How Can God Be Considered as ‘Personal’?
Today’s Post
Last week we addressed the uniquely Western concept of ‘the person’, and asked the question:“Given the perspective of Teilhard and science in general, how can the phenomenon of ‘person’ as understood in the West be brought into resonance with our working definition of God?”:
“God is the sum total of all the forces by which the universe unfolds in such a way that all the entities that emerge in its evolution (from quarks to the human person) each have the potential to become more complex when unified with other entities.”
Is God a ‘person’?
This week we will address this question.
‘Personization’ in Universal Evolution
In Teilhard’s understanding of evolution, the ‘person’ is a product of evolution which emerges as an effect of increasing complexity over long periods of time. If we are to understand God in terms of the definition proposed above, where does the characteristic of ‘person’ come in? If a person is a product of evolution, and God is a person, does this mean God evolves?
To Teilhard, the phenomenon of ‘complexification’ (increasing complexity over time) is the essence of the cosmic upwelling that we refer to as ‘evolution’. Once the agent of complexity is added to the scientific canon of forces as found in the Standard Model of Physics and Biology’s theory of Natural Selection, not only does evolution as we know it become possible but Teilhard shows how this increase in complexity can be seen to lead to the advent of ‘personness’ as found in the human.
As any educated atheist would point out, isn’t this teleology? In teleology, one reasons from an endpoint (the existence of humans) to the start point (the purpose of evolution is to create humans). In such teleology, creation exists for the purpose of making humans. Teleology therefore seeks to rationalize history in terms of what has emerged. Teleology is frequently used by fundamental Christianity, which sees God as intending humanity as the goal of ‘his’ creation. This accusation was discussed back in April 15, 2015.
This post mentioned the statement by Stephen Jay Gould, noted atheistic anthropologist, who asserted that “rewinding the tape of evolution” would not necessarily result in the emergence of the human. He believed that the many random events which have occurred in history, such as asteroid impacts which, by effectively wiping out entire species, cleared the way for the rise of mammals. He suggests that other, different, accidents would have had other different outcomes, which would not have necessarily led to the emergence of humans.
We saw how Gould’s statement nonetheless reflects his belief that evolution would still have proceeded through any combination of such disasters, and would therefore have continued to produce new species, just not necessarily mammals. It does not take into account that such continuation of life would have also have reflected a continuing rise of complexity in order to proceed. Therefore, conditions permitting, evolution would still have had the potential to produce an entity of sufficient complexity to have eventually become aware of its consciousness.
A different play of the tape of evolution which does not produce a human person is only part of the picture. Recognizing that the increasing complexity of any emergent entity would have led to some sort of consciousness is the other part.
Teilhard asserts that this potential for ‘rising complexity’ to eventually lead to consciousness is a phenomenon of the universe itself. While entities recognizable as ‘human persons’ may not be evolving elsewhere in the universe, the probability of the appearance of entities aware of their awareness is not insignificant.
Teilhard, therefore, sees the agent of complexity at work everywhere in the cosmos, and given the appropriate conditions, will raise its constituent matter to higher levels of awareness:
“From this point of view man is nothing but the point of emergence in nature, at which this deep cosmic evolution culminates and declares itself. From this point onwards man ceases to be a spark fallen by chance on earth and coming from another place. He is the flame of a general fermentation of the universe which breaks out suddenly on the earth.” (Italics mine)
Evolution, therefore, requires complexification, which results in consciousness which leads to personization.
So if God is to be understood as the ‘sum total of all forces’ (as proposed in our working definition), and the essential evolutive force is understood as that of ‘complexification’, then, among all the other forces (gravity, electromagnetism, chemistry), God can also be seen in the force of ‘personization’.
‘Personization’ In The Human
So, from this perspective we can see that the human person emerges from evolution not in a single discontinuous step, but instead from a slow accretion of characteristics layered one upon another over a long period of time. Cells evolve from single-cell to multiple-cell entities, adding sensory and mobility characteristics which unite through increasingly complex centers of activity via increasingly complex neural circuits. There is not a single entity in this long line of development that does not proceed from a less-complex precursor.
There are two seeming discontinuities in this process. The first is seen in the appearance of the cell itself. At one instance in the evolution of our world, it is swimming in a primordial soup of very complex molecules. At the next, many of these molecules are functional parts of an enclosed and centered entity, the cell. As Teilhard notes:
“For the world to advance in duration is to progress in psychical concentration. The continuity of evolution is expressed in a movement of this kind. But in the course of this same continuity, discontinuities can and indeed must occur. For no psychical entity can, to our knowledge, grow indefinitely; always at a given moment it meets one of those critical points at which it changes state.”
The advent of the cell is such a ‘change of state’ in which increasing complexity results in something totally different from its predecessor, but still composed of the same basic elements.
The ‘person’ is the second example of such ‘change of state’. Materialists argue that the differences between humans and their non-human ancestors are too small to be of significance, denying any uniqueness to the human person. This is true at the levels of morphology and supported by the evidence of DNA. It is just as true that human persons, through their unique ‘awareness of their consciousness’, are clearly separate from the higher mammals. They represent the outcome from the same significant type of ‘change of state’ as seen in the advent of the cell.
Therefore, while human persons are clearly a ‘product of evolution’, their level of complexity has increased from ‘consciousness’ to ‘awareness of consciousness’. It is in this new level of being that we find ‘the person’. And in finding it, we can now expand our definition of God:
“God is the sum total of all the forces by which the universe unfolds in such a way that all the entities that emerge in its evolution (from quarks to the human person) each have the potential to become more complex when unified with other entities.”
To which we add:
“In the recognition of the comprehensive forces by which the universe unfolds, the one which causes things to unite in such a way that they become more complex, conscious and eventually conscious of their consciousness (eg, the person) can be only be understood as personal.”
As Teilhard sees it, the person is “.. nothing but the point of emergence in nature, at which this deep cosmic evolution culminates and declares itself”. In such declaration, evolution itself can be seen as ‘ultimately personal’. From this perspective, the human person is “…the flame of a general fermentation of the universe which breaks out suddenly on the earth.”
Thus God is not ‘a person’ (by Teilhard’s definition, a product of evolution) but the ultimate principle of ‘personness’.
The Next Post
This understanding of the evolution of ‘personness’, while locating the personal agency of evolution in the sum total of evolutionary forces, answers the question “Is God a person?” It does however lead to the question of a human-God ‘relationship’. Humans are learning how to align themselves with many of the other aspects of ‘the ground of being’, which accounts for human evolutionary succe3ss thus far. How can such awareness of the personal aspect of these forces be seen to provide a basis of similar alignment?
Next week we will address this side of the question of personness, and explore how the concept of God as an agent of ‘personization’ can be extended to that of understanding ‘him’ as an agency of evolution with which we can have a relationship.