How can religion be seen as a tool for ‘articulating the noosphere’?

 Today’s Post

Last week we saw how religion can be seen as an attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’, in which the ‘laws’ of our personal and cultural evolution are sought and by which we can assure our continued personal and cultural growth.   This week we will see at how looking at them through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ at the level of religion can slowly inform our cultural standards.

From Articulating the Noosphere to Managing Human Evolution

Society has long struggled to both understand the principles which underlie a ‘successful’ society and to codify these principles into what we now understand as ‘laws’.  As chronicled by Nick Spencer in his book, “The Evolution of the West”, religion’s role in this historic process has been dualistic.  In many cases it has found itself trapped in the perpetuation of its financial, hierarchic, legalistic, and power scaffolding, and in other cases it has contributed to the fundamental concepts by which the delicate balance between personal and cultural civilization has successfully evolved.
Thomas Jefferson captured both arms of this dualism.   While his approach was to discard the ‘otherworldly’ aspects of the “Stories of Jesus” and focus on Jesus as a secular moralist, he nonetheless drew the basis of his understanding of human nature and personal freedom from these teachings.  The result, of course, was a cornerstone for a set of laws which has underpinned a truly ‘successful’ society.
Larry Siedentop, in his book, “Inventing the Individual’, traces the history of ideals that form the basis of Western values.   It’s not so much that these ideals are absent in Eastern thinking, but do not enjoy the primacy seen in the West.  He summarizes the ‘articulation of the noosphere’ as it has emerged in the West:

• Each person exists with worth apart from their social position
• Everyone deserves equal status under secular law
• Religious belief cannot be compelled
• Individual conscience must be respected

As Teilhard (and many others) have noted, the Western evolution of understanding of the person and society is becoming a standard embraced elsewhere:
“…from one end of the world to the other, all the peoples, to remain human or to become more so, are inexorably led to formulate the hopes and problems of the modern earth in the very same terms in which the West has formulated them.”
Johan Norberg, in his book, “Progress” documents in detail how this formulation, initially rising in the West, has made its way into many ‘developing’ countries.

The Perennial Philosophy

While considerable diversity and frequent contradiction is paramount among the threads of thought seen in the evolution of religion, Aldous Huxley saw common elements in all of them.  He defines the immemorial and universal ‘Perennial Philosophy’ which permeates all religions as:

“…the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being.”

Seeing this semi-theological assertion through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, we can see that this concept of the ‘Perennial Philosophy’ reflects the principle which powers the coming-to-be of the universe (the ‘world of things’) and that it is reflected in some way in the core of the human person.
Effectively, this ‘metaphysic’ points the way to the underlying activity by which we have come to be and the guidelines by which we successfully navigate our growth.  The Perennial Philosophy recognizes that there are basic dynamics of human existence which, understood and managed properly, will lead to increased completeness.  The religious and societal norms which have evolved, therefore, reflect our attempt to articulate these dynamics and the activities of understanding and management of them.  By definition, as we evolve as persons and as societies we hope to evolve them in a direction which activates our potential.
Or, as Karen Armstrong puts it in her insights on the many streams of thinking which developed during the ‘Axial Age’:

“The fact that they all (the sages of the Axial Age) came up with such profoundly similar solutions by so many different routes suggests that they had indeed discovered something important about the way human beings worked”.

The theologian, Cynthia Bourgeault, puts it a little differently:

”I think it’s fair to say that all of the great spiritual paths lead toward the same center—the larger, nondual mind as the seat of personal consciousness—but they get there by different routes.”

What’s the Alternative?

Successfully negotiating the continuation of our evolution goes beyond fulfilling our potential.  It is obvious today that human activity also has the potential of contributing to our extinction.  Finding and understanding the ‘laws of the noosphere’ also requires us to adapt to our ever-increasing population and the effects it has on the planet.  One example of the potential of such adaptation is acknowledged by John McHale in his book, “The Future of the Future”:

“At this point, then, where men’s affairs reach the scale of potential disruption of the global ecosystem, he invents precisely those conceptual and physical technologies that may enable him to deal with the magnitude of a complex planetary society.”

It’s not just that we are in danger of destroying our planet, but that even more danger lurks in our ever-increasing proximity to each other.  As we increasingly compress, we are more and more at the mercy of our instincts to defend our space, to keep ‘the other’ at bay, to defend our territory and make sure we get our fair share.  Inventing McHale’s ‘conceptual technologies’ means to develop evolutional strategies that overcome this strong resistance to closeness.

Johan Norberg documents nine distinct examples of such strategy in his book, “Progress”.
In this area it’s essential to our continued evolution for us to develop tactics which “use our neo-cortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of our reptilian and limbic brains.”
These ‘basic dynamics’ and ‘conceptual technologies’, therefore, are what is sought by humans in their attempts to ‘articulate the noosphere’.   Culling them from the enormous and often contradictory cluster of statements of beliefs that have arisen over the long evolution of religion is the main goal of a ‘reinterpretation’ process.
Teilhard offers a concise description of the validity of a person’s belief:

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

The Next Post

So, if we believe that that all expressions of religious beliefs include some elements of the ‘Perennial Philosophy’, what remains is to address them in the light of the perspectives we have developed thus far, then reinterpret them to find such kernels.  Next week we will begin to address the process of ‘reinterpreting religion’.

How can religion be reinterpreted by seeing it through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution?

Today’s Post

In the last few weeks, we have we have seen how Science and Religion, humanity’s two major belief systems, could extend their distinctive insights into a collaborative approach to the single reality in which we live.

Last week we saw how John Haught outlined a path for these two belief systems to become more synergistic, and hence more helpful to our search, in the approach which he termed, “anticipation”.

This week we will move to the next step of this ‘reinterpretation’ by addressing the ‘Root of Everything’

What’s At The Bottom of It All?

Our approach to the underlying causality of everything, the ‘ground of being’, has assumed the perspective of Teilhard with his highly comprehensive understanding of the process of evolution in the coming-to-be of the universe.  This perspective simply recognizes evolution as proceeding along an axis of increasing complexity over time.  Teilhard was one of the few thinkers to see how this process, essential to the fourteen or so billion years which precedes us, still continues in us: in our personal development as well as the development of our species.

He, as well as other thinkers such as Jonathan Sacks, Maurice Blondel and Karen Armstrong, saw the history of religion as the evolving search for the basis of this cosmic agency as it is manifest in personal human life.   As we have seen, this basis of personal life manifests itself as a branch of the cosmic ‘axis of evolution’ as its sap rises through living things.

The Common Threads of Religion

All the evolving threads of religious thought emerged across the multifaceted evolution of cultures and societies as they evolved their understanding of the roots of reality from a coarse animism and a necessary adjunct of the state.  Karen Armstrong, in her book, “The Axial Age” sees this evolution reaching a tipping point with the paradigm shift which can be seen in the period of human history from 900-200 BCE.  As she puts it,

“For the first time, human beings were systematically making themselves aware of the deeper layers of human consciousness.  By disciplined introspection, the sages of the Axial Age were awakening to the vast reaches of selfhood that lay beneath the surface of their minds.  They were becoming fully “self-conscious”. This was one of the clearest expressions of a fundamental principle of the Axial Age.  Enlightened persons would discover within themselves the means of rising above the world; they would experience transcendence by plumbing the mysteries of their own nature, not simply by taking part in magical rituals.…they all concluded that if people made a disciplined effort to reeducate themselves, they would experience an enhancement of their humanity.”

To paraphrase Armstrong and reflecting Teilhard and Sacks, evolution was becoming aware of itself.  Humanity was moving from its evolutionary critical point of ‘awareness of its awareness’ to its ontological critical point of ‘awareness of the principles of awareness’.  This step of “plumbing the mysteries of their own nature” was effectively a step toward understanding the ‘ground of being’ as the principle of what would later be understood by science as ‘evolution’.  While the theory of evolution as we know it today was still thousands of years in the future, nonetheless in the ‘Axial Age’ human persons embarked on a path that recognized the role that human choice played in both personal maturity and the evolution of society.

The fact that the stream of human inquiry has since bifurcated into the manifold strands found in religion and science only illustrates the value of recognizing, understanding, and cooperating with the underlying mechanisms which propel our evolution.  But at the root of it all, such understanding is necessary if we are going to continue to (paraphrasing Richard Dawkins) “raise the world to an increasing level of complexity”.

Teilhard labels this effort as ‘articulation of the noosphere’.  He saw this articulation as requiring two basic insights:

–  the ‘noosphere’ (the milieu of organized human thought) is structured by ‘laws’ by which evolution proceeds in the human species

–  such evolution cannot proceed unless we understand and cooperate with these ‘laws’ in the same way that we are learning to understand and cooperate with the laws of physics, chemistry and biology.

We can see religion, therefore, as the long, rambling, frequently contradictory and many-faceted attempt by the human species to identify these laws and attempt to apply them to human life.  Or, as Karen Armstrong puts it, “…to experience (growth) by plumbing the mysteries of (our) own nature”.  Just as we have come to see evolution as proceeding along the axis of rising complexity, we can now begin to see religion as the attempt to articulate the dimensions and continuation of this axis, marked by the success of its statements in continuing the rise of evolution through the human.

To understand religion, therefore, is to identify, among the diverse threads which can be found among its manifold and often contradictory forms, those statements of belief that, when practiced, move us onto a more complete “enhancement of our humanity”.  This in turn will lead to a society which better fosters such a grasp.

If we’re going to understand religion as an approach to ‘making sense of things’ in a way that helps us to understand things from the integrated perspective of Teilhard and Haught, and hence as a ‘signpost’ to a future in which we activate our potential, we must learn to see in it those insights which aid in such an understanding.

The Next Post

Next week we will continue our process of reinterpretation of religion by looking at religion as an ‘articulation of the noosphere’.  How can religious thought help us to better understand reality so that we can better negotiate our passage to the future?

How Can Religion and Science leverage each other?

Today’s Post

Last week we looked at the two most powerful streams of thought in human history: science and religion.  Nearly everything that can be seen in human society, from norms to laws to technology to human welfare can be attributed to one or the other (and in many cases, both) of these human enterprises.  But as John Haught points out (and Teilhard, Johnathan Sacks and Richard Rohr insist), there are areas in which they must both evolve if they are to continue their contribution to the human evolutionary ascent to fuller being. This week we will continue Haught’s insights into today’s shortcomings of these two systems, and how they can evolve to an integrated resource in which their strengths are leveraged in the great human enterprise.

The Inadequacy of the Two Stories

Haught sees a strong level of superficiality in both science and religion that inhibits relevance to human life:

“So far most (scientific versions of history) have stapled the human story only loosely onto scientific accounts of the earlier cosmological and biological chapters.  They have seldom looked deeply into how one stage interpenetrates the others.”

   He notes how neither of these two legacy ‘Cosmic Stories’ are satisfactory today as the ‘cosmic spark’ which underpins universal evolution is too otherworldly in religion, but overlooked altogether by science:

 “If the analogical (legacy religious) reading is unbelievable- since it has to bring in supernatural causes to explain how more-being gets into the natural world, the archaeonomic (legacy scientific) reading is even less believable since it cannot show how the mere passage of time accounts for the fuller-being that gradually emerges.”

  Haught notes, echoing Teilhard, how it is possible for the increasing discoveries of science to deepen the meaning and relevance of religion:

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

   But

“If analogy cannot make the emergence of life and mind intelligible without bringing in a non-natural mode of causation that lifts the whole mass up from above, archaeonomy is even less intellectually helpful in assuming that all true causes are ultimately mindless physical events, hence that life and mind are not really anything more than their inanimate constituents.”

   Further, Haught notes that both traditional science and religion, with their sights fixed firmly rearward, seem complicit in their disdain for universal potentiality.  He notes that:

“The cosmic pessimism of so many modern intellectuals, it turns out, is a cultural by-product of the implicit despair about the physical universe that had been tolerated for so many centuries by otherworldly, religious readings of nature.”

   It is this pessimism that is at the root of the ‘dangers of the past’ that infect our ‘existential anxiety’.  Science can open our eyes to the immensities of time and space, but in doing so it suggests both an impersonal nature of how they relate in an ultimately material basis of matter.   In doing so, those traditionally spiritual (Haught: ‘otherworldly’) beliefs of religion which have underpinned a positive stance to life in the past can become increasingly irrelevant.

As we learn more from science, beliefs which require unworldly hermeneutics become less relevant to human life, and hence less tenable.

As we have previously seen, and indebted to both Teilhard and John Haught, we delved into a very basic and powerful approach to reinterpretation which highlights the underlying problems of both traditional science and religion in making sense of our lives.

We saw that one aspect of this reinterpretation is simply a shift of perspective from locating ‘meaning’ in the past to positing it in the future.  Again, paraphrasing Haught:

“While traditional religion locates the fullness of being appearing in the past, a ‘timeless fiat accompli’, and science locates it in a set of mathematically perfect principles extant at the ‘Big Bang’, an ‘anticipatory set of eyes’ would see it as a dramatic, transformative, temporal awakening.”

   Or, as the poet Gerard Manly Hopkins saw it, as a

“Gathering to greatness/Like the oozing of oil”.

   But closer to the focus of our search for a story which is more relevant to our lives, Haught uncovers a perspective common to both science and religion:

“Both archaeonomic cosmic pessimism and analogical otherworldly optimism, by comparison, are expressions of impatience.”

   Impatience, an indignant dissatisfaction with our state and that of the environment which surrounds us, is a significant element of our ‘existential anxiety’.  Haught’s insight into this condition explains why neither the comfort provided by religion in the past or the intellectual satisfaction promised by technology for the future are working to ease such a condition.  Even after a read of Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress,” which documents a strong recent surge of improvement in global human welfare, many readers can still protest, “But look at all there is still left undone!”

   What can replace our traditional hermeneutic?  Haught recommends that we respect Hopkins’ “Gathering to greatness” as a good place to start:

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

The Anticipation Story

In his third category of ‘Cosmic Story’, Haught suggests a confluence between science and religion that leverages their strengths and ‘filters out’ their shortcomings.   He refers to this third story as “anticipation”.

“Anticipation offers a coherent alternative to both analogy and archaeonomy.  It reads nature, life, mind and religion as ways in which a whole universe is awakening to the coming of more-being on the horizon.  It accepts both the new scientific narrative of gradual emergence and the sense that something ontologically richer and fuller is coming into the universe in the process.”

   He proposes that such an approach to the nature of the cosmos can also bring about a profound sense of ‘belonging’ once we begin to trust the upwelling of wholeness warranted by fourteen or so billion years of ‘complexification’.

“An anticipatory reading of the cosmic story therefore requires a patient forbearance akin to the disposition we must have when reading any intriguing story.  Reading the cosmic story calls for a similar kind of waiting, a policy of vigilance inseparable from what some religious traditions call faith.  Indeed, there is a sense in which faith, as I use the term…, is patience”.

   Thus, the anticipatory approach to the cosmic story requires a certain patience with the ongoing process of complexification, certain in confidence in a future that somehow will be better than the past.  Placing the universe into the context of becoming requires us to understand that

“Not-yet, however, is not the same as non-being.  It exists as a reservoir of possibilities that have yet to be actualized.  It is a realm of being that has future as its very essence.”

   And, as Haught goes on to say, such an anticipatory perspective also is a factor in moving towards increased synergy between science and religion:

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

   Patricia Albere, author of “Evolutionary Relationship”, echoes this perspective

“..the long history of rising universal complexity suggests that we have only to allow ourselves to be lifted by the evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”.  To do this, “we only have to begin to pay attention”.

   And, as John Haught advises, “to anticipate with patience”.

The Next Post

This week we have looked a little deeper into how science and religion can evolve toward a more powerful integrated tool for managing the risks of evolution that we identified earlier. In doing so, we have approached it from the perspective of John Haught, who contrasts the legacy religious and scientific ‘Cosmic Stories’, but suggests a third, synergistic, insight into human life.  In his perspective, what is warranted as we participate in the flow of human evolution, is a spirit of ‘anticipation’: less a handwringing, indignant demand for faster progress than a recognition of the progress that is being made and a recognition that Albere’s ‘optimization’ is in fact underway in our lives as well as our societies.

But if we are to understand Haught’s suggestion that we evolve our religious thinking from ‘analogy’ to ‘anticipation’, how would our historical approach to religion change?

Next week we will begin a second relook at religion, this time from Haught’s perspective of ‘anticipation’ to sift the ore of traditional belief for the jewels of insight that it offers this exploration.

How do science and religion need to mature to be able to abate the risks of evolution?

Today’s Post

This week we will begin to explore how Teilhard’s lens of evolution and science’s way of making sense of things can offer religion a door to an understanding in which it can recover its relevancy.
With such ‘reinterpretation’, religion can emerge as a new, more relevant, and more immediate referent for personal growth, while science’s field of regard can expand to encompass the energies of personal life.
We will begin by seeing how their two traditional ‘cosmic stories’ can not only move toward increased resonance, but also toward higher synergy as they become more relevant to human life. In doing so, they can become more comprehensive, and collaborate as agencies which foster continued human development.

Retelling The ‘Cosmic Story’

We have seen how an integrated understanding of the cosmos can affect both our lives and our participation in the larger society.  We have also noted the many dualisms that face us as we attempt to integrate traditional principles of wholeness into our lives.  Science and religion obviously represent rich sources of concepts which we can use, but at the same time, both within themselves and between themselves, can be found many contradictions as well as concepts neither helpful nor relevant to human life.
John Haught, Research Professor at Georgetown University, offers a way to look at this situation from the center of what we have been referring to as ‘the terrain of synergy’.  In his perspective, outlined in his book, “The New Cosmic Story”, science and religion represent our two traditional ways of doing this.
In this book, he critiques the ‘stories’ traditionally told by science and religion and argues for a third story which offers an integrated perspective on what is clearly a single, integrated cosmos.
He stands well back from the traditional stories, addressing them as two categories of lore which address the same thing: the cosmos.
• The first category he labels as “archaeonomy” which is the traditional, empirically based, left-brained story told by science.
• The second category is the story told by traditional, intuition-based, right-brained religion, which he labels, “analogy”
He also envisions a third story, slowly emerging today, as we learn more about the universe on the one hand, and become less patient with the dualisms of traditional religion on the other. He labels the third perspective, which offers a synergistic reinterpretation of both, as “anticipation”.  This story is told from the perspective of the ‘whole brain’.
These three categories of stories serve not only as a taxonomy of insights into the cosmos, but also as a guide to understanding our place within it.  He notes that any story which purports to address the universe is, by definition, incomplete if it does not address the human person.  In this he echoes Teilhard, Paul Davies, Jonathan Sacks and Richard Rohr, all of whom we have met previously.

The ‘Archaenomic’ Story

We have looked in some detail at the story which mainstream science tells, particularly at how science, so obviously adept in building technology and increasing our creature comforts, seems to be marking time at the phenomenon of the human person.  In Haught’s telling, and in implicit agreement with Davies and Teilhard,

“The obvious fact of emergence- the arrival of unpredictable new organizational principles and patterns in nature- continues to elude human inquiry as long as it follows archaeonomic naturalism in reducing what is later-and-more in the cosmic process to what is earlier-and-simpler.   A materialist reading of nature leads our minds back down the corridor of cosmic time to a state of original subatomic dispersal- that is to a condition of physical de-coherence.”

And, recognizing this ‘corridor’ as Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’, he goes on to say

“Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ (eg consciousness aware of itself) has been part of the universe from the start.  So hidden is this interior side of the cosmos from public examination that scientists and philosophers with materialist leanings usually claim it has no real existence.”  (Parentheses mine)

   He goes on to comment how such an ‘archaeonomic’ story fails to address the very human characteristics that have emerged in evolution:

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

And, I would add, how little illumination on human happiness.
Not only, as he notes, does the archaeonomic perspective fall short of addressing these very human manifestations of life, but adds a dystopian outlook as well:

“The typical scientific materialist…takes decay to be finally inevitable because the totality of being is destined by what-has-been to end up in a state of elemental, lifeless disintegration.”

He sees this pessimistic perspective as one which ignores the very basis of science: that of evolution:

“(Science) professes to be highly empirical and realistic, but leaves out of its survey of nature the fact that the cosmos is still in the process of becoming.  …the fullness of being, truth and meaning are still rising on the horizon.”

The ‘Analogic’ Story

He is neither sparing of the traditional religious story.
“Analogy has appealed to religious people for centuries, but it remains intellectually plausible only so long as the universe is taken to be immobile.”
He proposes Teilhard’s method of making sense of religion by putting it into the context of evolution:

“Once we realize that nature is a gradually unfolding narrative, we cannot help noticing that more is indeed coming into the story out of less over the course of time, and that it does so without miraculous interruptions and without disturbing invariant physical and chemical principles.  It is intellectually plausible only as long as the universe is taken to be immobile.  The wrongness in religion is a signal that the universe is still far from being fully actualized.”

Next Week

This week we took another look at the human enterprises of science and religion, this time from the insights of John Haught.  In doing so we saw that even though both have played a critical part in the evolution of human society, and in understanding our individual lives, neither perspective is without need of further evolution if the whole of universal existence, and our part in it, is to be better understood.
Next week we will see how Haught sees a path to synergy of both systems that can facilitate such a journey.  In addition to these two ‘stories’, he also sees a third story as slowly emerging today as we learn more about the universe and become increasingly dissatisfied with traditional religion.  He titles this third ‘story’, “anticipation”.
These three categories of stories serve not only as a taxonomy of insights into the cosmos, but also as a guide to understanding our place within it.  In this endeavor Haught echoes Teilhard, Paul Davies, Jonathan Sacks and Richard Rohr.