How can the concept of spirituality be understood empirically?
Today’s Post
Over the last several weeks we have taken our second approach to religion, looking at the fundamental Western concepts of God, Jesus and the Trinity from our secular viewpoint. Starting this week we will begin to apply this same secular approach to the many beliefs and practices which make up the complex but often confusing tapestry of Western religion as found in Christianity, beginning with the concept of ‘spirituality’.
What is Spirituality?
Along with many of the premises of religion, spirituality is a difficult concept to grasp with the empirical tools of science. At the same time the reality of spirituality can be seen to underlie human life in a universal way. As John Haught addresses it
“Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ 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.”
Thus Haught offers us a very rudimentary but nonetheless secular first approach to ‘the spirit, as the ‘interior side of the cosmos’. How can his insight play out in the teachings of Religion?
One of the most fundamental dualities found in traditional religion divides reality into ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’. From this perspective, spirituality exists at the level of the ‘supernatural’, above nature, and while this layer of reality can impinge upon the ‘natural’ world in which we live, it is nonetheless separate and unobtainable ‘in this life’ (another duality).
In following Teilhard in our secular approach, all of reality is understood as a single, unified evolving thing. While there are indeed layers, such as Teilhard’s ‘spheres’ of complexity which unfold over time, at its basis Teilhard sees the universe as united in its basic principles, such as those articulated in the Standard Model of physics. These principles are assumed by science to apply everywhere in the universe, in all phases of its evolution. With Teilhard’s addition of the principle of increasing complexity over time (assumed by science but poorly addressed, as Haught points out above), these principles unite the three major stages of evolution (pre-life, life, life conscious of itself) and thereby account for everything that we can see.
Instead of them being understood as ‘super natural’ (above nature), in Teilhard’s perspective these principles become ‘supra natural’ (supremely natural).
If we define ‘spirituality’ as simply ‘supra-material’, we can begin to see spirituality as simply a milieu which surrounds us. We live our lives enmeshed in intangible but very real fields of such spirituality. These are reflected in our laws, the principles of behavior that shape our cultures, our financial systems and the everyday facets of relationships that inform our lives. As we have proposed many times, the many historical theological concepts boil down to attempts to ‘articulate the noosphere’, to make sense of things. At their root they are nothing more than attempts to articulate these principles so that we can understand and cooperate with them to make the most of our lives.
A secular example of such spirituality can be found in a fundamental axiom of our government. It can be seen at the basis of the idea of a ‘representative government’, and often described as the ‘will of the people’ so essential to democratic governments. While not finding articulation per se in the new American constitution and Bill of Rights, Thomas Jefferson was very clear in his concept of the validity of this ‘consensus in government’:
“I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be other that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master. I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves.”
Jefferson expresses a very revolutionary concept of the human person and his society with these views. Hints of them can be found in earlier attempts to articulate how governance should be undertaken, such as in the Magna Carta, but none expressed as unambiguously as Jefferson’s. At the time, the precedent for government was clearly to trust only in the provenance of royalty in the belief that if government were left to ‘the masses’, so the prevailing opinion said, chaos would result. The belief that a consensus resulting from ‘the masses’ could result in setting the course of the ship of state in a positive direction was indeed very unprecedented.
This ‘will of the people’ is essential to our democratic form of government, but intangible and difficult to quantify. Believing it to the extent that it is established as the basis for government has nonetheless resulted in a form of government that can be clearly seen to be more productive of human welfare than previous forms.
The Evolution of Spirituality
Seeing how such spirituality can be understood as underpinning our very concept of government, we can apply this perspective rearward in time to see the evolution of an idea without material substance:
– the intuition that “we were made in the image of God” expressed around campfires over three thousand years ago
– which evolved into ‘prophets’ with their intuition of ‘rights’ and ‘justice’ against the wrongdoing of the establishment
– to one that recognized love as the energy of unity which effects the uniqueness of the person
– to the adoption of this principle as a way of insuring the cohesiveness of a highly diverse empire
– rising through the many ‘charters’ (contracts between rulers and ruled) of Western medieval and Renaissance society
– to an expression that “all men are created with inalienable rights”, ones not granted by birth, wealth, education, or good fortune, and established as a cornerstone of the constitution of the most powerful nation on earth.
The Next Post
This week we took a first look at the concept of spirituality from our secular perspective, and saw how spirituality can be seen to play a part in the evolution of human ideals and their incorporation into the processes of governance.
Next week we will take a look at the part that spirituality plays in evolution itself.