in our societies.

One such tool is, properly understood, religion. This week we will take a first look at religion to understand how it can be seen as a tool to achieve such a goal.

Why Religion?

One of the foundational concepts of the great Western awakening known as “The Enlightenment” was the diminishment of religion’s role in society and government. One of the results of this diminishment was the rise of atheism, which placed many of the world’s ills (eg ‘Noospheric risks’) at the doorstep of organized religion. Both the leading Enlightenment thinkers, and the atheists which foll0wed them, valued objective, empirical thinking over the subjective and intuitive intellectual processes that had informed medieval Western thinkers. As we have discussed many times, the rise in ‘left brain’ thinking began to surpass that of the ‘right brain’ as a method of ‘articulating the noosphere’.

Given the many ills stemming from religious teachings that can be seen today in the Mideast governments, infused with radical and fundamentalist expressions of Islam, as well as Western religions weighted down by fundamentalism, dogmatism, and excessive hierarchical structures, It would seem that these post-Enlightenment perspectives are indeed superior to traditional religion in helping us make sense of what’s happening in the noosphere, and how to navigate our way through it.

Can there be a way that religion can be seen as a tool for helping us ‘articulate the noosphere’ or is it destined to end up in the dust bin of history: a perspective that has ‘seen its day’ but is no longer relevant in this new and technical milieu?

One way to look at this question is to see it as evidence of yet another, very fundamental ‘duality’. We have looked at the concept of ‘dualities’ from the perspective of evolution previously in this blog. Jonathan Sacks, like Teilhard, saw such dualities as a way of seeing things as opposites, such as ‘this world’ vs ‘the next’, or ‘natural’ vs ‘supernatural’. In Teilhard’s insight, most dualities simply reflect an inadequate understanding of such concepts, resulting in ‘cognitive dissonance’, and can be overcome with the application of an appropriate context.

From the traditional perspective, science and religion are often seen in terms of such a duality. Dualities often reflect a mode of seeing in which ‘right brained’ and ‘left brain’ perspectives, empiricism and intuition, are understood as ‘opposites’. To see them thusly is to overlook the fact that there is only a single brain, although it may have many modes of operation.

Teilhard’s method of resolving ‘dualities’ is simply to put them into a single context, as he does with ‘evolution’. In such a context, the ‘opposites’ now appear as ‘different points in a single integrated spectrum’. By this method, the underlying coherence that exists in the two ‘opposites’ can now be understood.

So, applying this insight to the question above can now reframe it: “How can the legitimate ‘right brained’ perspective offered by religion be seen to help us make sense of things, in the same way that the ‘left brained’ perspectives of the Enlightenment helped us to understand the cosmos.”

As we saw in our series on Norberg’s ‘Progress’, the human actions of innovation and invention, obviously the fruit of ‘left brain’ activity, nonetheless turn on the pivot points of personal freedom and human relationships, which are much more the domain of the ‘right brain’. So, on the surface, it would seem essential for these two modes of human thought to operate less like the commonly understood ‘opposites’ than as the two facets of the single thing that biology shows us that they are.

Earlier in this blog, I have suggested that one measure of increasing human evolution is the skill of using the neocortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of the lower (reptilian and limbic) brains. Just as important is the corollary of using the whole neocortex, both left and right lobes, intuition and empiricism, in making sense of things.

As the above example from Norberg shows, the skill of articulating the ‘right brained’ concepts of personal freedom and relationships, while essential to our continued evolution, is not something we can learn from science. Religion, as religion is commonly understood, is not up to the task either. Traditional Western religion has only slightly evolved from its medieval perspectives, and as such would seem to offer little to a partnership with science in the enterprise of ‘articulating the noosphere’. For religion to be relevant to the task of extending Teilhard’s approach of understanding difficult questions by putting them into an evolutionary context, it must itself evolve. A similar challenge to science also exists: for science to expand its reach to the human person, it must recognize the ‘spirit’.

Note that I am using this term ‘spirit’ in Teilhard’s context. ‘Spirit’ is simply the term we use to address the agency by which matter combines in evolution to effect products which are increasingly complex. As Teilhard puts it

“…spirit is neither super-imposed nor accessory to the cosmos, but that it quite simply represents the higher state assumed in and around us by the primal and indefinable thing that we call, for want of a better name, the ‘stuff of the universe’. Nothing more, and also nothing less. Spirit is neither a meta- nor an epi- phenomenon, it is the phenomenon.

   Spirituality is not a recent accident, arbitrarily or fortuitously imposed on the edifice of the world around us; it is a deeply rooted phenomenon, the traces of which we can follow with certainty backwards as far as the eye can reach, in the wake of the movement that is drawing us forward.”

The Evolutionary Roots of Western Religion

Re-reading the Christian New Testament with Teilhard’s evolutionary context in mind offers a starting place for such evolution. There are many unprecedented concepts in the ‘New Testament’ that have been poorly carried forward in the evolution of Christian theology, such as:

  • Understanding the presence of God in all created things (Paul) ,and particularly in the human person (John), which is contrary to a God eventually taught as ‘external’ to both the universe at large and to the individual person as well.
  • Understanding that we are bound together by a force which fosters our personal growth and assures the viability of our society. (Paul)
  • Recognizing that this growth enhances our uniqueness while it deepens our relationships.
  • Recognizing that this uniqueness gives rise to the characteristic of human equality (Paul)), as opposed to the preeminence of hierarchy

So a first step toward maturing religion would be a return to its evolutionary roots, many of which have sprouted anew in secular organizations, as so brilliantly seen in Thomas Jefferson’s reinterpretation of these evolutionary roots in purely secular terms. We must be able to rethink religion.

Rethinking Religion

As we have seen, one of Teilhard’s key insights was that to be able to manage our journey through the noosphere, we must first understand it. The entire history of religion shows it to be our first attempt to do so. Born in an era which depended on intuitive insights and instinctive reactions, the early religions were simply extensions of the clan lore which formed the base for the societal structures that came into being. They all reflected the need to stabilize the ever-increasing size, density, and diversity of human society. All of the early myths and stories reflected the common understanding that the world had always existed, and that it had existed in manifestations that had only superficially changed over the years.

As we have seen elsewhere in this blog, these early noospheric insights held sway for thousands of years until the “Axial Age”, some 700 years BCE. These new perspectives, with their tendrils of early Greek thinking, did not begin to compete with the traditional mode of thinking until the eleventh centrur, when more empirical and objective perspectives began to appear in the West.

When this happened, the highly metaphorical insights into the composition of the noosphere began to change into an increasingly empirical and therefore secular understanding of first the noosphere itself and then the universe which surrounds it At the same time, the universe began to be seen less as static and more as dynamic.

The clash between the neo-think offered by the nascent scientific evidence and the prevalent static and intuitive beliefs which still reflected medieval scholasticism is well documented, and to some extent still goes on today. These beliefs offer profoundly opposed insights into the composition of the noosphere, and reflect the significant dualism that underpins modern attempts to understand it. So it comes as no surprise that today we find it difficult to unravel these two threads to find a way to re-spin them into a single strand.

In such a single strand, the concept of morality moves beyond the dualistic religious basis for a secure society and a roadmap to successful entry into the next life, and into a set of guidelines which ‘articulate the noosphere’ in such a way that we insure our continued evolution into states of greater complexity.

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at religion as a tool for helping us understand the structure of the noosphere as a step to managing its risks. Next week we’ll continue this theme, taking a look at how religion has traditionally ‘articulated the noosphere’, and how Teilhard sees a shift needed in the religious concept of ‘morality’ to be able to provide ‘seeds’ for a more evolved, and hence increasingly fruitful, articulation.

May 7, 2020 – How Is Human Evolution A Continuation of Cosmic Evolution?

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at a way to deal with the ‘noospheric’ risks, suggested by Teilhard: to better understand the noosphere (the milieu of human thought and enterprise) itself and what part we play in it.

In a nutshell, Teilhard saw that over its fourteen or so billion years of existence, evolution of the universe can be seen to follow the basic principle by which matter enters into more complex (and hence less probable) organizations under the influence of the basic ‘energy of becoming’ which is built into the ‘stuff of the universe’.   He sees this principle manifesting itself explicitly in the increasing complexity of this same ‘stuff’ over time, and therefore sees how this energy is reflected in in human lives as we participate in our own evolution.

Last week we looked at Teilhard’s graphic of the ‘spiral’ as a way of seeing how matter not only evolves, but in doing so it ‘converges’ as its capacity for unification becomes more pronounced through the first eight or so billion years. This week we will see how this convergent rise continues through the ‘life era’, and to its current state of ‘consciousness aware of itself’.

The Conscious Spiral

Last week we saw how evolution proceeds through ‘discontinuities’ in which new and unprecedented functionalities appear at key steps. These new functionalities not only show themselves in their greater potential for union, but also in increased facilities such as influence over environment, mobility, vitality and potential for further increase in complexity through future unions.

While the above manifestations of evolution occur in scientifically verifiable steps, each of them represents a highly discontinuous step from the preceding plateau of evolution. On an evolutionary time scale, the transition to each new state of complexity can be seen to occur at an increasingly rapid pace. This increasing convergence of the spiral can even be seen to be active in the stage of entities aware of their consciousness (humans).

Last week we looked at this phenomenon in the ‘material’ realm of ‘pre-life’. Recognizing that Teilhard makes no sharp distinction between this ‘pre-life’ realm and the ‘life realm’, we can see how this rise of evolution through discontinuous steps spills over into it and continues its rise into the ‘realm of consciousness’.

While the earliest days of humanity are only vaguely understood, it is possible to roughly track this convergence of the spiral of evolution as it morphs into human history (all dates approximate):

  • Very early humans began to invent intuitive modes of thinking, based on instincts and clan relationships some 200,000 years ago
  • The evolution of primitive ‘laws’ of society evolve from clan norms about 15,000 years ago
  • ‘Axial Age’ concepts of person and society emerge from primitive concepts into ‘philosophies’ based on intuitions and instincts 3,500 years ago
  • ‘Left brain’ (empirical) modes of thinking arise in Greece from the traditionally universal ‘Right brained’ (intuitional) thinking of earlier systems some 3,000 years ago.
  • Merging of left and right ‘modes’ of neocortex functions begins with the introduction of ‘left brain’ thinking into the legacy ‘right brained’ mode as Jewish-inspired Christianity becomes more influenced by Greek thinking 2,000 years ago
  • Scientific/empirical thinking emerges from the Christian right-left merge 1,400 years ago
  • The ‘Enlightenment’ emerges from the prevalent right-brained, post medievalism at the same time as establishment of the personal as locus for the juridical (Jefferson) three hundred years ago
  • The abrupt increase in human welfare, documented by Norberg, begins one hundred fifty years ago.

In each of these ‘discontinuous bursts’ we can see Teilhard’s three ‘vectors of increasing complexity’ at work in the human species:

  • Societies are all initially similar to the less complex entities which preceded them
  • They all in turn effect an increase in both the vitality and potential for union from those that preceded them
  • Each new step required a new and more complex way of human relationship, increasing differentiation, and leading to increased vitality and power to unite.

It’s also important to note the timeline: each discontinuity in the above list took less time to effect its step increase in complexity than the preceding.

The Continuity Beneath the Discontinuity

Thus, while Teilhard notes the occurrence of discontinuity in evolution, he also shows how underneath these discontinues lies a basic fundamental, continuous current which powers the ‘axis of evolution’. He notes that at each such step, several things happen no matter which stage of evolution we are addressing:

  • The evolved element of ‘the stuff of the universe’ (atoms, molecules, cells, neurons, humans) rises not only in its complexity, but in its uniqueness. Each new appearance, while initially retaining its similarity to its parent, becomes sharply distinguishable from its precedent.
  • This characteristic is very important to the recognition that human evolution occurs in the same way that all steps have occurred in universal evolution. As Teilhard puts it: “True union differentiates”

This applies to evolution at every phase, from the Big Bang to the human person.

Thus, an important step in understanding the noosphere is to recognize that our lives are powered by a cosmic agent by which, to the extent that we can recognize and cooperate with it, we will be lifted ever upward. In Teilhard’s words:

“..I doubt whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.”

   Understanding this connects us to the fourteen billion year process which has raised the universe, as Richard Dawkins observes, “into its present complex existence”.   So, if we are to understand the noosphere, as Teilhard suggests as a step towards managing its risks, we need the ‘scales to fall from our eyes’ so that we can not only take in the breadth and scope of the universe, but recognize that we fit into it naturally, as a child to a loving parent.

The Next Post                         

This week we took a second look at ‘understanding the noosphere’ in terms of a rising, converging spiral, this week looking at the nature of the spiral as it rises from ‘complexifying matter’ by way of ‘enriching spirit’. Teilhard shows the current state of human evolution to be a stage in a sure and steady continuation of such rise over the preceding fourteen or so billions of years of universal existence. As such, we can now see that the basic nature of our lives is nourished and assured not only of survival but increasing fullness by this personal agent of evolution. All that is necessary, he asserts, is for us only to open our eyes to it, recognize it as active in our lives, and learn to cooperate with it if we are to be successful in dealing with the ‘noospheric risks’.

Having taken a closer look at those risks which can impede human evolution, and looked at a better understanding of the ‘noosphere’ as a start to managing them, next week we will return to the core topic of this blog, ‘reinterpretation of religion’, to see how religion can be employed to build on Teilhard’s “clearer disclosure of God in the world” to assure our future.