In the potential collaboration between science and religion to lead us forward, what part can science

play?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Jonathan Sacks, former British Chief Rabbi, understood the potential role that religion could play with science in the further evolution of humans on this planet.

This week, we will look at the ‘other side of the coin’ to see his thoughts on the potential role of science.

Religion’s Need for Science

Just as the left- brained perspectives of science are in need of the right-brained balance of religion, as implicitly recognized by Norberg, so the perspectives of religion are in need of the left-brained balance of science.

The claims of all forms of religion are based on metaphorical beliefs, many of which cannot be held by those who are powering the ‘progress’ curve outlined by Norberg. As we saw in the case of Thomas Jefferson, he systematically stripped the gospels of such ‘miraculous’ teachings to reveal what he considered to be the bedrock of “The Teachings of Jesus”. He then applied them to his underlying (and asserted as ‘self-evident’) assertions of the value, equality, and dignity of the individual human person.

Many educated persons believe that scientific insight will eventually replace religion as the basis of human action. It is certainly true that in the past two hundred or so years, many religious teachings have become unacceptable due to the rise of empiricism, such as the formal blaming of the Jewish race for the death of Jesus, the seven literal days of creation, and so on. The continuing value of religion in many parts of the world is due more to its ability to push back on state corruption and savagery than its teachings on reincarnation and virgin births. But with the increasing evolution of state structures more benign to the human person, such as that found in democracies, the underlying importance that religion places on the individual human person plays a larger role.

For religion to continue to play a role in this evolution, it must be seen as relevant. As Sacks sees it:

“Religion needs science because we cannot apply God’s will to the world if we do not understand the world. If we try to, the result will be magic or misplaced supernaturalism.”

The Road to Synthesis

So, how do we get to the point where right- and left- brain process are balanced? Sacks addresses what happens when we don’t:

“Bad things happen when religion ceases to hold itself answerable to empirical reality, when it creates devastation and cruelty on earth for the sake of salvation in heaven. And bad things happen when science declares itself the last word on the human condition and engages in social or bioengineering, treating humans as objects rather than as subjects, and substitution of cause and effect for reflection, will and choice.”

He recognizes that science and religion have their own way of asking questions and searching for answers, but doesn’t see it as a basis for compartmentalization, in which they are seen as

completely separate worlds. Like Teilhard, he sees the potential for synergy

“..because they are about the same world within which we live, breathe and have our being”.

He sees the starting point for such synergy as “conversation”, in hopes that it will lead to “integration”. From Sacks’ perspective:

“Science needs religion, or at the very least some philosophical understanding of the human condition and our place within the universe, for each fresh item of knowledge and each new accession of power raises the question of how it should be used, and for that we need another way of thinking.”

Even though Sacks doesn’t place his beliefs in an explicitly evolutionary context, he does envision a more whole human person which emerges as a result of a more complete balance between the influence of the ‘right’ and ‘left’ brains (modes of engaging reality). In this sense, he echoes Teilhard’s belief of ‘fuller being’ resulting from ‘closer union’.

The Next Post

This week we have seen how Jonathan Sacks echoes Teilhard’s call for a fresh approach to the potential synergy between religion and science. Like Teilhard, he concludes that the success of the West requires a balanced synergy between science and religion if it is to continue.

Next week, we will apply Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ to ‘rethinking’ both religion and science, by seeing how both must continue to evolve if they are to hold up their end of the relationship.

In the potential collaboration between science and religion to lead us forward, what part can religion play?

Today’s Post

Last week we looked at the last four of Teilhard’s eight ways of seeing the natural confluence between religion and science. As we saw, Teilhard understands them to be natural facets of a synthesized understanding of the noosphere, and therefore potentially of benefit to an increased insight into human life.

This week we will see how another thinker sees this potential for a closer and more beneficial relationship. Jonathan Sacks, former British Chief Rabbi, comes at this subject from a slightly different perspective. While Teilhard situates traditional dualities into an evolutive context to resolve them, Sacks understands them in the context of the two primary modes of human understanding intuition and empiricism.

Sacks On the Evolution of Religion

Teilhard of course placed religion (as he does all things) into an evolutionary context as one strand of ‘universal becoming’. His understanding of the mutual benefit of a synthesis between science and religion is focused on their paired value to the continuation human evolution.

Sacks, in his book, “The Great Partnership”, stays closer to home, focusing on religion’s potential to help us to become what we are capable of becoming. From this perspective, religion, properly understood and applied, is a mechanism for our personal growth in the context of our collective growth. Sacks sees the evolution of human thinking in the unfolding of religion and the evolution of language, and thus as a slow movement towards a balance between the ‘left’ and ‘right’ hemispheres of the human brain. In this way, the cooperation between religion and science can be seen as simply a more balanced and harmonious way of thinking in which the traditional ‘dualities’ (as seen by both Teilhard and Sacks) can be resolved.

Science’s Need for Religion

Sacks’ perspective is strongly resonant with Johan Norberg’s insight as he sees the freedom of the human person as the cornerstone of improving human welfare. Like Jefferson, he also recognizes the role that religion has played in the evolution of society:

“Outside religion there is no secure alternative base for the unconditional source of worth that in the West has come from the idea that we are each in God’s image. Though many have tried to create a secular substitute, none has ultimately succeeded.”

The ‘none’ to which he refers can of course be seen in those countries which tried to create a “social order based on materialistic lines”. These examples can be seen in Stalinist Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the Kim family’s North Korea.

As he sees it, the problem arises when an alternative to religion’s value of the human person is sought. Sacks locates the failure of such searches in science’s inability to address human freedom. As he sees it:

“To the extent that there is a science of human behavior, to that extent there is an implicitly denial of the freedom of human behavior.”

He sees this duality at work in Spinoza, Marx and Freud, who argued that human freedom is an illusion, but notes that “If freedom is an illusion, so is human dignity”. Hence when human dignity is denied, the state is no longer viable.

Sacks agrees with the success of science in overcoming the superstitions that so often accompany religion, but notes that it does not replace the path to ‘meaning’ offered by religion. He summarizes these two facets of human understanding:

“Science takes things apart to understand how they work. Religion puts things together to show what they mean.”

For science to be effective, its statements must be objectively ‘proved’, and the means of doing so are accepted across the breadth of humanity. Both the need for such rigor and the success of its application can be seen in the many aspects of increased human welfare (effectively advances in human evolution) as seen by Johan Norberg. Clearly the ‘scientific method’ is a significant root of human evolution.

However, Norberg recognizes the cornerstones of human evolution as human freedom, innovation and relationship. These three facets of the human person are not ‘provable’, and which existence, as we saw above, is even denied by many ‘empiricists’. Since these facets are active in the sap of evolution, they also must be in the root.

At the level of the human person, Sacks observes that

“Almost none of the things for which people live can be proved.”

He offers the example of ‘trust”:

“A person who manages the virtue of trust will experience a different life than one to whom every human relationship is a potential threat.”

Therefore, any group in which all the members can trust one another is at a massive advantage to others. As evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has argued, this is what religion does more powerfully than any other system.

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at the insights into Jonathan Sacks on the value of religion to human evolution, and of how these values, while critical to this evolution, are not to be found in our other great system of thought: science.

Next week, we will look at the other side of the coin to see how science offers its own critical value. These two perspectives, when seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’, can lead to an insight in which they can collaborate in insuring our path to the future.

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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.

 

Overcoming the barriers to a partnership between science and religion

Today’s Post

Last week we once again noted the evolutionary progress that can be seen in the secular world, effecting a startling increase in human welfare over the past hundred fifty years. We also noted that the continuation of this trend is not inevitable. It is possible for ‘noospheric risks’ to undermine the continuation of human evolution. As Teilhard asserts, however, the potential of science and religion, properly focused, conjoined and applied, can emerge in the form of tools which will help us make our way. He sees this potential in eight insights.

This week we will look at four of his assertions to understand the potential for religion’s confluence with science.

The Evolutionary Potential of Religion

Teilhard notes that Christianity, of all the world’s religions, in its fundamental teachings is well placed for such a partnership with science to overcome ‘noospheric risks’.

His first observation is that Christianity differs from other religious perspectives in its primacy of the person:

“.. the (Christian) doctrine of the personal universe … is already virtually realized and lived within Christianity.”

Like Teilhard, Jefferson recognized this personalistic focus of Christianity, and saw it as necessary for the success of a democratic form of government. Teilhard recognized the value of attaching primacy to the concept of the person not only in human affairs, but as necessary for understanding the entire evolution of the universe. Teilhard first identifies complexity as the key metric of universal evolution, then goes on to trace how this complexity eventually manifests itself as person-ness in evolution’s most recent stages on this planet.

Second, he notes how this primacy of person is captured in the Christian concept of ‘incarnation’, which can be seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ as an impetus for the development of ‘the person’ that is the cornerstone to continued human evolution:

” The degree to which Christianity teaches and offers a prospect of universal transformation can never be sufficiently stressed. By the Incarnation God descended into nature to ‘super-animate’ it and lead it back to Him: this is the substance of the Christian dogma.”

Here Teilhard’s concept of God as the fundamental agent of the rise of complexity that powers universal evolution expands and quantifies John’s core Christian insight that “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”. The Christian claim that the universal agent of evolution’s increasing complexity is somehow present in each of its products is unique among all the world’s religions. It clearly reflects the belief that whatever is happening in our lives as we grow is powered by a universal agency for such growth.

Third, Teilhard also takes note of how the core elements of Christian theology are not only compatible with science’s understanding of the ‘natural’ world, but they can also be enhanced by it. Teilhard, like Blondel before him, understood how the scientific concept of evolution offered a more complete understanding of religion’s ancient teachings:

“… we are apparently beginning to perceive that a universe of evolutionary structure… might well be…the most favorable setting in which to develop a noble and homogenous representation of the Incarnation.”

“… does not (Christianity) find its most appropriate climate in the broad and mounting prospect of a universe drawn towards the spirit? What could serve as a better background and base for the descending illuminations of a Christogenisis than an ascending anthropogenesis?”

“Drawn towards the spirit” of course invokes Teilhard’s reinterpretation of ‘spirit’ as the agent of ‘increased complexity’. Through his ‘lens’, Christogenisis can be seen as the personal aspect of this increased complexity. With this observation, Teilhard ‘closes the loop’ between a science which struggles to understand the fundamental force of evolution by which the intensity of its complexity is increased (“drawn towards the spirit’) and a religion loosed from its Medieval moorings of superstition, hierarchy and a spirituality which has become detached from the noosphere.

In his fourth insight, Teilhard addresses science with his belief that to live the noosphere we must understand it.

“Man is… an object of unique value to science for two reasons.

(i) (The human person) represents, individually and socially, the most synthesized state of order which the stuff of the universe is available to us.

(ii) Collectively, he is at present the most (fluid) point of the stuff in course of transformation.

For these two reasons, to decipher man is essentially to try to find out how the world was made and how it ought to go on making itself. The science of man is the practical and theoretical science of hominisation. “

The Next Post

This week we saw our four of Teilhard’s insights illustrate how his ‘lens of evolution’ can be used to explore the potential for a partnership between science and religion.

Next week we will look at four more of Teilhard’s insights to see how he 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.