How could a closer relationship with science add to religion’s potential as an ‘evolutionary tool”?
Today’s Post
Last week we saw we saw how the scientific insights reflected in the Enlightenment opened the door to a rebound in human evolution envisioned by Teilhard and documented by Johan Norberg.
This week we will turn Teilhard’s ‘lens’ on religion to see how he understands the potential of a rebound in religion that can work better with science to move us along in our march to the future.
Religion’s Role As An ‘Evolutionary Tool’
And this, of course, is where religion comes in. We have taken a long look at ‘risks’ to the noosphere and saw that even with the unconscious ‘tide’ that Steven Pinker cited last week, there’s no guarantee that it will ultimately prevail over the ‘risks’ to the noosphere that we have identified.
At the basis of these ‘risks’ is the necessity for us to choose to continue to power this tide. It is possible for humans to simply allow fear, pessimism, and disbelief to weaken their will to continue. When this happens, the ills of “racism, sexism and homophobia” recognized by Pinker, always lurking in the background, will resurge.
Pinker notes, for example, that although the rate of suicide is declining everywhere across the world, it is increasing in the United States. Increased welfare, it would seem, is no bulwark against despair. This, of course, is the ultimate duality: Faith in human progress seems to be declining in the first society to provide evidence of the progress itself.
We have looked at examples of how evolution is proceeding through contemporary secular events, as prolifically documented by Norberg and Pinker, but as many of their critics note, they spend little time addressing the downside, the ‘evolutionary risks’ of these examples. While this does not diminish the reality of the progress that they document, neither does it address the risks.
Teilhard believed that religion, properly unfettered from its medieval philosophical shackles, its overdependence on hierarchy, and its antipathy towards science, is well suited to address these ‘downsides’.
We noted last week that Teilhard asserted that religion, if it is to indeed rise to its potential as a tool for dealing with these ‘noospheric risks’, must find a way to enter into a new phase of contribution to this process:
“At the first stage, Christianity may well have seemed to exclude the humanitarian aspirations of the modern world. At the second stage its duty was to correct, assimilate and preserve them.”
In the last two weeks, we have applied Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to a key facet of religion, ‘morality,’ to understand how this concept can be reinterpreted in terms of building blocks for continued human evolution. How can religion itself evolve to become an agency which can “correct, assimilate and preserve them”? Teilhard’s answer to this question was to see a way forward for religion and science to overcome the traditional religion-science duality:
“Religion and science are the two conjugated faces of phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge- the only one that can embrace the past and future of evolution so as to contemplate, measure and fulfil them.”
The Next Post
This week we took a first look at the potential of science and religion to become ‘partners’ for managing the noosphere, particularly in managing the human-initiated risks to it, but recognizing that traditionally, they have been understood as opposites in a long-standing duality.
Next week we will look a little deeper into how Teilhard understood the potential confluence between these two powerful modes of thinking, and how they could be brought into a fully and integrated human response to the challenges of evolution.