Tag Archives: Reinterpretation of Religion

March 24, 2022 –  Mapping the Headwind of Pessimism

Leave a reply

   Two more facets of pessimism in human society today.

Today’s Post

In answering the question, “Why isn’t Teilhard’s optimism better reflected today?”, we have noted how the seemingly existential need for pessimism in human society inhibits the holistic view of life from which Teilhard derives his great optimism.

Last week we looked into three aspects of such pessimism that Steven Pinker sees in human culture today:  the Ubiquity of News, Miscalibration and the Negativity Bias.  In all three could be seen trends today which tend to color our outlook on life in dystopian ways.

This week we will look an additional two facets that he saw at work in this ‘existential’ outlook.

Progressophobia, Part Two

The ‘Wisdom of Pessimism’ – Pinker notes that throughout history, “pessimism has been equated with moral seriousness”.  This can be seen, for example, in the Hebrew prophets who “blended their social criticism with warnings of disaster”.  The best way to be perceived as a prophet, it seems, is to predict the worse, because there’s always something happening somewhere that can be seen to confirm the prediction.

Pinker also notes that

“Intellectuals know they can attain instant gravitas by pointing to an unsolved problem and theorizing that it is a symptom of a sick society.”

   As we saw two weeks ago, the affluence of the children of Billy Graham, popular Protestant speaker of the last century (and many Evangelicals today) is testimony to how financially successful this strategy can be.

Not that all pessimism is bad.   The fact that there are more of us concerned about evils that would have been overlooked in more callous times, itself contributes to the increase in human welfare which Norberg documents in such detail.  The danger that Pinker sees is that

“…as we care more about humanity, we’re apt to mistake the harms around us for signs of how low the world has sunk rather than how high our standards have risen”.

   The ‘high’ of Indignation – This last facet of existential pessimism comes not from Pinker but from recent studies in which brain activity was recorded under different stimuli.  In these studies, the researchers were able to identify which part of the brain ‘lit up’ with different activities.  They noted that when a person was shown information that made them indignant, the same part of the brain responded as when they ate chocolate.  It turns out that being indignant releases the same kind of endorphins, a substance which increases a pleasure not unlike that from eating chocolate.  In a nutshell, indignation feels good.  As my old supervisor at the ‘Bomber Plant’ used to say, “Indignation is the balm that soothes the pain of inadequacy.”

Pinker summarizes Norberg when he cites that

“The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being”

   But he goes on to cite an underlying cause of pessimism due to the fact that

“Almost no one knows about it.”

   The fact that there clearly exists such ‘fruits of evolution’ as seen in Norberg’s facets of global  welfare at the same time that acknowledgement of them seems so rare presents us with yet another ‘duality’.  When Teilhard addresses what he considers to be the risks to the continuation of evolution in the human, he rates such duality high on the list.  Like Pinker, he remarks on what there is to be seen once we have the proper perspective.

“.. I doubt that whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that the is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.”

   Pinker presents us with six distinct examples of such ‘scales’ and how they prevent us from seeing the astounding rate at which our personal and cultural evolution is rising.

The examples that we have seen illustrate the difficulty of developing the skill of using the neocortex brain as a mediator to the instinctual fears that we have inherited from our evolutional ancestors.  It’s not that the fears are necessarily inappropriate, but that an intellectual context, a ‘hermeneutic’, is needed to provide a compass for navigating them.  Failure to successfully navigate them will eventually constitute a failure to continue human evolution on its path of ‘rising complexity’ which leads to the ‘greater consciousness’ which is necessary to the ‘more completeness’ required by the future.

Next Week

This week we took a second look at why the positive view of human evolution so clearly encouraged in the New Testament, recognized by Teilhard as a ‘current to the open sea’ and quantified by the statistics of Norberg, should have to struggle against the dystopian headwind of an endemic ontological pessimism.
Next week we will address a more universal aspect of Teilhard.  As noted many times in this blog, Teilhard proposed using the ‘lens of evolution’ to view reality from a single integrated and comprehensive perspective.  From his perspective, the oft confusing aspects of reality, expressed in the many ‘dualities’ of Science, Philosophy and Religion, can be used as a tool for knitting their many seemingly contradictory cosmic stories into a single fabric.

March 17, 2022 –  The ‘Progressophobic’ Headwind of Pessimism

Leave a reply

   Three facets of pessimism in human society which resist Teilhard’s optimistic vision of the future

Today’s Post

Last week we noted that despite the generally positive aspects of human evolution as postulated by Teilhard and quantified by Johan Norberg, there is a steady undercurrent of belief that things are going from better to worse, leading from more perfect past to a dystopian future.

This week we will look at three facets of this phenomenon in which those who have benefited most from Teilhard and Norberg’s articulation of progress seem to be those that most fail to see it.

Progressophobia In Western Society

Stephen Pinker, in his book “Enlightenment Now”, notes that when Westerners are polled about their opinion of progress in society, a twofold perspective can be seen.  On an individual basis, people seem optimistic about their personal situation, and that of their immediate relationships (family, neighbors, friends), but pessimistic about society at large.  Pinker refers to this as the “Optimism Gap”:

“For two decades…when Europeans were asked by pollsters whether their own economic situation would get better or worse in the coming year, more of them said it would get better, but when they were asked about their country’s economic situation, more of them said it would get worse.”

  This is a puzzling phenomenon: comfortable, secure, educated individuals are unable to project their personal optimism onto their society.   Why should this be so?  Pinker offers a few suggestions.

   Ubiquity of News – We are immersed in news in a way which is truly unprecedented.  Thanks to technology, we receive it not only in ‘real time’ but in unprecedented volume.   As Pinker observes:

“Whether or not the world really is getting worse, the nature of news will interact with the nature of cognition to make us think that it is.”

     And not only does immediate news sell, negative news sells better than positive news, resulting in negative slant.  As an example, Pinker cites a survey showing a ‘negative count’ in the New York Times from 1945 to 2015, in which the use of negative terms in news articles shows a distinctive increase.

Miscalibration – Further, while the result of such a plethora of information might be seen as simply leaving us ‘better informed’, it can also be seen as leaving us ‘miscalibrated’.  For example, we worry more about crime even as (as Johan Norberg documents) crime rates are falling.  As Pinker points out, such information can “part company with reality altogether”.   He cites a 2016 American poll in which

“77% agreed that “Islamic militants operating in Syria …pose a serious threat to the existence and survival of the United States.”

  Pinker notes that such an opinion is not only an example of ‘miscalibration’, it is “nothing short of delusional”.

The Negativity Bias – As in the above examples, such pessimism isn’t just due to skepticism about the data but suggests an ‘unpreparedness’ for the possibility that the human condition is improving.  This is, to some extent, a ‘human original sin’, in which it is easier for humans to imagine a future in which life is degraded by violence, illness, poverty, loss of loved ones or a nearly endless list of woes, than it is to imagine it as uplifted, quality of life improved, relationships deepened, or their future brighter than their past.  Effectively, lack of clarity about the past can be seen to lead to an unpreparedness for the future.

But there’s also a biological factor at work.  One reason for such negative bias is the simple fact that our ‘lower’ (reptilian and limbic brains) continue to stimulate us with the basic urges common to our ancestors, such as fight or flight, hunger, anger or other ‘base instincts’ so necessary for their survival.  Just because evolution has endowed us with a neocortex brain capable of rationally dealing with such instincts (“am I really threatened?”) doesn’t mean that the stimuli from these ‘lower’ brains will cease.

It also illustrates the incomplete maturity of our 200,000-year-old neocortical skills.  Teilhard sees humanity as still in the early stages of its evolution.  He notes that just as the cell emerges in evolution as “dripping in molecularity”, so our human brains emerge as “dripping in animality”.  To put it into perspective, if universal evolution was captured in a thousand pages, the appearance of the human would not occur until the bottom three words of the last page.  Hence Teilhard sees humanity as still in an early evolutionary state very much influenced by the instinctual stimuli which served our ancestors so well.

Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised that after a mere 200,000 years, we have yet to become fully aware of the current that has carried us so faithfully thus far.  Teilhard suggests that as our understanding of the cosmos continues to widen, we will learn to navigate this current more successfully.

“..I doubt that whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that the is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.”

Next Week

This week we took a second look at why the positive view of human evolution so clearly encouraged in the New Testament, recognized by Teilhard as a ‘current to the open sea’ and quantified by the statistics of Norberg, should have to struggle against the dystopian headwind of an endemic ontological pessimism.
Next week we will explore Steven Pinker’s parsing of this ‘headwind’ a little further.

March 10, 2022 –  The Difficulty in Seeing Evolution in Human Life

Leave a reply

   Why is the optimism of Teilhard and Norberg so difficult to see?   

Today’s Post

   In looking into Johan Norberg’s data on human evolution, Teilhard’s optimistic vision of the human’s place in the universe is clearly substantiated.  Norberg documents several objective and fact-substantiated measures of Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’, as it rises through the human species, both in the individual person and the cultural edifices that result.

As both Norberg and Steven Pinker (“Enlightenment Now”) point out, however, this data, while factually supporting Teilhard’s optimism, seems to be poorly echoed in the opinions of those who benefit from it the most.

Teilhard mentions the inevitability of a positive outlook on life when he asserts that

“..I doubt that whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that the is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.”

   But given the amount of pessimism in the world today, it seems evident that either there is little recognition of the ‘universal will’ or that this recognition is not understood as the positive nature of our lives.

This week we will look into what causes such ‘popular dystopia.”

A Quick Look At The History of Pessimism

In looking at the sheer volume of data that Norberg provides, and Teilhard’s insight into the energy of evolution that rises within us, ‘conventional wisdom’, as catalogued by many contemporary polls, shows that nearly all those responding to polls are either unaware of this data or disagree with it.  Steven Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”, noting this rising sap of pessimism, sees in it a sort of ‘progressophobia’, particularly strong in the West, that either ignores data such as that provided by Norberg, or rejects it outright.

Such ‘progressophobia’ isn’t a recent phenomenon. For example, pessimists have always been able to find a basis for their negativity in their sacred books. The parallel depictions of a ‘vengeful’ and a ‘loving’ God, alongside those of a ‘deserving’ and ‘underserving’ humanity in the Bible are obvious.

Based on such readings, it’s not surprising that the founders of the great Sixteenth century Protestant Reformation had a very negative opinion of human nature.  Martin Luther, whose Protestant worldview took root in Europe following the Reformation, saw humans as “piles of manure, covered over by Christ”.  Calvin went him one better, seeing them as “total depravity”.  Freud piled on with his warnings against the core of the human person:  the “dangerous Id”.  Even today, authors such as Yuval Harari, “Sapiens”, can see consciousness, as found in the human person, as ‘an evolutionary mistake’ which will doom us to ‘early extinction’.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement of the late 17th and early18th centuries, on the other hand, emphasized the two major fruits of human evolution, reason and individualism, over tradition.  This emphasis was in distinct contrast to that of the Reformation, which Pinker sees in the writings of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Jung, Heidegger and Sartre.

In the Protestant Reformation, the essential positive message of Jesus seen in the New Testament became secondary to the need to understand the human species as ‘broken’, ‘fallen’ from some previous pristine state, and in need of a future divine intervention (the ‘second coming’) in which humans would be rescued from their ‘fallen’ nature by the same God which created it.

Such recoil against the Enlightenment’s positive perception of human nature was only reinforced as Science began to see the human as an evolutionary phenomenon, evolving aimlessly into the future without the need for divine intervention.

There seems to have been much profit in such dystopian predictions.   For example, with the death of the popular American evangelist, Billy Graham, his children have continued to benefit financially from prophesies of ever-increasing doom, clearly showing that ‘pessimism sells’ even to this day.

Such pessimism can also be seen today in results of polls such as those cited by Norberg.  Even his actual, tangible, and supportable statistics, such as those showing a considerable plummet in the rate of violent crime and poverty, still leaves the majority of Americans seeing their country “heading in the wrong direction”.  Canny populist politicians are quick to capitalize on such pessimism and are very successful at getting elected on platforms in which such an obviously depraved human condition must be closely controlled by strong men (and it’s always a man) such as themselves.

Further, as David Sanger notes in a recent New York Times article, political supporters, known more for their passion than their policy rigor, are ripe for exploitation.   “Make them pessimistic enough”, he is suggesting, “and you’ve got control”.

Next Week

This week we took a first look at why the positive view of the ‘ground of being’ so clearly expressed in the New Testament and recognized by Teilhard as a ‘current to the open sea’ should have to struggle against the dystopian headwind of an endemic ontological pessimism.
Newt week we will explore this ‘headwind’ a little further.

March 3, 2022 –  Teilhard and Norberg on The Direction of Evolution

Leave a reply

   Teilhard is often criticized for his optimistic view of evolution.  How does Norberg substantiate it?    

Today’s Post

In the past several weeks we have seen examples how human evolution can be placed into the context of the unfolding of universal reality as well as how details can be seen in both science and history.  Teilhard was one of the first to attempt this as he encapsulates in his book, “The Phenomenon of Man”. His insights, however, were criticized as ‘too material’ for the Church and ‘too spiritual’ for science.  A criticism found in both milieus found his insights of ‘holy matter’ and ‘a God of Nature’ to be idealistic and naive, and thus unfit for either making sense of reality much less of our place in it.  A particular critique common to both was that, considering the unending evils which surround us, his pervasive optimism was distinctly unwarranted.
Having seen how evolution proceeds through the unfolding of the universe, and how universal causality increases its complexification in the human, how can Teilhard’s optimism, echoed by Norberg, be not only justified, but emerge in human life as a ‘current to the open sea’?

What can we see?

   Teilhard is often accused of having a Western bias in his treatment of human evolution, even to the extent of being accused of racism, because he has simply recognized that

 “…from one end of the world to the other, all the peoples, to remain human or to become more so, are inexorably led to formulate the hopes and problems of the modern earth in the very same terms in which the West has formulated them.”

   With Norberg’s extensive documentation of just how quickly the world is now “formulating the hopes and problems of the modern world” in Western terms, we can see how this is less a statement that the West is ‘superior’ to the East, than a testament to what happens when a seed falls upon a ground prepared to take it.  In human evolution, ideas must start somewhere; they don’t emerge simultaneously everywhere.  The nature of the ‘noosphere’, as Teilhard sees it and Norberg quantifies it, is that ideas propagate naturally when allowed.  The fact that these Western tactics and strategies have taken hold and prospered sooner in the West than in the East is evidence that the human potential for betterment is equal everywhere.

But the caveat must be stressed: “when allowed”.   As we have seen in Norberg’s examples, in those parts of the world, such as North Korea, where individual freedom is “not allowed”, progress has been slow, even negative in some cases.  For example, the anatomic stature of North Koreans has diminished in the past sixty years, compared to South Korea where it has grown to nearly par with the West in the same time frame.  To a lesser extent, this phenomenon can be seen in the resultant loss of human stature in East Germany following its partition after WW II.

Norberg notes in several places, and concludes his book with, the observation that this optimistic history of recent trends in human evolution goes significantly against the grain of ‘conventional wisdom’.

He cites a survey by the Gapminder Foundation which illustrates this:

“In the United States, only five percent answered correctly that world poverty had been almost halved in the last twenty years.  Sixty-six percent thought it had almost doubled.  Since they could also answer that poverty had remained the same, a random guess would have yielded a third correct answers, so the responders performed significantly worse than a chimpanzee.”

   But we also noticed that such an optimistic perception of the human capacity for continued evolution is not shared by a large majority of those in the West that have benefited from it the most.  Why should this be true?  More to the point, what is the risk that such prevalent pessimism will undermine the continuation of human evolution?

Next Week

This week we began to explore the curious denial of progress that seems strongest among those who have benefited from it the most.  If Teilhard’s optimism, backed by Norberg’s data, is correct, this should be a time for rejoicing in our progress instead of lamenting that ‘we’re still not there yet’.

Next week we will look more closely into why this seems to be the case.

February 24, 2022 –  Norberg, Teilhard and the Noosphere’s Role in Human Evolution

Leave a reply

    How Teilhard’s Insights on the noosphere are substantiated by Norberg’s wealth of data 

Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at Teilhard’s concept of the ‘noosphere’ as the most recent layer of universal evolution on this planet.  As John Haught summarizes it in his recent book, “The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin”:

“He (Teilhard) took it for granted that, on our planet at least, natural processes have successively brought about the realm of matter (the geosphere, then life (the lithosphere), then most recently the noosphere, the ‘thinking layer’ of earth history, a network made up of human persons, societies, religions and other cultural, intellectual, artistic and technological developments.”

   We have how Johan Norberg, substantiates this insight of Teilhard with examples in human history of this recurring building and rebuilding of human culture as evidence of human evolution.

This week we will look a little deeper into this aspect of human evolution.

The Noosphere as the Milieu of Human Evolution 

We saw last week how Teilhard understood human evolution as enabling personal ‘fuller being’ to not only emerge from ‘closer unions’ but to rebound into moving our species toward increased ‘fullness’.  As Norberg saw it, this process is much more than one limited to the plane of human relationships as it spills over into cultural evolution.  Teilhard, Norberg and Dawkins all recognize the presence of something in the milieu of “human culture” that influences human behavior in a way that moves it forward.  Dawkins touches on this phenomenon when he says

“Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which in the broad sense can be called imitation.  If a scientist hears or reads about a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures.  If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.”

   This ‘propagation’ requires the existence of a means of sharing this data in such a way that it acquires a life of its own.  Teilhard uses the word, ‘noosphere’ to connote this milieu.

Norberg, reflecting on Steven Pinker’s insights, addresses how Teilhard’s ‘union-being’ dynamic can be understood in terms of human characteristics.

“A couple of hundred thousand years ago, we simultaneously developed three unique traits: intelligence, language and cooperation.  These are mutually reinforcing: incremental improvements in one of them make the other two more valuable, and thus change the social and physical environment- and with it evolutionary pressures for additional adaptions”.

– Intelligence makes it possible to learn and store information and skills

– A grammatically advanced language allows us to communicate this to others so they can build on our experiences and don’t have to make the same mistakes or to reinvent the wheel.

– This gives us both the means and incentives to cooperate with others.”

     Norberg explores this concept of ‘the means’ in his book, ”Open”, where he recounts the rise and fall of nations and empires in our turbulent history.  In each case he notes the three well-known phases of ‘rising’, ‘thriving’ and ‘falling’ that can be seen in their history.  He relates these three phases to ‘opening’, ‘maintaining’ and ‘closing’.  These three phases can in turn be traced to the evolution of the two critical dynamics mentioned above, personal freedom and productive relationships.  In essence, these are simply Teilhard’s ‘fuller being’ that causes the ‘closer union’ that leads to ‘fuller being’.

In his look back at human history, Norberg notes that

“In retrospect, it is easy to see that these advances… made our modern world.  And that openness in politics, economics and culture is the best way of assuring the continued, open-ended search for improvement.”

      As Norberg points out, innovation is most active in countries where the human person has the freedom to exercise their creativity and least active in countries where such activity is undermined by excessive state control.  A key effect of globalization appears in the transfer of innovation to other countries where ineffective government is being replaced by democratic institutions.  In general, he notes, as his data clearly documents, this nearly always has occurred in a West-to-East direction.

Teilhard takes this same look at the noosphere, as he cites the role of the noosphere in history:

“…from one end of the world to the other, all the peoples, to remain human or to become more so, are inexorably led to formulate the hopes and problems of the modern earth in the very same terms in which the West has formulated them.”

     As Norberg sees it, it is less that the West invented these terms, and more that the increasing robustness of the noosphere is enhanced by the evolving Western norms of democracy.  As he sees it, for the first time in human history the ancient insights built up over time by previous waves of civilization are consciously and systematically collected, enhanced, developed, and globalized.  Norberg shows a distinct example of how this can be seen as the insights from Greek and Roman empires were folded into Islamic culture and then rose anew in the European Renaissance.  And both he and Teilhard show in their statements above how this process continues today.

Next Week

This week we have taken a third look at how Norberg’ insights into the spread of human evolution through culture, and how it substantiates Teilhard’s axial role of the ‘noosphere’ in the continuation of human evolution. In the past several weeks we have seen how Teilhard’s remarkable grasp of how cosmic evolution can be seen to continue its rise through the human species.  We have also seen again how Teilhard bases his wonderful sense of optimism on such insights.  If Teilhard is correct, and his insights are substantiated by contemporary secular sources, universal evolution is on track to continue its remarkable journey to a future filled with the promise of ‘fuller being’ for both the individual human person and the species as a whole.

Even the most casual look at the data in which we are daily inundated, however, can suggest a quite opposite view.

Next week we take another look at Teilhard’s optimistic view of the future of humanity.  Why is it so difficult to see?

February 17, 2022 –  Norberg, Teilhard and the Noosphere

Leave a reply

   Norberg’s wealth of data can be seen to substantiate Teilhard’s Insights on the noosphere 

Today’s Post

Last week we saw a synopsis of how Johan Norberg, whose interpretation of the documented history of human development provides objective evidence of human evolution.  In the four (of the nine) categories of improvements in human welfare over the past 150 years that he cites, the ability of the human species to not only survive, but to thrive during its (so far) evolutionary run on this planet is very clear.  That this data substantiates the optimistic insights of Teilhard is also not only clear, but descriptive of how they are being played out today.

This week we will see how Norberg views human evolution from a different vantage point, which also gives tangibility to yet another of Teilhard’s great insights, that of the ‘noosphere’.

Extrapolating Norberg’s Data

In his book, “Progress”, Norberg provides a wide spectrum of information, provided by many independent sources, and based on objective measures to provide a view of human evolution that is very resonant with the insights of Teilhard and the other thinkers we have encountered in our attempts to understand the fabric of human existence.  Like Teilhard, he is very optimistic in his perception of the potential of humans to continue their evolution in the form of increased their welfare.

And, like Teilhard, he is keen to uncover the threads of causality by which this progress occurs.  Looking at this potentiality, he sees the trend that

“ .. we are using ever-smaller quantities of resources per unit of output.  Demand is not for the resource itself, but for what we do or make with it, and new technology and ingenuity will enable us to find other, hitherto unforeseen resources to achieve our needs.  If the market is relatively free, a shortage will mean higher prices, in which case we will economize more with that raw material, and should a resource run out, we will find or invent substitutes.”

   And, as Teilhard would agree, he goes on to assert that

“The most important resource is the human brain, a resource which is pleasantly reproducible.”

   Thus, as both Norberg and Teilhard see it, the human brain can be understood as a reliable resource for our continued march to the future, requiring only two things:

– Personal freedom to innovate and invent

– Stable and productive relationships

   Teilhard succinctly describes the dynamic that unites the development of the human person with the improvement of relationships in his “Phenomenon of Man”:

 “Fuller being is closer union: such is the kernel and conclusion of this book.”

   He sees this action at work in the human phenomena of the psychism, that which is found in human groups which effects the

 “.. increase in mental interiority and hence of inventive power”

required to find and employ

 “.. new ways of arranging its elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space.”

   The finding of these new ways is obviously necessary for human evolution to continue.  But as Norberg provides countless examples of, it is in the depository’ of these new ways that they are retained and reused.  Thus, Teilhard’s concept of a ‘recursive’ mode of evolution is revealed.  As humans contribute to this trove of insights, it in turn contributes to ever more to Teilhard’s ‘new ways’ of moving forward.

Next Week

This week we began to look at the huge trove of data which Johan Norberg culls to quantify how evolution can be seen to increase human welfare.

Next week we will look a little deeper into this facet to see how Norberg’s insights into the noosphere clearly substantiates Teilhard’s insights on human evolution.

January 27, 2022 – Dawkins, Teilhard and God

Leave a reply

   While Dawkins quantifies Teilhard’s insights on evolution, where is he on the concept of God?

Today’s Post

For the past three weeks, we have been looking at how such a brilliant scientist, who prides himself on his secular grasp of the unquestionable processes in both human and material evolution, ends up providing insights which validate Teilhard’s insights into evolution.

What it doesn’t show is how Dawkins is unable or unwilling to follow his own insights into resonance with Teilhard’s understanding of God.

This week we will look into the other side of Dawkins’ thoughts on God as the name for the ultimate principle of this evolution.

Dawkins, Teilhard and God

We have seen how Dawkins reflects several aspects of Teilhard’s thinking when he says

“There must have been a first cause of everything, and we might as well give it the name God.  Yes, I said, but it must have been simple and therefore whatever else we call it, God is not an appropriate name (unless we very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers). The first cause that we seek must have been the simple basis for a self-bootstrapping crane which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence. “

   We can parse this statement in three ways.  First, he agrees with both Physics and Teilhard with the concept of a ‘first cause”.  Secondly, he implicitly agrees with the efforts of Teilhard (and Blondel before him) that the language of traditional religion needs to be ‘divested of its baggage’ and therefore ‘reinterpreted’ if it is to have relevance in this age of scientific discovery.  Third, he further resonates with Teilhard’s concept of an energy which evolves the universe in the direction of increasing complexity.   From this perspective, Dawkins reveals himself less as an ‘a-theist’ and more of an ‘a-religionist’.

However, he makes little effort to address how these three simple insights can be carried forward to perform the ‘divestment of baggage’ that he says is necessary to correctly ‘conceptualize’ God.   His quote from Carl Sagan offers an example:

“If by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God.  This God is emotionally unsatisfying…it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”

   The flaw in this argument lies in his assumption that all the ‘laws’ of the universe can be found in those currently understood in Physics.  In the first quote above, he obviously acknowledges that these ‘laws’, by his definition, must include those which underly the rise of complexity if our ‘present complex existence’ is to be scientifically understood.  And further that these laws, so far, lie outside those addressed by Physics.  He seems unaware of his contradiction that when we follow his suggestion that these other laws be considered, the phenomenon of ‘complexification’ can be explored to reveal a God whose ‘emotional satisfaction’ increases the intensity  of traditional religion.

Dawkins makes the vague pronouncement that

“Natural science …explains how organized complexity can emerge from simple beginnings without any deliberate guidance.”

   He, astute student of natural science, provides no examples of such explanation, nor does he offer any explanation himself.  He focusses on debating the common religious assertion that evolution is ‘deliberately guided’, even though he seems comfortable with ‘a crane’ that ‘raises’ complexity over time.

Looking a little more closely at this ‘crane’ we can see further contradictions.

“The evolutionary drive towards complexity comes, in those lineages where it comes at all, not from any inherent propensity for increased complexity, and not from biased mutation, it comes from natural selection: the process which, as far as we know, is the only process ultimately capable of generating complexity out of simplicity.” (Italics mine)

This would seem to contradict his statement that the action of the ‘complexification’ that he acknowledges is different between the causality seen in natural selection and that seen in the rise complexity of the universe.

“The crane doesn’t have to be natural selection.  Admittedly, nobody has ever thought of a better one.  But there could be others yet to be discovered.  Maybe the ‘inflation’ that physicists postulate as occupying some fraction of the first yoctosecond of the universe’s existence will turn out, when it is better understood, to be a cosmological crane to stand alongside Darwins biological one”.

   After first claiming that natural selection is the “only process ..capable of generating complexity”. He now asserts that “it doesn’t have to be natural selection”.

Contradictions become even more pronounced in assertions such as these.   The ‘drive to increased complexity’ in evolution is seen as merely an aspect of natural selection, even though he admits elsewhere that NS cannot cause it during the ‘pre life’ phase of the universe or in the non-biological phase of cultural evolution.  Nor does he even attempt to explain how the ‘replication’ of living things can result in ‘complexification’.

He nonetheless goes on to implicitly agree with Teilhard’s concept of a universe in the process of increasing its complexity, as at least as it occurs on Earth.

“On one planet ..molecules that would normally make nothing more complicated than a chunk of rock, gather themselves together into chunks of rock-sized matter of such staggering complexity that they are capable of running, jumping, swimming, flying, seeing, hearing, capturing and eating other such animated chunks of complexity; capable in some cases of thinking and feeling, and falling in love with yet other chunks of complex matter. “

   Dawkins eschews the idea that the religious idea of God can be reconciled with his valid insights on evolution because he conflates his reasonable concept of God (as the underlying ‘cause’ of complexification) with the Christian fundamentalist and anthropological understanding of God as a supernatural person who creates, judges, rewards and punishes.  He seems incapable of understanding how his suggestion to “divest the idea of God of its baggage” can lead, as Teilhard asserts, to “a clearer disclosure of God in the world”.

Next Week

This week we looked at the thinking of the brilliant geneticist and evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins whose detailed understanding of the progression of evolution in the ‘pre-life’ and the ‘conscious-life’ eras of the unfolding of the universe give substance to Teilhard’s insights.  We also saw how Dawkins’ anti-religion bias colors and therefore inhibits his ability to recognize how such insights, as recognized by Teilhard, have given new life to what has often been a dogmatic and increasingly irrelevant Christianity.

Next week, we will move on to yet another contemporary secular thinker, Johan Norberg, so see how his flood of data also can be seen t substantiate Teilhard’s insights.

January 13, 2022 –  Dawkins and Teilhard on Complexity in Evolution

Leave a reply

   How can Richard Dawkins’ insights of genomic evolution illustrate Teilhard’s insights into universal evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look into how Richard Dawkins understood the role of the gene in biological evolution, offering the distinction between the replication function of the gene and the selection function of the cell as addressed by the theory of Natural Selection.

This week we will look a little deeper at this distinction to see how it opens the door to Teilhard’s insight that both are simply stages in the fourteen billion years of universal evolution.

Replication and Complexification

Dawkins avoids addressing the key to the activity of replication and selection.  While he insightfully describes how the DNA is the premiere agent of replication, he does not address how complexification gets into the replication function itself.  What factor in the DNA engine of reproducing complex amino acids causes the reproduced products to be more complex than those from which they were produced?   Dawkins maps the DNA factory’s reproduction process, which of course leads to the ability of Natural Selection (NS) to guide the cellular products into satisfactory accommodation of their environments, but nowhere in this story is the question of ‘why complexity?’ addressed.

While such ‘complexification’ can clearly be seen to continue in cellular structures, the lack of fossil evidence prevents a clear picture of how it progresses in the ‘pre life’ era.  While simple amino acid molecules are thought to emerge very quickly (180 or so M years after the big bang) that leaves some 8 B years for it to increase to the level of DNA.

But the genes themselves obviously evolve.  This can be seen in a comparison of the size of the genomes and the complexity of the resultant biological entity.  Generally (and unsurprisingly) more complex entities are endowed with larger genomes, from the first eucaryotic cells (a thousand genes) through the early bacterial entities (two thousand genes) through to the human (twenty thousand genes).  Science generally believes that these simpler constructions preceded their more complex offspring over time, suggesting that the molecular increase of complexity seen in genomic evolution continues to increase in the succeeding cellular biota.

So, while Dawkins insightfully describes the intricate process of developing the mainspring of biological evolution, the cell, from a complex interaction among pre-cellular, but not ‘alive’, molecules, he casts his net only to the edge of the stage of universal evolution at which the DNA molecule is alive and well.  What came before it to raise the structure of the molecule from its vastly simpler construct of two atoms, helium hydride, to the incredibly complex structure of the DNA molecule?

Dawkins, Teilhard and ‘Pre-organic Evolution’

In his recognition of the preorganic role of molecules, Dawkins effectively moves the process of evolution back one step from the cell to the DNA molecule, showing that the organic cell depends on the inorganic (or better, the preorganic) molecule for biological evolution.  But that just moves the mystery of complexification back as well.  Conventional thinking sees Darwinist evolution as ‘selecting for’ the complexity seen in science’s history of biological evolution.  But if the ‘replication’ activity of the molecule is required for Darwinist ‘selection’, what causes its own increase in complexity?  Clearly, the more complex a cellular product, the greater the complexity of its component genes.  If there is no ‘feedback’ from the ‘selected’ biological product to the DNA of the ‘replicator’, how does the DNA itself ‘evolve’?  Dawkins does not address this contradiction.

While Dawkins clearly recognizes the significant novelty introduced into the process of universal evolution by the gene, he does not remark on another aspect noted by Teilhard.  In every step up the evolutionary stairway of matter from the big bang to the precursor of the gene, the element of evolution does not itself change in its participation in the elevation to the next level of complexity.  For example, the atom retains its basic structure as it fulfills its potential for unity with other atoms to form molecules.  In the gene, as with all evolutionary products, complexification occurs in the act of unification.  The gene not only presents us with a new mode of evolution, it is also the first time in evolutionary history that the element of evolution itself changes in the act of unification.  As we will see, this phenomenon takes on even more significance in the human phase of evolution as we ourselves evolve to fuller being in the course of pursuing fuller union.

That said, however, in this second of three examples of Dawkins’ thinking we can see the door to Teilhard’s more comprehensive insight into evolution opening a little wider.  Dawkins insightfully articulates the process of the differentiation leading to the diversity addressed by NS, and that of the replication which leads to elements capable of differentiation.  He thus sees them as the result of two different processes, the second of which is rooted in the molecular processes asserted by Teilhard, and the first of which is identified in the theory of Natural Selection.

Therefore, in our first two examples of how the insights of Richard Dawkins define the densely complex process of evolution’s rise from the inorganic to the organic, we can see echoes of Teilhard’s sweeping vision of a universe in the process of becoming more complex.  Dawkins rarely expands his insights to the workings of the universe, but he does admit that where evolution occurs in the universe, it will likely do so with the steps of replication followed by differentiation seen in the genetic process at work on our planet.

Next Week

This week we looked a little deeper into Dawkins’ distinction between replication and selection to see how it opens the door to Teilhard’s insight that both are simply stages in the fourteen billion years of universal evolution.

Next week we address Richard Dawkins’ take on the ‘other end’ of biological evolution: how it continues to proceed through the human species.  As we shall see, this third facet of his evolutionary insights is the one that is most resonant with Teilhard’s much more holistic picture of the process of evolution as it rises through the history of the universe.

December 16, 2021 –  Mysticism as Active in Human Evolution

Leave a reply

   How can mysticism be seen as a key ingredient of human evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we looked at mysticism as a skill required to move into the future.  This week we look at the part such a skill plays in human evolution.

The Mystical Role in Human Evolution

We have addressed mysticism as a skill which is required to move into the future.  It is a key evolutionary skill, without which human evolution would simply be replaced by an endless repetition of replication followed by decay.  (Indeed, as we have seen, many materialists consider this to be exactly what is happening.)

If we can agree that coming to recognize that whatever perception that we have of reality falls short of whatever is ‘real’, one of the challenges of life is pursuing a bridge to close this gap.  Human history is filled with examples of both failing to do so and of those where success has led on to a clearer understanding of life and our part in it.   The many historical attempts to solve the enigma of the ‘one and the many’, manifested in the cacophony of governmental experiments which attempted to tame human self-centered tendencies while reaping the harvest of human capabilities for collaborative labor, speak volumes of attempts to develop the skill of building this bridge.

Richard Rohr addresses the role of mysticism in developing this skill.

 “Charles Péguy (1873–1914), French poet and essayist, wrote with great insight that “everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.” Everything new and creative in this world puts together things that don’t look like they go together at all but always have been connected at a deeper level. Spirituality’s goal is to get people to that deeper level, to the unified field of nondual thinking, where God alone can hold contradictions and paradox.”

   This journey from mysticism to politics frames the path of human evolution.

Teilhard offers another perspective on this path.

“Truth has only to appear once, in a single human being, for it to be impossible for anything ever to prevent it from spreading universally and setting the whole world ablaze”

   Teilhard’s understanding of the slippery term, ‘truth’ is very simple.  As he sees it, it is simply that understanding of reality which is most consistent with the reality itself.  The more the gap between our inner grasp of reality and the reality itself is narrowed, the more confidence we can have in our understanding of it.

We have referred frequently to the statistics assembled by Johan Norberg in the quantification of our human evolution in terms of human welfare.  In Chapter Four, this data was summarized in the nine categories of

Food                                                      Sanitation

Life Expectancy                                 Poverty

Violence                                              The Environment

Literacy                                                Freedom

Equality

In his identification of objective historical data which shows how human welfare has increased in each of these categories, we can see aspects of the mystical basis of our journey to the future in play.

In each of the nine cases, for the specific advances which he documents, an individual or group of individuals must first become aware of some specific phenomenon, wonder as to its causality, try to replicate it, and eventually be able to reliably cause it to happen.  The first two steps are intuitive in nature, then transferring to the empirical state in the last two.  The first two begin with a single person, or with a small ‘psychism’, and as the movement to the second two occur the ‘reach’ of the idea extends.  As we saw from Péguy above, “everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.”  Paraphrasing this in our terms: “Every idea begins with an intuition about reality which becomes articulated into the standards by which we govern ourselves.”

In the case of a tenth category, that of ‘fuel’, this can be clearly seen.  The phenomenon of ‘fire’ was experienced long before it could be caused.  The ability to control heat, of course, had obvious value to human welfare, and as Teilhard notes, the ‘truth’ of this value spread inexorably among early humans.  The next steps continued the spiral of development between awareness and articulation, as the need for greater thermal efficiency grew along with the need for surviving the inevitable downsides of each new articulation.  The deforestation related to wood burning was replaced by the asphyxiation of coal burning, then by the atmospheric damages from gas:  all resulting in ever more efficient fuel offset by new ecological risks.  Each step requiring new insights into our reality followed by new articulations of these insights and new effects on human evolution requiring new insights.

Thus, the ‘mystical skill’ of humans can be seen as the essential aspect of our spiral path to the future as it is followed from our intuitional peering into liminal space through our conscious articulation into ‘ideas’ and finally emerging as the set of social norms encoded into our cultural practices.  This winding path is the social counterpoint to Teilhard’s understanding of cosmic evolution: “fuller being from closer union and closer union from fuller being”.

Next Week

This week we ended our series addressing human mysticism from a secular perspective.

A key theme in this blog has been the seeing of reality, both of ourselves and the environment we inhabit, through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.  In doing so, we have seen how such a seemingly secular perspective can open traditional Western religious beliefs to a new and deeper bearing on human life, one which is not only more relevant to it but more intimate with the source of life which underlies our being.   Next week we will begin a series which looks into three facets of his idea of ‘evolution’ to explore how such a perspective can offer this insight.

 

December 9, 2021 –  The Enstatic Mysticism of Teilhard

Leave a reply

How is mysticism a key to the continuation of human evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we continued our look into Cynthis Bourgeault’s insights into ‘enstasy’, and saw examples of it in scripture and in the works of Elaine Pagels.  This week we will look into how mysticism can be seen in both our ‘personization’ and in the continued flow of human evolution.

The Mystical Role in Personization

We have seen how Teilhard understands the progress of universal evolution as captured in the process of ‘complexification’.  He further sees this process leading to the emergence of ‘personization’ as he sees the ‘reflexive consciousness’ of the human as the point of greatest complexity reached thus far.  To Teilhard, not only does ‘true union differentiate’, and ‘fuller being result from closer union while closer union results from fuller being’, but that in these recursive dances the continuous rise of complexity takes on the unique aspect of ‘personness’.  What role can mysticism be seen to play in this unfolding?

As we have seen frequently thus far, Teilhard exemplified the enstatic mode, continuously weaving the profound insights of Christianity into a common cloth with the profound insights of Science.  As we saw above, Cynthia Bourgeault, who introduced the concept of enstacy to our conversation, showed how Teilhard’s insights into the evolutionary foundation of the human person led to his insights on the uniqueness of the person.  She also noted the potential danger of the other face of the ‘liminal space’.

“Teilhard’s evolutionary vision is profoundly enstatic.  He fought ecstasy all his life- the siren call, as he took it, of the Asian traditions to dissolve into the One, to fund union at the point of undifferentiated simplicity.”

She notes elsewhere that ecstasy and enstacy are not necessarily opposites but work differently in the human person.  In the traditional treatment of ecstasy, the person is pulled away from Teilhard’s psychism in order to come into contact with what is most real within us.  In the great stories of Christian mysticism, the mystic’s first step is to pull away from the trappings of society.  Some see this happening in the early days of the church as the ‘Desert Mothers and Fathers’ sought to escape the hierarchical church’s need for orthodoxy.  But no matter what the cause, the mystical life was a clear ‘siren call’ from the depths of the soul.

Teilhard’s concept of the psychism, on the other hand, recognizes that we can be called into fuller being as we undergo closer union.  Teilhard, reflected in Bourgeault’s development, notes that both enstasy and ecstasy require a ‘peering into liminal space’ for the vision that can move us to fuller being, but it is only the translation of the inner sight into fuller articulation that causes this to happen.

It should be noted that the great mystics often return from their ecstatic visions with such articulations.  For example, we saw above Hildegard’s understanding that her visions were instances of a natural human capability of ‘resonance’ with the divine.

When we explore this resonance, we are peering into the liminal space between what we know and what is real, by seeking what is still left to be understood.  To the extent that we understand, we activate our potential not only to understand more fully, but to become fuller ourselves.  Such mysticism is not only an aspect of the potential by which we become more fully what we can be, but by which the evolution of our species becomes more fully resonant with its environment.

Not only are the things we see in liminal space yet to be understood, they are potentials yet to be actualized.  Thus, when we look into liminal space, it can be said that we are looking into the future.

As we have explored it here, mysticism is simply a skill which is, as Audre Lorde put it in her poem “The Unsayable’

“…the way we give names to the nameless so it can be thought.”

Giving the ‘nameless’ a name so that it can be thought is bringing an intuition into the empirical state in which it can be objectively considered.  An insight into the future thus becomes a tangible way of preparing for it.   Seen from the perspective that we have been developing, mysticism can be seen as the building of planks to be installed on the bridge that we are building to the future.

Next Week

This week we began to address mysticism as a skill which is required to move into the future.  It is a key evolutionary skill, without which human evolution would simply be replaced by an endless repetition of replication followed by decay.  (Indeed, as we have seen, many materialists consider this to be exactly what is happening.)

Next week we will take yet another look at human history to see how it shows the slow increase in the ‘skill of mysticism’ at work in the building of our bridge to the future.