How can we use Teilhard’s lens to understand religion as necessary to evolution?
Today’s Post
For the past several weeks we have been tracing John Haught’s recognition that both religion and science need to evolve to effect the synthesis necessary to form a tool for dealing with the ‘risks of religion. In this series we have noted that both science and religion clearly have developed ‘tools’ for dealing with our evolution, but that these tools, effective as they have been shown to be, are still a work in progress.
Last week we refocused Teilhard’ lens on religion’s ‘articulation of the noosphere’.
This week we will see at how religion’s side of this relationship must evolve if is to hold up its side of such potential synthesis.
Why Should Religion Evolve?
As Jonathan Sacks sees it, the secularization of Europe happened not because people lost faith in God, but because people lost faith in the ability of religious believers to live life peaceably together. More gradually, but also more extensively, Western Christianity has had to learn what Jews had been forced to discover in the first century: how to survive without power. From his perspective
– no religion relinquishes power voluntarily
– the combination of religion and power leads to internal factionalism, the splitting of the faith into multiple strands, movements, denominations, and sects
– at some point, the adherents of a faith find themselves murdering their own fellow believers
– it is only this that leads the wise to realize that this cannot be the will of God
What is needed, therefore, is for religion to continue to evolve, to recognize that many of the criticisms of the more well-spoken atheists are on target, and that most of the new findings of science only threaten the least reasonable aspects of religion as seen in such things as superstition, biblical literalism, dualism and focus on the afterlife. The fundamental belief in a principle of reality that is ‘on our side’, an evolutionary process in which we can realize our potential, and a recognition of the need for love are only found in religion. They need to be stressed anew for it to recover its relevancy to human life.
How can Religion Evolve?
What inhibits religion’s potential as a tool for ‘making sense of things’? It was only a few generations ago that religion was at the focus of all societies, but most respected polls today show a trend of decline in religion’s importance to society.
Although still clearly in the minority, the atheist voice has risen strongly in this same time frame. One consistent thread of this voice sees the religious viewpoint becoming completely replaced by an objective, materialistic and atheistic worldview in the near future. Popular, learned, and eloquent voices, such as Richard Dawkins, Oxford professor of “Public Understanding of Science”, is one of many who have written copiously of the many contradictions and superstitions that can be found in Western religion as well as a significant lack of grounding in the physical sciences. Science itself contributes to this trend as modern medicine and technology continue to extend their power to improve human welfare.
So, given these trends, how can religion move back to the center of human enterprise, equal to science in its application to the human need to ‘make sense of things’? Maurice Blondel, an early twentieth century French philosopher, addressed the problem of relevance in religion:
“A message that comes to man wholly from the outside, without an inner relationship to his life, must appear to him as irrelevant, unworthy of attention and unassimilable by the mind.”
With this succinct assertion, Blondel not only identifies the heart of the problem, but also opens the door to a path to returning relevance to religion. His observation suggests that this path requires religion to understand and express its beliefs in terms of human life as opposed to providing information about the ‘supernatural’, that which is “wholly from the outside”.
We have discussed religion as a ‘tool’ for us to continue our evolution at both a personal and societal level. Blondel proposes a ‘tool’ by which religion can realize its potential to improve its capability of helping us do just that.
The tool is ‘reinterpretation’.
The Next Post
This week we have seen how Jonathan Sacks echoes Teilhard’s call for a fresh approach to the potential synergy between religion and science. Like Teilhard, he concludes that the success of the West requires a balanced synergy between science and religion if it is to continue.
Next week, we will expand Maurice Blondel’s suggestion of ‘reinterpreting religion’ to recover its relevance to human life.