Today’s Post

Last week we returned to the focus of this blog, ‘The Secular Side of God’ by beginning a summary of how Teilhard and others have opened the door to an understanding of the basic agent of evolution.   When Richard Dawkins states that God could be considered a’ “basis for a process which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence” (‘The God Delusion”), not only does he offer a way to clarify and refocus the fundamental concepts of religion but a clarification of science as well.

This week we will continue this summary by exploring how this new approach offers religion a new relevancy not only to human life, but in doing so, to its role in the continuation of human evolution.

So What Happens to God in the Teilhardian Shift? 

Many Christian thinkers critical of Teilhard base their case on the idea that a God relegated to the role of ‘energy’ begins to approach theDeistic concept, that of a God who ‘winds the universe up’ and without further interest or involvement, turns it loose.  In this model, God is distant and uninterested in human affairs.  It retains the Christian concept of God as “a person” (albeit very powerful), but denies the essential Judeo-Christian idea of ‘intimacy’ with ‘Him’.

This critique overlooks the basic concept of energy, particularly as it can be seen in the light of evolution’s tendency toward increased complexity.  Acknowledging this energy, as Teilhard did,  not only retains the Christian idea of intimacy with God, but returns it to the level seen in the Gospel stories of Jesus, removing, for example, the medieval concept of saints as ‘intersessionaries’ who ‘negotiate’ with God on our behalf.  In the vision of both Teilhard and John (‘He who abides in love abides in God and God in him”) there is simply no hard distinction to be made between Blondel’s God and our person.  As Blondel puts it,

 “It is impossible to think of myself…over here, and then of God, as over against us.  This is impossible because I…have come to be who I am through a process in which God is involved.”

  In Teilhard’s insight, the energy which moves evolution forward manifests itself differently in the different phases of evolution: Basic entities (atoms, molecules) by atomic, gravitational and chemical forces, biological entities by cellular principles, and humans are united by the energy in which we become more whole as we unite, and by which we become more unique as become more whole.

The play of energy in evolution, as understood by Teilhard, initially emerges as forces described by the “Standard Model” of Physics, but becomes more subtle as it interacts with matter more quickly in the forces described by Biology, and currently manifests itself in the forces by which we grow as persons and thus unite with others to form societies.

The degrees of ‘articulation’ of the evolving entities are better understood at the simpler (and older) stages of evolution, but are still unfolding as we learn more about how the universe is composed.  While biology offers still another layer of ‘articulation’, the process by which the purely ‘physical’ evolves into the partially ‘spiritual’ (eg consciousness and more distinctness), the ‘science of the human person’ is much less clear.

This lack of ‘articulation’ of our ‘noosphere’, however, does not keep us from continuing to evolve along Teilhard’s ‘axis’ toward more complexity.  As we have seen in the statistics of Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress”, a simple metric for measuring our evolution is ‘human welfare’, which he describes in great detail.  Such process is not necessarily due to better objective understanding of evolutionary principles, but is nonetheless the result of finding better ways to embrace the ancient concepts of person, freedom and relationship.

Thus, whatever we posit as Dawkins’ “basis for process..to..complexity”, and whether we understand it or not, it is carrying us along.

So how can such a concept of God be seen as compatible with that of religion?

The God That is Essential to Evolution

Teilhard simply focuses on the essential element of whatever composed the ‘stuff of the universe’ at the very first moment of its existence.  Without an agent of evolution by which the elements of which this ‘stuff of the universe’ were composed, it seems obvious that this initial ‘stuff of the universe’ would be ‘dead on arrival’; the universe would be very simple and very static..

The ‘essential element’ of course is the ability of these elements to unite in such a way as to produce increasingly differentiated and complex products.  In their more complex state, the potential of these products to unite and form more complex offspring is also increased.

Seeing the universe as emerging in such ‘cycles of becoming’ leads to the insight that these cycles evolve along a single axis, one of increasing complexity, by which all things are connected by not only their place in the flow, the upwelling, of this basic energy over time.  The increased potential for their uniting at every stage of evolution also reflects a ‘spark’ of the single quantum of energy which flows through them.  This spark, as we shall explore next week, offers still another basis for connection.

In this upwelling, each product of evolution, active as it is in producing future products of more complexity, is thus cooperating with the agency of evolution, and is thus intimately related to other products.

Thus Teilhard’s understanding of God as the essential agent of the universe’s ever-increasing potential for higher potential moves God from a distant progenitor, now retired, uninterested, and thus uninvolved, to an ever-active principle of being which flourishes in each product of evolution, from the quark to the person.

The Next Post 

This week we returned to the question of God, as suggested in the title of this blog: “The Secular Side of God”.  As on all subjects, we followed Teilhard in his hermeneutic of placing all things in an evolutionary context in order to better understand them.  Understanding God as ‘the ground of being’ which powers the universe’s march toward increased complexity offers a starting point toward understanding the manifestation of this complexity as it appears in ever higher states until it reaches (so far) the human person.  This also provides a basis for understanding how God, who is not a ‘person’, can nonetheless be considered ‘personal’.

Next week we will we will examine this claim in more detail.