Monthly Archives: January 2023

January 26, 2023 – Applying Teilhard’s ‘Lens’ to Religion’s ‘Morality’

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   How can religion’s ‘morality’ be reinterpreted as a set of tools to help us move forward?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw two examples from Teilhard’s essay, “The Phenomenon of Spirituality”, in which he saw the need for the continuing evolution of religion’s concept of morality if it is to emerge as an ‘evolutionary tool’.

This week, we will see three more examples .

Rethinking Morality as a Tool for Human Evolution

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 Johan Norberg in his book, “Progress”.  One of the facets that Norberg 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 personness).  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 (personness) 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 necessary for our continued evolution.  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 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 Evolutionary 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 life in such a way that we maximize our potential for being fully and authentically human.

The Next Post

In the past two weeks, we have looked at Teilhard’s insights into religion’s concept of morality to see how it can serve as a tool for continuing our evolution as humans.

Next week we will begin to look at how human history following “The Enlightenment” shows the potential for science and religion to begin to converge as ‘evolutionary tools’.

January 19, 2023 – Religion’s ‘Morality’ as a Tool for Human Evolution

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   Religion is based on ‘morality’.  How can Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help see it as a tool necessary to our evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we 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.  We also opened the door to re-seeing it through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, as simply an attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’; the ‘right brained’ counterpart to the ‘left brained’ perspectives of science.

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 the fundamentalism, excessive hierarchical structures and dogmatism seen in the West?  Is there a way that the teachings that have led to such obvious ‘noospheric risks’ can be reinterpreted into teachings that can mitigate 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 theologians to recognize that science’s discovery of both the depth of universal time and the nature of evolution provided an insight which could be applied not only to the universe but the human person as well.  This new insight showed the universe 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.

In his essay on “The {Phenomenon of Spirituality”, Teilhard offers five insights into the key religious concept of ‘morality’ which can 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 by the findings of science, but in doing so can provide a much needed ‘ground of humanity’ to science.

This week we will address the first two.

 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’ so that we can relate to them more effectively. In this attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’, religion has used the slowly accumulated noosphere provided by intuition, metaphors, and dreams, but impeded by egos, fears, and ambitions.

He is unconcerned by the fact that we’re already some two hundred thousand years into human evolution, and still not ‘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 as we unlock 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 Next Post                              

This week we applied Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to two aspects of religion’s concepts of morality 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 three more such ‘facets’.

January 12, 2023 – Rethinking Religion Through the ‘Lens of Evolution”

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How can seeing religion through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help it become an ‘evolutionary tool’?T

Today’s Post

We have seen how Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ is a potential tool for resolving the ‘dualities’ that have always plagued human evolution.  Last week we saw how focusing this lens on the phenomenon of ‘religion’ will help to see it as one manifestation of this ‘tool’.

This week we will continue our look at religion to see not only how such focusing can take place, but how religion can begin to emerge as a simply an intuitive facet of the empirical tool that science offers.

The Evolutionary Roots of Western Religion

Re-reading the Christian New Testament with Teilhard’s evolutionary context in mind offers a starting place for focusing this lens.  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), 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 applying Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to religion would be to focus on 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 managing manage our journey through the noosphere requires us to 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 earliest religions were simply extensions of the clan lore which formed the base for the societal structures that slowly emerged.  They all reflected the need to stabilize the ever-increasing size, density, and diversity of human society.  All 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.

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 century, 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 give way to increasingly empirical and therefore secular insights 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 emerging scientific evidence and the 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-weave 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.  With it, religion becomes 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 and relevant, articulation.

 

January 5, 2023 – Religion as a Tool for Understanding the Noosphere

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   “How can religion be reexamined through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’?

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 from the perspectives of religion and empiricism.  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, at least on this planet, given rise to humans.

As we have seen over the past several weeks, with the human person, 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 is at work in our continued evolution, both in ourselves as well in our societies.

One such tool is, properly understood, religion.  This week we will begin to use Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to 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 (e.g., ‘Noospheric risks’) at the doorstep of organized religion.  Both the leading Enlightenment thinkers, and the atheists which followed them, valued objective, empirical thinking over the subjective and intuitive intellectual processes that had informed medieval Western thinkers.  As we have discussed last week, the rise in ‘left brain’ thinking began to surpass that attributed to the ‘right brain’ as a method of ‘articulating the noosphere’.

It is obvious that 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 are sources of ‘evolutionary risk’.  This suggests that the 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 mitigate these risks, or is it destined to end up in the dust bin of history?  Is it simply 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 in religion the evidence of many deep seated ‘dualities’.  Jonathan Sacks, like Teilhard, saw such dualities as seeing different facets of a single reality as opposites, such as ‘this world’ vs ‘the next’, or ‘natural’ vs ‘supernatural’.  Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, 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 his ‘lens of evolution’.  In such a context ‘opposites’ now appear as ‘different points in a single integrated spectrum’.  From this perspective, the underlying coherence that exists in the two ‘opposites’ can now be understood.

So, applying this insight to the question above allows us to reframe it: “How can the legitimate aspects of the ‘right brained’ perspective offered by religion be seen to help us make sense of the human person 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 that these two modes of human thought operate less like the commonly understood ‘opposites’ than as the two facets of the single thing that Teilhard’s ‘lens’ shows us that they are.

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 it 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.  Contrary to conventional wisdom, a closer relation to science can aid in the recovery of such relevance, as John Haught asserts.

“…every aspect of religion gains new meaning and importance once we link it to the new scientific story of an unfinished universe.”

   A similar challenge can be made to science: for science to expand its reach to the human person, it must recognize the phenomenon ‘spirit’, as understood in Teilhard’s context.  ‘Spirit’, to Teilhard, 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’.

   Haught sees the opposite side of the coin as he takes note of

“…how little illumination materialistic readings of nature have shed not only on religion but also on life, mind, morality and other emergent phenomena.”

The Next Post

This week we have seen how putting human history into a context of evolution helps us to begin to see how what have been traditional and deep seated ‘dualisms’ can be put into a single integrated context and begin the process of using both our human modes of thought to better understand who we are and how can continue to move ourselves forward.

Next week we will look at this process.