Today’s Post

Over the past several years we have been tracing the current of evolution as it continues its fourteen billion years of rise in complexity, most recently through our individual and collective lives.  Through the insights of Teilhard de Chardin we have been able to see how God can be understood as the name we give to basis for and the continued principle by which this journey continues.

This week we begin to look at ‘denial’ of the Cosmic Spark.  If it is, as Teilhard asserts, the essential element which has brought the universe into its current state of complexity, can we be assured of its continued presence in our personal and collective lives?

A Recap

This blog addresses the subject of God in ‘secular’ terms; that is without recourse to traditional Western (or Eastern) religious thinking.  This approach opens a fresh ‘hermeneutic’  to making sense of religion by finding ‘reinterpretations’ which square with what we are uncovering about reality through the methods of science.  It is not that religion is basically antithetical to science, but that reality is something that can be approached by both the empirical and intuitional modes of human thinking; the ‘right’ and ‘left’ brains.

In our journey, we have come to see both science and religion pointing to an evolution by which complexity rises over time, and how this complexity makes and remakes its products in ever increasing manifestations of complexity.  In such a way that in the latter phases of evolution, this increase in complexity shows up as increased awareness, consciousness and sphere of activity of the individual products.  Teilhard and many others (such as Johan Norberg) see these characteristics as evidence of increases in human ‘personness’ and ‘freedom’.

In tracing this thread first through the sequentially increasing complexity of pre-life (quarks, electrons, atoms, molecules) then into the much more complex world of cells, neurons, brains and consciousness aware of itself, we have become aware of a common thread which runs through the fourteen billion years of evolution that we are aware of.

We have seen how the earliest Christian teachings (especially Paul) grasped the tangibility of this thread (The ‘Cosmic Spark’) as it rises through our lives, but also how the more Greek Platonic influences tipped the scales toward an ‘outsider’ God, an “over and against of man”, as seen by Blondel.  The ‘intimate’ God, proclaimed by Jesus, articulated by Paul and expressed so eloquently and straightforwardly by John in his statement:

“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”

is not as important to church hierarchy as the God of structure embraced after the Council of Nicea which insured the new Church’s place in the political scheme of things.

Over the past few weeks, we have also seen how such an insight as the Cosmic Spark nonetheless offers a hermeneutic for reinterpreting the basic message of Western Christianity: clarifying its message and deepening understanding of how it can be seen as the sap which flows in all limbs of this ‘tree of life’.  Further, we have seen how acknowledgement of it and cooperation with it not only is essential to continuing human evolution, but in doing so enriches our individual lives.

We have also been able to see, through the volumes of metrics offered by Johan Norberg, how in spite of our general clumsiness in recognizing and cooperating, we humans have become generally increasingly adept at increasing our collective evolutionary complexity.  As Richard Rohr puts it:

 “All of us, without exception, are living inside of a cosmic identity, already in place, that is drawing and guiding us forward. We are all (engaged), willingly or unwillingly, happily or unhappily, consciously or unconsciously.”

   Evidently, it is not necessary that we consciously and systematically uncover the action of the Cosmic Spark in human life to benefit from it.

Or is it?

What Could Hold Us Back?

In spite of our conscious or unconscious ability to move human evolution ahead, we have looked at the impediments that our society has developed which can get in the way.  We saw how a negative strand of thinking has entwined itself in Western Christianity that gives rise to a mistrust of this ‘Cosmic Spark’ and manifests itself in echoes of Luther’s belief that humans are ‘Piles of excrement covered by Christ’, and Freud’s belief that the fundamental nature of the human person is ‘dangerous’, and cannot be trusted.   Consequences of such negativity can be seen in our time in the arrival of the anti-personal regimes of Stalin, Mao and the Kims.

But surely in our resolute resistance to such anti-evolutionary currents, successful thus far in overcoming them, the battle is won?

Unfortunately, as even the most cursory examination of current social norms show, in spite of the tremendous increase of worldwide human welfare as documented by Norberg, general trust of these norms is becoming harder to find in those societies most enriched by it.   Trends in such things as recent elections and current social media show not only an increasing unease with our norms, but a downright prevelance of antisociality which works against cooperation.

History has clearly shown that the benefits of a society in which freedom and innovation prevail are phenomenal, with such benefits as decreases in infant mortality, extensions of freedom to all segments of society, reductions in malnutrition, warfare, disease and poverty.  In spite of such ‘hard’ data somehow a large segment of Westerners, where all these trends began, seemed called to be suspicious, even in downright disbelief, at these benefits.

Today, we see trends in our politics in which we are encouraged to mistrust those Democratic norms which have thus far carried us to such unprecedented levels of human welfare.  Why now, after such a hard-won plateau of welfare, should such anti-evolutionary thinking become prevalent?

Who are we?  Are we indeed untrustworthy carriers of the evolutionary genes which are capable of raising our complexity (read our innate capability to grow as whole human persons)?  Is there anything to Teilhard’s profound trust in the Cosmic Spark, or has this bubble, risen for fourteen billion years, only to burst in our inadequate hands?  Is human nature, as asserted by Freud and Luther, really untrustworthy?  Was there a golden age when we were, as some thinkers claim, ‘one with nature and free from sin’, or is our unease simply the result for looking, for the first time, at the cosmos and recognizing its vast potential?

Richard Rohr reflects both the siren song of the past and Teilhard’s great confidence in the future when he states that

“Paul offers a theological and ontological foundation for human dignity and human flourishing that is inherent, universal, and indestructible by any evaluation of race, religion, gender, sexuality, nationality, class, education, or social position. He does this at a time when perhaps four out of five people were slaves, women were considered the property of men, temple prostitution was a form of worship, and oppression and wholesale injustice toward the poor and the outsider were the norm. “

   But that still leaves us with the question, “Why, with all the evidence of improvement in human welfare, why do we still cling to a pessimism that is capable of eroding the underpins of evolution from beneath us?  Where does what seems to be such an upwelling of mistrust come from and how can it be dealt with?  Is this just another ‘duality’, or is there something more deep-seated and hence more insidious at work?

The Next Post

This week we began a look at the ‘flip side’ of Norberg’s (and Teilhard’s) profound and well documented affirmations of ‘human progress’, which optimism, (if one is to believe in the rising tide of pessimism as found in today’s politics and social media) is not necessarily shared at large.

Next week we will look more closely at this phenomenon.