How does Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help to see the potential connections between religion and science?

Today’s Post

In the last two weeks, we looked at religion’s concept of morality, and saw how Teilhard’s insights offer a rethinking of traditional religion’s potential as a tool for ‘stitching together’ the fabric of society.   Teilhard sees the need for religion’s morality to evolve from proscription to prescription for it to realize its potential as a tool for insuring our continued evolution.  We saw five ways in which he recognized that traditional morality could be understood as a fundamental way for religion to recover its role as a tool for understanding the noosphere, and by doing so to assist us in living life in such a way that we can become fully and authentically human.

This week we turn our focus to the other great human enterprise, science, to begin exploring how a revitalized religion, better focused on an evolving humanity, might better work with an increasingly insightful science in realizing our human potential.

Evolution Everywhere

In addressing Johan Norberg’s extensive data (‘Progress’), we saw how it is possible for us, with eyes properly focused through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’, to recognize threads of this evolution all around us. We saw how Norberg offers, as the Economist identifies, “A tornado of facts” which quantify the many ways that human welfare proceeds by the correct application of human freedom, innovation, and relationship throughout the world.  Norberg’s examples of increased human welfare are without doubt tangible evidence of the ways in which the human species can be seen to continue its evolution today.

We have also seen that Norberg considered human freedom, innovation, and relationships to be essential for such progress to proceed, which is why the earliest examples of this progress appeared in the West, with its unprecedented emphasis on all three.

By the same token, we also noted that these three characteristics are addressed poorly by science, and its companion ‘secular’ disciplines such as economics and politics.   Norberg’s three cornerstones of progress initially appear in the West, as a slowly building consequence of society influenced by its Christian roots in the uniqueness of the person.

When Jefferson asserted that “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves” he was recognizing such uniqueness, but it was not an insight derived from any empirical source.  His inspiration for such an unprovable concept was none other than his own excerpts from the New Testament, known as the “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth”:

 “We all agree in the obligation of the moral precepts of Jesus, and nowhere will they be found delivered in greater purity than in his discourses.”

   Thus, our claim that religion, for all its creaky hierarchy, superstitions, and contradictions, and even its many instances of hostility to Norberg’s three building blocks of freedom, innovation, and relationships, threads can still be found of the current which must be fostered if it is to continue to carry us forward.

We have Jefferson to thank for both a clearer understanding of the noosphere, and how its structure in human affairs has evolved from Enlightenment principles intermixed with Christian values, even though they can initially be seen as “dripping” with the accouterments of medieval worldview.

As Norberg quantifies at length, this objective understanding of the unfolding of human evolution clearly articulates the success of the West in providing a milieu which has effected a degree of stability not only unprecedented in human history, but which has slowly permeated into the rest of the world.

Steven Pinker (“Enlightenment Now”) recognizes how this unfolding can be seen in the West as a “tide of morality” which is effecting an “historical erosion of racism, sexism and homophobia”.  It is not coincidental that these three negative aspects of society have all, at one time (and even today) been paramount in all religions.  Pinker sees in this tide the effect of ‘empiricism’s superiority over ‘intuition’, a sentiment which underpins the beliefs found in the Enlightenment.  However, as do many thinkers influenced by the Enlightenment, he fails to recognize that in the essential beliefs of Jefferson, reflecting those of Jesus, the key kernel which makes such a tide possible is the recognition of the essential importance of the human person.  Without this belief, essentially unprovable and thus ‘intuitive’ rather than ‘empirical’, the tide would not surge, it would ebb.

The Next Post

This week we saw how the ‘Enlightenment’ opened the door to a phase of human evolution in which, as Teilhard envisioned and Johan Norberg documents, human evolution rebounds in terms of increased human welfare.

Next week we will begin to look at what is needed by religion if it is to begin to realize its potential as ‘co-creator’ of the future with science.