How can seeing universal evolution through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ enhance our confidence in life?
Today’s Post
Last week we explored how a shift in perspective in the search for meaning in traditional science and religion can open a more positive stance towards understanding and living out the ‘articulations of the noosphere’. As reflected in the sacraments, values, and morals, we have addressed this stance from
Teilhard’s evolutionary perspective. We saw last week how the concept of Paul’s ‘Theological Virtues’ expresses three key such attitudes which underlay our employment of these articulations.
In the series of posts on discovering the thread of evolution within each of us, which we saw as ‘finding God by finding ourselves’, we examined the thoughts of Carl Rogers, whose optimistic approach to psychology was infused with a secular approach to faith. In this series, we saw how the virtues of Faith, Hope and Love are strongly woven into his insights on human evolution
This week we will explore this weaving as it can be seen in the virtue of ‘Faith’.
The Traditional Approach to Faith
Faith is the first of the virtues to be addressed by Paul and has been traditionally expressed as a ‘belief in things unseen’. As interpreted by the Christian church, it asserts that we must believe in ‘revealed truths’ (eg ideas that appear in our ‘sacred’ texts and as interpreted by the church) which we do not (even often cannot) understand, and that such belief is necessary for a successful eventual passage from this world to the next. In the more conservative Christian expressions, ‘understanding’ is unnecessary for salvation as long as ‘belief’ is present. Since belief is pleasing to God, by this interpretation, it will therefore insure one’s salvation: the entry into ‘the next life’. At the extreme, the more difficult the ‘truth’ is to understand (eg the virgin birth), the higher the value of belief.
Karl Rahner was one of the theologians who influenced the changes of Vatican II. His acute theological insight into identifying issues facing the church as it progressed into the future was resonant with Pope Francis’s current project of ecclesial reform and sharply critiqued this approach to faith.
“We are often told that it is difficult to believe, and by this is meant that the truths revealed by God are beyond human understanding, that they demand the sacrifice of the intellect, and that the more opaque they are to human understanding, the greater the merit in believing them.”
Gregory Baum expands on this critique in his book on Maurice Blondel, “Man Becoming”:
“When Christians have difficulties with certain dogmatic statements, for instance with the those on the Trinity or the eucharist, they are sometimes told by ecclesiastical authorities that there is a special merit in not understanding, in being baffled by a teaching that sounds unlikely, and in obediently accepting a position that has no other link with the human mind than that God has revealed it to men.” “Faith in this context appears as the obedient acceptance of a heavenly message, independently of its meaning for man and its effect on human life.” (Italics mine)
Reinterpreting Faith
As we developed our ‘principles of reinterpretation’, we saw how Maurice Blondel considered that this inability of religion to bring “meaning for man and its effect on human life” was one of the great failures of modern religion, as it severely limited the relevance it could afford to human life. As he saw it:
“Faith in this context appears as the obedient acceptance of a heavenly message, independently of its meaning for man and its effect on human life Man cannot accept an idea as true unless it corresponds in some way to a question present in his mind.”
And, presaging both Teilhard’s recognition of God as manifest in the threads of evolution which are at the core of each life, as well as a principle of reinterpretation of traditional religion, Blondel goes on to say:
“To the man who accepts the Gospel in faith, it is not a message added to his life from without; it is rather the clarification and specification of the transcendent mystery of humanization that is gratuitously operative in his life.” (Italics mine)
As we have discussed earlier, such reinterpretation in terms of human life is necessary for religion to regain its lost relevancy.
On a purely secular level, there are few things more fundamental to human action than ‘faith’. Surely, we act only to the extent that we believe in both our capacity to act and success of the outcome, and this has nothing to do with religion. Our history is filled with ‘acts of faith’ which lead to actions profoundly affecting the evolution of society. We earlier saw, for example, how the evolution of the belief in human equality leads to the West’s practice of democracy.
The difference between secular faith and religious faith can be seen in the question: what is the basis for the act of faith? Why should we believe what we believe? Or as Blondel asks, “what difference does a belief make in our lives?”
In the secular case, faith is built up over time, in a trial-and-error approach in which the consequences of beliefs can be evaluated as positive or negative. Those seen as positive can be filtered through society and passed forward as laws, standards, or practices through the mechanism of culture. An example is those recognized and adopted by society at large. The U.S Constitutional Bill of Rights is the result of such an approach.
The many laws of science are themselves based on secular faith. Science is based on two unprovable beliefs: that the universe is intelligible and that humans are capable of understanding it. Over time, this belief has led to the ‘scientific method’, a sort of set of secular virtues which has proved successful in building our understanding of the universe. Without adherence to these elements of faith, neither Western society nor its pillar of scientific endeavor would survive.
Teilhard’s perspective recognizes that in each of us there is a continuation of the fourteen or so billion years of universal activity that has brought us to this moment. Secular faith is the intuitive, unprovable sense that not only is evolution carrying us along with it, but that its direction is from a past simplicity of the earliest components of matter to a yet unknown future state of complexity and completeness. It is the expectation that while we are as yet unfinished, we are nonetheless embraced by a current that will carry us to future wholeness.
The Next Post
This week we began our look at the stance we can take if we are to live out Teilhard’s ‘articulations of the noosphere,’ beginning with that of ‘faith’. We saw how the religious attitude of faith acquires new relevance if we reorient it from ‘belief in the unbelievable as a condition for being eligible for the afterlife’, to the recognition and trust that the energy of evolution flows through each of us and carries us on to a future state of wholeness.
Next week we will address the second of the ‘Theological Virtues’ that of ‘hope’.