Today’s Post
Last week we went a little deeper on the possibility of synergy between science and religion; one which would enhance and enrich both bodies of thought and contribute to the continuation of our evolution.
However, while Davies and Teilhard offer two very clear examples of thinking about synergy between science and religion, the question can be asked, “what areas of focus could be common to science and religion?” Aren’t they, as claimed by Stephen Jay Gould (and echoed by Richard Dawkins), “two completely different and non-overlapping magisteria?”
Mapping the ‘Terrain of Synergy’
While science’s search for the agency by which the universe becomes more complex will go on for some time, as predicted by Paul Davies, humankind cannot afford the luxury of waiting for an empirical closure on the subject if it’s going to continue its evolution. Our evolution is not only proceeding ‘under our feet’ whether or not we understand it, the rate rate is increasing. Each day that passes seems to demand more choices with the mounting of the pressure of our advancement from instinct to volition.
The list of evolutionary threats seems to grow every day, and each individual risk gives rise to the prediction, “if this trend continues… (fill in your favorite evil)”. Malthus may have been wrong in his prediction, but how do we know that eventually he will be proven right and the curtain of humanity will finally fall?
Therefore it is imperative that we build on those intuitions which have carried us thus far, but with the caveat that they must stay in coherence with the findings of science. The source of these intuitions is religion, properly divested of Richard Dawkins’ “baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers.”
Jonathan Sacks agrees, and goes a little further by identifying some of the many subjects that when addressed would light the way towards a synthesis suitable for mapping a route to the future.
“There may be, in other words, a new synthesis in the making. It will be very unlike the Greek thought-world of the medieval scholastics with its emphasis on changelessness and harmony. Instead it will speak about:
– the emergence of order
– the distribution of intelligence
– information processing
– the nature of self-organizing complexity
– the way individuals display a collective intelligence that is a property of groups, not just the individuals that comprise them,
– the dynamic of evolving systems and what leads some to equilibrium, others to chaos.
Out of this will emerge new metaphors of nature and humanity; flourishing and completeness. Right brain (religious, intuitive) thinking may reappear, even in the world of science, after its eclipse since the seventeenth century.”
This list is echoed, with much more articulation, by Davies. Also note that many of these subjects have long been the object of study and debate by religion. Effectively, Sacks and Davies have begun mapping the territory that, when explored, offer the terrain of ‘synergy’ between science and religion.
Teilhard elaborates on traditional religion as rich ore to be refined into an elixir which enriches human evolution.
“After allowing itself to be captivated in excess by the charms of analysis to the extent of falling into illusion, modern thought is at last getting used once more to the idea of the creative value of synthesis in evolution. It is beginning to see that there is definitely more in the molecule than in the atom, more in the cell than in the molecule, more in society than in the individual, and more in mathematical construction than in calculations and theorems. We are now inclined to admit that at each further degree of combination something which is irreducible to isolated elements emerges in a new order.”
Davies, from the scientific perspective, echoes the insights of Teilhard and predates those of Sacks toward the need for science to expand its reach to include this underlying principle by which the universe unfolds:
“The general trend towards increasing richness and diversity of form found in evolutionary biology is surely a fact of nature, yet it can only be crudely identified, if at all. There is not the remotest evidence that this trend can be derived from the fundamental laws of mechanics, so it deserves to be called a fundamental law in its own right.
The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, so it turns out, is not to be understood as a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles. Rather, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of these new pieces of behavior requires research which is as fundamental as, or perhaps more fundamental than, anything undertaken by the elementary particle physicists.”
Thus both Davies and Teilhard can be clearly seen to “assail the real from different angles and on different planes”. Such an approach as Davies is suggesting would act as an agent which can help religion to “..divest the word ‘God’ of all the baggage that it carries in the minds of most religious believers” from one angle while Teilhard offers the translation of science’s universal insight to the lives of human persons from another.
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, as represented by Paul Davies and Teilhard, and how they illustrate the potential to envision them as Teilhard did, as global “meridians as they approach the poles…,(which) are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the pole”.
While Davies and Teilhard offer two very clear examples of thinking about synergy between science and religion, there is another voice that contributes to this dialog, and that is Jonathan Sacks. Next week we will take a look at his insights to move us along in understanding how ‘thinking with the whole brain’ can be understood.