Overcoming the barriers to a partnership between science and religion
Today’s Post
Last week we once again noted the evolutionary progress that can be seen in the secular world, effecting a startling increase in human welfare over the past hundred fifty years. We also noted that the continuation of this trend is not inevitable. It is possible for ‘noospheric risks’ to undermine the continuation of human evolution. As Teilhard asserts, however, the potential of science and religion, properly focused, conjoined and applied, can emerge in the form of tools which will help us make our way. He sees this potential in eight insights.
This week we will look at four of his assertions to understand the potential for religion’s confluence with science.
The Evolutionary Potential of Religion
Teilhard notes that Christianity, of all the world’s religions, in its fundamental teachings is well placed for such a partnership with science to overcome ‘noospheric risks’.
His first observation is that Christianity differs from other religious perspectives in its primacy of the person:
“.. the (Christian) doctrine of the personal universe … is already virtually realized and lived within Christianity.”
Like Teilhard, Jefferson recognized this personalistic focus of Christianity, and saw it as necessary for the success of a democratic form of government. Teilhard recognized the value of attaching primacy to the concept of the person not only in human affairs, but as necessary for understanding the entire evolution of the universe. Teilhard first identifies complexity as the key metric of universal evolution, then goes on to trace how this complexity eventually manifests itself as person-ness in evolution’s most recent stages on this planet.
Second, he notes how this primacy of person is captured in the Christian concept of ‘incarnation’, which can be seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ as an impetus for the development of ‘the person’ that is the cornerstone to continued human evolution:
” The degree to which Christianity teaches and offers a prospect of universal transformation can never be sufficiently stressed. By the Incarnation God descended into nature to ‘super-animate’ it and lead it back to Him: this is the substance of the Christian dogma.”
Here Teilhard’s concept of God as the fundamental agent of the rise of complexity that powers universal evolution expands and quantifies John’s core Christian insight that “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”. The Christian claim that the universal agent of evolution’s increasing complexity is somehow present in each of its products is unique among all the world’s religions. It clearly reflects the belief that whatever is happening in our lives as we grow is powered by a universal agency for such growth.
Third, Teilhard also takes note of how the core elements of Christian theology are not only compatible with science’s understanding of the ‘natural’ world, but they can also be enhanced by it. Teilhard, like Blondel before him, understood how the scientific concept of evolution offered a more complete understanding of religion’s ancient teachings:
“… we are apparently beginning to perceive that a universe of evolutionary structure… might well be…the most favorable setting in which to develop a noble and homogenous representation of the Incarnation.”
“… does not (Christianity) find its most appropriate climate in the broad and mounting prospect of a universe drawn towards the spirit? What could serve as a better background and base for the descending illuminations of a Christogenisis than an ascending anthropogenesis?”
“Drawn towards the spirit” of course invokes Teilhard’s reinterpretation of ‘spirit’ as the agent of ‘increased complexity’. Through his ‘lens’, Christogenisis can be seen as the personal aspect of this increased complexity. With this observation, Teilhard ‘closes the loop’ between a science which struggles to understand the fundamental force of evolution by which the intensity of its complexity is increased (“drawn towards the spirit’) and a religion loosed from its Medieval moorings of superstition, hierarchy and a spirituality which has become detached from the noosphere.
In his fourth insight, Teilhard addresses science with his belief that to live the noosphere we must understand it.
“Man is… an object of unique value to science for two reasons.
(i) (The human person) represents, individually and socially, the most synthesized state of order which the stuff of the universe is available to us.
(ii) Collectively, he is at present the most (fluid) point of the stuff in course of transformation.
For these two reasons, to decipher man is essentially to try to find out how the world was made and how it ought to go on making itself. The science of man is the practical and theoretical science of hominisation. “
Next Post
This week we saw our four of Teilhard’s insights illustrate how his ‘lens of evolution’ can be used to explore the potential for a partnership between science and religion.
Next week we will look at four more of Teilhard’s insights to see how he 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.