How can two seemingly orthogonal modes of thinking collaborate in our evolution?
Today’s Post
Last week we saw four of Teilhard’s insights we applied his ‘lens’ to explore the potential of a properly refocused science and religion, once conjoined and applied, to emerge in the form of tools which will help us make our way to the future.
This week we will look at the remaining four of his assertions to understand the potential for religion’s confluence with science.
In his fourth insight last week, we saw how Teilhard believed that
“to decipher man is essentially to try to find out how the world was made and how it ought to go on making itself.”
For this to happen, he is suggesting, we must find a way to understand ourselves in the context of understanding the world from such a context that our existence has meaning.
In his fifth insight, he recognizes, however, that the emergence of science was not without its seeming competition with religion.
“To outward appearance, the modern world was born of an anti-religious movement: man becoming self-sufficient and reason supplanting belief. Our generation and the two that preceded it have heard little but talk of the conflict between science and faith; indeed, it seemed at one moment a foregone conclusion that the former was destined to take the place of the latter.”
This sentiment was strongly evident in the earliest claims of the superiority of empiricism over that of intuition, such as that which appeared in the Enlightenment and addressed by Stephen Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”.
However, as Pinker undertakes the slippery subject of personal happiness in this book, he is forced to recognize the significant correlation between meaning and life satisfaction. He fails to note that the empirical nature of science prevents incorporation of personal ‘meaning’ into its insights.
Jonathan Sacks addresses this meaning/understanding dichotomy in his book, “The Great Partnership”.
“Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean. The difference between them is fundamental and irreducible. They represent two distinct activities of the mind. Neither is dispensable. Both, together, constitute a full expression of our humanity. They are as different and as necessary as the twin hemispheres of the brain. It is in fact from the hemispherical asymmetry of the brain that the entire drama of the mutual misunderstanding and conjoint creativity of religion and science derive.”
In his sixth insight, Teilhard, goes on to envision a future relationship between science and religion in which their viewpoints capitalize on Sacks’ potential synergies, and they begin to approach a synthesis in which the ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ content of human evolution are finally recognized as two facets of a single thing.
“But, as the tension (between science and religion) is prolonged, the conflict visibly seems to be resolved in terms of an entirely different form of equilibrium- not in elimination, nor duality, but in synthesis. And the reason is simple: the same life animates both. “
Here Teilhard summarizes his understanding of how the empiricism of science and the intuition of religion, the traditionally understood ‘left’ and ‘right’ brain perspectives that Sacks highlights, can now be seen as two potentially integrated and synthesized human enterprises. Long envisioned as the opposite sides of a deep-seated duality, Teilhard sees them as destined to bring us to a more complete understanding of ourselves and the noosphere which we inhabit.
In his seventh insight, Teilhard summarizes his belief that such synthesis is necessary for the continuation of human evolution:
“Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or 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.”
As we have seen, Johan Norberg, in his book, “Progress”, implicitly agrees when he cites the three factors of freedom, innovation and relationship as essential for the continuation of the human progress, the essence of human evolution. In showing how these three factors are critical to secular progress, he is in implicit agreement with Teilhard that “neither (science nor religion) can develop normally without the other” and with Sacks that “Both, together, constitute a full expression of our humanity”.
In an eighth insight, Teilhard notes that ‘the person’, the current manifestation of universal evolution on this planet, is poorly addressed by science.
“Up to now, Man in his essential characteristics has been omitted from all scientific theories of nature. For some, his “spiritual value” is too high to allow of his being included…in a general scheme of history. For others his power of choosing and abstracting is too far removed from material determinism for it to be possible, or even useful, to associate him with the elements composing the physical sciences. In both cases, either through excessive admiration or lack of esteem, man is left floating above, or left on the edge of the universe.”
For such an oversight to be corrected, Teilhard sees the need for science to widen its scope to include the universal agency of ‘complexification’ including its manifestation in both human and social forms. As Teilhard saw it, the progress of human evolution cannot wait for such phenomenon to become unequivocally understood and empirically quantified. Humanity, here and now, must somehow continue with enough ‘subjective’ understanding for us to to have the confidence to move forward. To Teilhard, this recursive dance of intuition and empiricism must converge for both science and religion to move towards the synergy that he saw as necessary to provide the tools necessary to our continued evolution.
The Next Post
In the last two weeks we saw eight of Teilhard’s insights that underlay his assertion that the continuation of human evolution requires a synergy between science and religion.
We also cited Jonathan Sacks’ insights on these two ‘domains of thought’ and next week will look a little more deeply into how they can better team to assure this continuation.