Today’s Post
Last week we took a deeper look at the skill of using the ‘whole brain’ to assess the ‘noosphere’: further understand our place in it and better understand how we can develop the skill necessary to cooperate with the flow of evolutional energy as it rises through the human species.
This week we will extend this theme of ‘coherence’ to our two great human paradigms of understanding and the ‘hermeneutics’ which we employ in them as we further our attempts to ‘make sense of things’.
Science and Religion: Activities of Two Hemispheres?
As we have seen, the two modes of thought, empiricism and intuition, can be used in opposition, as seen in the many dualities that we have addressed. It’s not that they are in true opposition, but that often one or the other holds sway in the reasoning process. What is necessary for ‘whole brain thinking’ is for each to recognize the need for the other: intuition as the starting point for objective articulation, and empiricism as the infrastructure to verify and clarify intuition.
Ultimately, after all, there is but one reality. As Teilhard says in his Preface to the “Phenomenon of Man”
“Like the meridians as they approach the poles, science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole. I say, “converge” advisedly, but without merging, and without ceasing, to the very end, to assail the real from different angles and on different planes”.
Science and religion are typically seen as left and right brained functions, and the duality of science vs religion is common in our debates. Teilhard’s deep insights into the nature of ‘being’ certainly precipitated heated criticism from both his scientific-oppositional hierarchy and from the predominately anti religionists of science.
However, thinking with the whole brain requires these two perspectives to naturally complete and enrich the other, whether we are addressing reality from the ‘left brain’ empirical perspectives of science or those of the intuitional ‘right brain’ of religion.
From the religious perspective, Teilhard (and Blondel before him) clearly understood how the scientific concept of evolution represented a way to reinterpret traditional religion in a way which clarified the immediacy of God, diluted religion’s superstitious and supernatural aspects and ultimately opened the door for a belief by which humans could more effectively contribute to their personal as well as societal evolution.
From the scientific perspective, Paul Davies, professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, outlines the many ways that science is beginning to articulate religion’s insistence that a cosmic thread of ‘becoming’ rises through all things, and thus offers a door to inclusion of the human in scientific discourse.
We don’t need to be able to empirically understand the nature of the underlying agent of increasing complexity to be able to capitalize on it. The ancients understood enough of it to be able to craft a belief system and the resultant social organization that benefited from it.
Are Religion and Science Compatible?
As Davies moves towards articulating the underlying agent by which the universe ‘complexifies’, he is moving beyond the traditional empiricism of science. He acknowledges the need for an ‘extension’ to traditional science which empirically treats such complexification. Religion needs a similar extension which places this same complexification in a more central focus. Teilhard fits this bill:
“”The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world”
I believe that Davies would reply that:
The true religion is that which recognizes the creative aspect of God in the ever-increasing complexity that occurs with universal evolution.
Davies notes that Einstein didn’t replace Newton’s ‘laws’ with relativity, nor does quantum physics replace the Standard Model of Physics. In both situations, the understanding of phenomenon simply expands from the realm previously described into a realm more recently recognized. As new phenomena are so recognized, new relationships and paradigms are required to address them.
Teilhard does the same for religion. As he goes to great pains to describe, the scientific concept of ‘evolution’ does not require the jettison of religion in the human journey toward completeness. He simply offers an approach to religion that, anticipating Richard Dawkins:
“..divests the word ‘God’ of all the baggage that it carries in the minds of most religious believers.”
He sees the ‘secular side of God’ in fact as the ‘religious side of science’
Thus Davies’ empirical quest for the agency of universal complexity is the scientific equivalent of Teilhard’s intuitional religious quest: the object is ultimately the same, and requires healing of the basic ‘dualism’ between religion and science. The fabrication of such cohesion would equip the human mind a ‘wholeness’ with which it can more adeptly navigate the process of human evolution.
Newton addressed the narrow but essential niche of existence in which we live life. Einstein (relativity), then Planck (quantum physics) expanded Newton’s field of view to the mini- and macro- spheres of the universe: the mega hot and the mega cold, the mini-small and the cosmic large outer reaches of existence of which we are not aware in our day-to-day existence, but which underpin (and overarch) it nonetheless. These three steps have led in turn to the elegant but still incomplete models of the Standard Model of Physics, Relativity and Quantum Physics as science advances in its quest to ‘make sense of things’.
What Teilhard brings to the table is that these visions of reality are all somehow woven into a single cloth of cosmic existence, and what Davies recognizes is the necessity to first acknowledge this single cloth, then go to work expanding Einstein and Planck to the next level of theory. Not a ‘meta’- physics but an extension of Newton, Einstein and Planck to the next level in which the agency of evolution and its universal product of ‘complexity’ becomes not just better recognized but quantified in such uncertain terms that the necessity for our allegiance to the laws which they reveal is unquestionably clear.
In such a way, Teilhard’s vision of ‘coherence’ between science and religion, in which they mature their legacy gifts of understanding into a collective effort “to assail the real from different angles and on different planes”, begins to be less a dream and more of a reality.
The Next Post
This week we took a deeper look at the skill of using the ‘whole brain’ to assess the ‘noosphere’, focusing on the different thinking modes of science and religion, and how it is possible to envision them as Teilhard did, as global “meridians as they approach the poles…, bound to converge as they draw nearer to the pole”.
Next week we will dig a little deeper into what many would consider unlikely: the possibility that science and religion, and the perspectives, viewpoints and hermeneutics which they traditionally represent, are nonetheless simply facets of a single, integrated, and coherent attempt to make sense of the universe in which we live. Is it possible for science to accommodate the intuitions of religion, with its hopes, faith and insistence on love, and for religion to (as Dawkins insists) “..divest the word ‘God’ of all the baggage that it carries in the minds of most religious believers” and accept the scientific discovery of ‘complexification’ as the manifestation of God’s creation?