Today’s Post

This week we continue the recap of the blog, “The Secular Side of God” with an overview of the posts which address the evolution of religion.

We left off last week with an overview of evolution itself, seeing through Teilhard’s eyes how the unfolding of the universe can be seen in the increase of complexity over time. Therefore this universal context, since it includes both the infinitesimally small at one end and the consciously personal at the other end, it seamlessly encompasses humans as well as atoms.

Our treatment of this subject can be seen in the posts from 6 August 2015 (Isn’t This Just Deism?) to 26 November 2015 (Part 7- The Rise of Christianity)

Looking at Religion From the Vantage Point of Evolution

This blog assumes Teilhard’s basic hermeneutic that most things can be better understood when put in the context of religion, and his context included the entire universe over the entire span of time to the present. Therefore it is appropriate to approach the complex and multifaceted subject of religion as one of the products of evolution if we are to make better sense of it.

We took a look at such evolution from three perspectives:

• From the vantage point of history
• As the evolution of thinking
• As influenced by human neurology

As history

From the perspective of history, we noted how Matthew Kneale, An Atheist’s History of Belief, saw it: we have evidence of religious belief in the very first stirrings of human thought, addressing healing, controlling the environment, enhancing relationships and coordinating group activities. These four values, articulated in the many diverse and manifold beliefs, were understood as contributing to the quality of early human life.

He traces the evolution of these intuitions at the tribal level to the formation of regulations seen as necessary for the social order of the emerging civilizations. The earliest of such formal guidelines seems to have appeared as early as the 24^th century BCE. The first ‘laws’ to address a relation between humans and deities appears later, and includes prescriptions for rituals, behavior and worship (Judaism).

As The evolution of thinking

It was not until the fourth century BCE that laws begin to appear which addressed relations among different societal groupings that took the place of distinct tribes. The first comprehensive example of which can be found in the Roman laws, which begin to appear as early versions of what we know today as ‘constitutions’.

During this same period, however, a new way of thinking emerged in the East which addressed both human nature and relationships separately from regulating society. The ‘Axial Age’, summarized eloquently by Karen Armstrong in her book by the same name, introduced such concepts as ‘person’, ‘love’, and ‘human potential’. Such intellectual stirring can be seen in Chinese Confucianism, Indian Buddhism, Israeli Monotheism and Greek Rationalism, all of which addressed the basic nature of the human person and explored ‘his’ potential for a fuller life.

All the great concepts of contemporary religion were born during this period, such as the importance of charity, the danger of egoism, the existence of the transcendent and the importance of the human person in the scheme of things.   With such new ideas, humans were becoming ‘self conscious’, aware of their consciousness, and therefore planting seeds in the garden of collective consciousness that would flower a few centuries later in societies which treated all members as ‘equal’.

Other seeds were planted at this time, such as the Greek break from Eastern modes of thinking, as seen in the rise of objectivity and rationality, and the Jewish understanding of the ‘ground of being’ as not only ‘one’ but ‘personal’.

As Influenced by human neurology

Jonathan Sacks, in his book, “The Great Partnership” goes beyond seeing such evolution simply as the development of ideas. He notes that the human brain is made up of two hemispheres, referred to as the ‘right’ and ‘left’ brains. While a neurological fact, it is common to impute human thinking to one or the other, resulting is a general association of ‘emotion’ to the left brain, and ‘reason’ to the right. While he correctly identifies the necessity of the whole brain working cohesively to achieve ‘rationality’, he does acknowledge each hemisphere’s contribution as distinct.

With this approach to human thinking in mind, he sees the historical record prior to the ‘Axial Age’ as more influenced by the ‘right’ brain, and hence more ‘intuitional’. This can be seen in the preponderance of the religious beliefs, which themselves were the basis for what was understood to be the norms of society.

With the Greeks, he theorizes, a movement to thinking with the ‘left’ brain can be seen. As an example of this, he proposes that the shift in writing of the Greek alphabet from ‘left-to-right’ to ‘right- t- left’ was caused by this shift in brain hemisphere thinking.

He further takes note that as a result of this shift, by the third century BCE, Greek and Hebrew (still ‘left-to-right) were not just different languages with different alphabets, they represented orthogonal civilizations, very unlike in their most basic understanding of reality. Departing from the prevalent mode of ‘right brained’ thinking to one more influenced by the ‘left brain’, he sees

“Athens evolved to a ‘literate’ from an ‘oral’ culture”, and in doing so “it became the birthplace of science and philosophy, supremely left-brain, conceptual and analytical ways of thinking”.

The Rise of Christianity

Having established a pathway of the evolution of human thought from the ancient ‘right-brained’ mode to the branching of the ‘left-brain’ mode about six thousand years ago, Sacks goes on to look at how these two great branches continue to evolve. In particular, he notes how, in five steps, these two branches demonstrate their potential for eventually becoming a single branch.

First he notes how in the passages from ‘the stories of Jesus’ seen in the first three gospels (the synoptic gospels), the teachings of Jesus are expressed in typical Jewish lexicon: Jesus makes points by telling stories, as had the many ‘authors’ of the Old Testament.

Then we find Paul restating them into Greek formats: lists, analysis, and most importantly, philosophy. He summarizes Jesus’ teachings into such things as ‘Theological Virtues’ (faith, hope love) and the eight aspects of the ‘Fruit of the Spirit’. He goes on to develop the nascent gospel concept of ‘Jesus as the Son of God’ into his concept of ‘The Universal Christ’. Then, we find that under the Hellenistic influences of Paul, the first ‘New Testament’ emerges in Greek, not Hebrew. Finally, the continued development of Christian theology occurs at the hands of the ‘Fathers’ and the ‘Doctors’ of the Church, all classically trained in Greek philosophy.

Thus, Sacks notes,

“Christianity combined left-hand brain rationality with right-brain spirituality in a single, glorious overarching structure.”

   However, he goes on to see several problems with this attempt to remerge the two branches. He finds that as Christianity develops, while it might carry the evolving insight of human personal and societal potential for continued evolution, its burdensome hierarchy, insistence on its exclusive understanding of truth and creation of many dualities weakens it. He sees these as

“Much more so than Judaism, Christianity divides: body/soul, physical/spiritual, heaven/earth, this life/next life, evil/good, with the emphasis on the second of each. “

As a result, he sees modern Christianity as having effected an increased loss of relevancy as well as an increase in the perceived distance between the human person and the ‘ground of being’. These problems also contribute to the well-known contention between science and religion today.

We will explore this division and the potential for overcoming it later in the blog, but at this stage, how can we take one step back to establish a clearer picture of how these two major currents of thinking are active in human life? How can they be better understood in Teilhard’s hermeneutic of using the context of universal evolution to make sense of things?.

The Next Post

This week we overviewed the six posts on the evolution of religion in which Jonathan Sacks’ understanding of how the evolution of human thinking can be seen in the evolution of religion from its earliest beginnings to the emergence of Christianity.

Having established this look into religion’s evolution, next week we will apply Teilhard’s unique perspective on universal evolution to Sacks’ insights.