Today’s Post

For the last several posts we have been exploring the religious concepts of sacraments, values and morals as ‘articulations of the noosphere’: structures of the reality in which we live that when cooperated with can lead us to Karen Armstrong’s “greater possession of ourselves” and Teilhard’s “current to the open sea”.

This week we will continue this exploration into modes of human life which capitalize on these structures: ‘ways to be what we can be’.

The Holistic Perspective

Last week we saw how both the traditional scientific, materialistic, even atheistic perspectives on human existence can be brought into confluence with traditional religious perspectives with a few changes in interpretation.

• Once science expands its understanding of evolution from terrestrial biological phenomena (Natural Selection) to a universal perspective (complexification), evolution can be seen in three distinct phases united by a continuing increase of complexity in its products (pre-life, life, life conscious of itself).  In this more comprehensive perspective, there are indeed ‘articulations of the noosphere’ which foster our continued evolution.
• The theist assertion that morals are absolute imperatives issued from a divine source thousands of years ago requires that these standards of behavior are, as the materialists assert, intelligible, but also that our quest for understanding them is still ongoing.

Or, as Teilhard puts it:

“So long as our conceptions of the universe remained static, the basis of duty remained extremely obscure.  To account for this mysterious law which weighs fundamentally on our liberty, men had recourse to all sorts of explanations, from that of an explicit command issued from outside to that of an irrational but categorical instinct.”

   So putting evolution into an unfolding cosmic context leads to, as John Haught asserts in his book, “The New Cosmic Story” a third, holistic, approach.

 The Third Way

As we saw in the post of September 12, when we addressed John Haught’s three approaches to making sense of reality, he notes that at their roots, both the traditional theistic traditions and materialistic interpretations most often associated with science are rooted in the past.

Science, for its part, continues to search for understanding of the cosmos by looking backwards into the increasingly particulate components of matter and energy.  In science’s ‘Theory of Everything’, success will be declared when we understand every step of the evolution of matter from its initial state of pure energy (the ‘big Bang’) to its current state of highly complex combinations of atoms, molecules and cells.   As Jonathan Sacks puts it, “Science takes things apart to see how they work”.  Such beliefs as random determinism (our thoughts are the result of random firings of neurons precipitated by molecular activity) often lead to a denial of human free will.  In other words, from this perspective meaning is to be sought from, as Teilhard puts it, “The behind and below”.  In this perspective, the future is indeterminate; it is only by understanding the past that we can understand the universe and prepare for the future.

Religion posits the validity of its beliefs in ‘revealed truth’, usually contained in ‘sacred scripture’ written eons ago.  In simpler terms, humans have been given the ‘law’ but consistently fail to live up to it.  From this perspective, the human species will fail in its enterprises, requiring an eventual imposition by God of a theistic and divine government.  While Sack’s observation that ‘Religion puts everything together to see what it means’, is correct, the criteria by which it does so assumes a perfect past from which we are ‘fallen’.

Haught notes that Teilhard (as well as Blondel and Rohr) recognizes that the scientific concept of evolution (when freed from its biological constraints) offers religion a freedom from its ‘chains of the past’, and permits these two classical modes of thinking to be seen to have a level of coherence that the traditional modes deny.  He also notes that the single strongest component of this new approach is simply the clarity that which is brought by understanding the stuff of science and religion in the light of a comprehensive, universal evolutionary process.

Again, from Teilhard:

   “Under the influence of a large number of convergent causes (the discovery of organic time and space, progress in the unification or ‘planetization’ of man, etc), man has quite certainly become alive, for the last century, to the evidence that he is involved in a vast process of anthropogenesis, cosmic in plane and dimensions.”

   So, if we are to find new ways of ‘employing our neo-cortex brains to modulate the instincts of our limbic and reptilian brains’, or more prosaically, ‘becoming what we are capable of becoming’, understanding and living life in terms of the sacraments, morals and values that we have explored can take on new meaning when we begin to understand that we are part of an evolutionary process by which we are brought into ‘greater possession of ourselves’ when we engage in these activities.

To see ourselves caught up in Teilhard’s process of ‘anthropogenesis’ is to recognize that meaning is always to be sought in the future.  No doubt that our bodies can be boiled down to masses of molecules and that the insights of the past are worth our attention, but recognition that we are ‘borne on a current to the open sea’ requires us to look past the ”explicit commands issued from the outside” as proposed by Religion, and the “… irrational but categorical instincts” proposed by Science to a future that, to our opening eyes, is truly open to us.  .  Teilhard proposed a spherical image of the actualizing of potential for Science and Religion to mutually foster our future evolution:

 “Like the meridians as they approach the poles, science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.”

   The shift in our stance with respect to life that Haught explores is one that turns our expectations, hopes and actions, as Teilhard says, “Towards the future”.  This leads us to the religious concept of ‘the virtues”.

The Next Post

This week we have explored how Teilhard’s understanding of cosmic evolution can bring new clarity to both the meanings proposed by materialists as well as those asserted by theists.  Next week we will extend this exploration to the stances that we take when we seek to apply the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ (sacraments, morals and values) to our life.  It makes a difference whether or not we see such articulations as rules to be followed to achieve ‘salvation’,  or the acceptance of the fate of a faceless, indeterministic universe, and we will take a look at such stances in the light of religion’s ‘theological virtues’.