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 a few 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 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 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”.e refers to
“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 returned to the idea of a ‘Terrain of Synergy’ in our search for the ‘principle of becoming’ which lies at the center of ‘The Secular Side of God”. Last June we looked at religion could be reinterpreted as a tool for managing human evolution. This time 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 hand-wringing, indignant demand for faster progress than a realization 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 legacy 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.