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’.

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’.

How can seeing universal evolution through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ enhance our confidence in life?

Today’s Post

Last week we explored how a shift in perspective in the search for meaning in traditional science and religion can open a more positive stance towards understanding and living out the ‘articulations of the noosphere’. As reflected in the sacraments, values, and morals, we have addressed this stance from

Teilhard’s evolutionary perspective. We saw last week how the concept of Paul’s ‘Theological Virtues’ expresses three key such attitudes which underlay our employment of these articulations.

In the series of posts on discovering the thread of evolution within each of us, which we saw as ‘finding God by finding ourselves’, we examined the thoughts of Carl Rogers, whose optimistic approach to psychology was infused with a secular approach to faith. In this series, we saw how the virtues of Faith, Hope and Love are strongly woven into his insights on human evolution

This week we will explore this weaving as it can be seen in the virtue of ‘Faith’.

The Traditional Approach to Faith

Faith is the first of the virtues to be addressed by Paul and has been traditionally expressed as a ‘belief in things unseen’. As interpreted by the Christian church, it asserts that we must believe in ‘revealed truths’ (eg ideas that appear in our ‘sacred’ texts and as interpreted by the church) which we do not (even often cannot) understand, and that such belief is necessary for a successful eventual passage from this world to the next. In the more conservative Christian expressions, ‘understanding’ is unnecessary for salvation as long as ‘belief’ is present. Since belief is pleasing to God, by this interpretation, it will therefore insure one’s salvation: the entry into ‘the next life’. At the extreme, the more difficult the ‘truth’ is to understand (eg the virgin birth), the higher the value of belief.

Karl Rahner was one of the theologians who influenced the changes of Vatican II. His acute theological insight into identifying issues facing the church as it progressed into the future was resonant with Pope Francis’s current project of ecclesialreform and sharply critiqued this approach to faith.

“We are often told that it is difficult to believe, and by this is meant that the truths revealed by God are beyond human understanding, that they demand the sacrifice of the intellect, and that the more opaque they are to human understanding, the greater the merit in believing them.”

Gregory Baum expands on this critique in his book on Maurice Blondel, “Man Becoming”:

“When Christians have difficulties with certain dogmatic statements, for instance with the those on the Trinity or the eucharist, they are sometimes told by ecclesiastical authorities that there is a special merit in not understanding, in being baffled by a teaching that sounds unlikely, and in obediently accepting a position that has no other link with the human mind than that God has revealed it to men.” “Faith in this context appears as the obedient acceptance of a heavenly message, independently of its meaning for man and its effect on human life.” (Italics mine)

Reinterpreting Faith

As we developed our ‘principles of reinterpretation’, we saw how Maurice Blondel considered that this inability of religion to bring “meaning for man and its effect on human life” was one of the great failures of modern religion, as it severely limited the relevance it could afford to human life. As he saw it:

“Faith in this context appears as the obedient acceptance of a heavenly message, independently of its meaning for man and its effect on human life Man cannot accept an idea as true unless it corresponds in some way to a question present in his mind.”

And, presaging both Teilhard’s recognition of God as manifest in the threads of evolution which are at the core of each life, as well as a principle of reinterpretation of traditional religion, Blondel goes on to say:

“To the man who accepts the Gospel in faith, it is not a message added to his life from without; it is rather the clarification and specification of the transcendent mystery of humanization that is gratuitously operative in his life.” (Italics mine)

As we have discussed earlier, such reinterpretation in terms of human life is necessary for religion to regain its lost relevancy.

On a purely secular level, there are few things more fundamental to human action than ‘faith’. Surely, we act only to the extent that we believe in both our capacity to act and success of the outcome, and this has nothing to do with religion. Our history is filled with ‘acts of faith’ which lead to actions profoundly affecting the evolution of society. We earlier saw, for example, how the evolution of the belief in human equality leads to the West’s practice of democracy.

The difference between secular faith and religious faith can be seen in the question: what is the basis for the act of faith? Why should we believe what we believe? Or as Blondel asks, “what difference does a belief make in our lives?”

In the secular case, faith is built up over time, in a trial-and-error approach in which the consequences of beliefs can be evaluated as positive or negative. Those seen as positive can be filtered through society and passed forward as laws, standards, or practices through the mechanism of culture. An example is those recognized and adopted by society at large. The U.S Constitutional Bill of Rights is the result of such an approach.

The many laws of science are themselves based on secular faith. Science is based on two unprovable beliefs: that the universe is intelligible and that humans are capable of understanding it. Over time, this belief has led to the ‘scientific method’, a sort of set of secular virtues which has proved successful in building our understanding of the universe. Without adherence to these elements of faith, neither Western society nor its pillar of scientific endeavor would survive.

Teilhard’s perspective recognizes that in each of us there is a continuation of the fourteen or so billion years of universal activity that has brought us to this moment. Secular faith is the intuitive, unprovable sense that not only is evolution carrying us along with it, but that its direction is from a past simplicity of the earliest components of matter to a yet unknown future state of complexity and completeness. It is the expectation that while we are as yet unfinished, we are nonetheless embraced by a current that will carry us to future wholeness.

The Next Post

This week we began our look at the stance we can take if we are to live out Teilhard’s ‘articulations of the noosphere,’ beginning with that of ‘faith’. We saw how the religious attitude of faith acquires new relevance if we reorient it from ‘belief in the unbelievable as a condition for being eligible for the afterlife’, to the recognition and trust that the energy of evolution flows through each of us and carries us on to a future state of wholeness.

Next week we will address the second of the ‘Theological Virtues’ that of ‘hope’.