Tag Archives: Teilhard de Chardin

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

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   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

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   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

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    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

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   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

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   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 20, 2022 –  Dawkins and Teilhard on the Continuation of Evolution in the Human Species

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   How can Richard Dawkins’ insights on human evolution quantify those of Teilhard?

Today’s Post

In the first Dawkins insight that we have addressed, he opens the door to Teilhard’s insight that the key metric of universal evolution is that of the increased complexity of its products over time.  In the second, the door is opened a little wider into articulating how the scientific concept of evolution in the ‘life era’ can be extrapolated backward to flow from the increase of complexity can be seen to occur in the ‘pre-life’ era.

In the third we will see how Dawkins opens the door much wider to how evolution’s process of Natural Selection can be extrapolated forward into the era of life become conscious of itself.  In doing so, we can see. In addition to quantification, implicit agreement with Teilhard’s vision of how human evolution fits into the evolution of the cosmos.

With his expanded perspective of the gene, Dawkins sets off on a new perspective on evolution, rooted in his insights of complexity proceeding from the molecular to the cellular level.

 “For more than three thousand million years, DNA has been the only replicator worth talking about in the world. But it does not necessarily hold these monopoly rights for all time. Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own.”

   In making this statement, he is referring to the fact for billions of years, evolution occurred through the connection of particles to form new particles of higher complexity (as in atoms to molecules).  In this action, the ‘parent’ particles are unchanged in the making of a ‘child’ particle.  An oxygen atom is unchanged in its union with a hydrogen atom to form the molecule of water.

The action of the replicative function of the genes is different in two significant ways.  First, the gene molecule itself forms new genes, and secondly the new genes can be different from their parents.  Unification is replaced by a replication which results in differentiation.

Dawkins’ quantification of this process is another confirmation of Teilhard’s assertion that evolution constantly manifests itself in new ways as it increases the complexity of its products.

It also introduces Dawkins’ idea of “a new kind of evolution”.

Echoing Teilhard, Dawkins sees that

“Most of what is unusual about man can be summed up in one word: ‘culture’.

   And he identifies ‘culture’ as the latest evolutionary milieu of evolution:

“Cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission in that…it can give rise to a form of evolution”.

   Dawkins goes on to quantify the underlying principle of this “new form”.

“I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet.  It is still in its infancy, drifting around in its primordial soup, but is already achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.  The new soup is the soup of human culture”

   And the new replicator

“… conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission.  We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.”

   The name he proposes for this new unit of imitation is ‘meme’, and he proposes that the meme, via the process of cultural transmission, provides the same agency to human evolution that the gene provided to cellular evolution.

“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”.

   And, again in implicit agreement with Teilhard, he remarks on the exponential increase of this new form of evolution over the genetic process.  He uses the concept of language to illustrate:

“Language seems to ‘evolve’ by non-genetic means. and at a rate which is orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution.”

   He continues this perspective when he asserts that human culture

“.. historically evolves in a way that looks like highly speeded up genetic evolution. but has nothing to do with genetic evolution.”

   He also seems to implicitly agree with Teilhard on the need to expand Darwin’s concept of the idea of evolution from the narrow confines of the theory Natural Selection:

“For an understanding of the evolution of modern man, we must begin by throwing out the gene as the basis of our ideas on evolution.  I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined by the narrow context of the gene.”

   He even takes a stab how such a new view of evolution can open the door to a new concept of consciousness:

“Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain’s simulation of the world becomes so complex that it must include a model of itself.”

   It is very interesting that such a brilliant scientist, who prides himself on his secular grasp of unquestionable processes in both human and material evolution, ends up providing such a validation of Teilhard’s insights.  This strongly suggests the bridges that Teilhard builds from his mystically-charged insights into universal evolution to the emerging empirical quantifications of  such empirical probes are not only valid, but able to carry the weight of our personal search for ‘fullness’.

Next Week

This week we looked at a third aspect of the insights of Richard Dawkins, famous atheist and brilliant genetic biologist, as he trained his sights on how evolution can be seen to continue in the human species beyond the actions of genes.  We also saw how the further he extends his vision, both backward in the direction of ‘pre-life’ molecules and forward in the direction of ‘post-genetics’, the more the visionary insights of Teilhard are validated.

Next week, we will move on to yet another contemporary secular thinker, Johan Norberg, so see how his flood of data also quantifies Teilhard’s projections.

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

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   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.

January 6, 2022 –  Teilhard, Dawkins and the Genetic Root of Evolution

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   How can Richard Dawkins’ insights on genetic activity reflect Teilhard’s insights into evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we began out look at how three of the insights of Richard Dawkins into human evolution can be seen to have nuggets of thought that resonate with Teilhard, starting with the idea that evolution is the underlying phenomenon by which the universe comes to be.

This week, we will look at the second of his insights into evolution, that of the essential contribution of the amazing molecule, the gene, to the continuation of evolution on our planet.

Dawkins and ‘Pre-Biological’ Evolution

While Dawkins does not explicitly open the idea of evolution as a satisfactory term to describe the development of the universe from the big bang to the human, he opens this door by addressing evolution before the advent of biological life.  In his book, “The Selfish Gene”, He describes in great detail how biological evolution is made possible by the ‘gene’.

In the 1940s and early 1950s, experiments pointed to DNA as the portion of chromosomes that held genes. A focus on new model organisms such as viruses and bacteria, along with the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA in 1953, marked the transition to the era of molecular genetics, a subject in which Dawkins is considered most proficient.

Genes are pieces of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) inside each cell that tell the cell what to do and when to grow and divide. Each gene is made up of a specific DNA sequence that contains the code (the instructions) to make a certain protein, each of which has a specific job or function in the body.

Dawkins, however, takes a closer look at the relation between genes and Natural Selection (NS).  He points out that genes do not themselves evolve by NS.  NS requires genes to be active in the cellular structure before ‘selection’ can take place.

“Darwinian selection does not work on genes directly.  DNA is cocooned in protein, swaddled in membranes, shielded from the world, and invisible to natural selection.  If selection tried to choose DNA molecules directly, it would hardly find any criterion by which to do so.  All genes look alike, just as all recording tapes look alike.  The important differences between genes emerge only in their effects (cells)”.

He makes the distinction that while biological species evolve, genetic components replicate.  The transition to the increase of the diversity addressed by NS requires the cell.

The gene itself, in comparison to its component parts, is incredibly complex.  Its complexity is not limited to its size, but also to its function.  Dawkins sees the gene as the first element in evolution to be able to replicate itself.  This replication process itself is itself quite complex, as the gene’s ability to guide the work of RNA to build proteins not only ‘encodes’ the proteins that result, but as well the creation of the enzymes that build the cells, instruct their growth and guide their divisions and interactions with other cells.

In this model, the DNA molecule can be seen as the master software ‘app’ which feeds instructions to lesser ‘apps’ which perform the construction and management of those of the cell itself.

This raises the question: how did the evolutionary product of the molecule get from the earliest known structure of helium hydride, thought to emerge very early in the evolution of the universe, to the incredibly complex molecule of DNA?  Even more importantly, how did the evolutionary process of connecting elements to make newer and more complex ones become a process in which elements become able to replicate themselves?  Dawkins does not address this per se but makes the assumption that the basic function of replication is fully in place before the process of biological evolution can begin.  He opens the door to understanding an evolutionary process that eventually produces the level of complexity required by the gene.  His theory requires a complex precursor to the gene.

Of course, the replication function itself is somewhat iffy.  Were it not so, the same genome would be simply be endlessly identically replicated, and none of the diversity that is clearly in evidence today would be possible.  Such diversity that results from random changes to the genetic content obviously leads to the diversity of cellular structures, and further leads to the ramification of biological species addressed by Natural Selection.  As Dawkins sees it, what is referred to as ‘genetic evolution’ is simply the effective ‘selection’ of certain genes which ‘survive’ in their cellular ‘vehicles’.

Next Week

This week we took an initial look into the insights of Richard Dawkins on the role of the gene in biological evolution, and how, by differentiating the two distinct steps of replication and selection, he opens the door to a backwards look at the process of molecular evolution proceeding that of Science’s Natural Selection.

Next week we will look a little deeper into the relationship between these two processes, and how in doing so Teilhard’s vision of how the energy of evolution flows into the development of living things can be seen.

December 30, 2021 –  Richard Dawkins and Teilhard on Evolution

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

Today’s Post

      Last week we began a series which looks into two contemporary facets of Teilhard’s insights into ‘evolution’ to explore how they reflect both Teilhard’s optimism as well as how his vision for the future is being born out in contemporary thinking and events.

This week we will begin this series by addressing the perspective of Richard Dawkins.

Richard Dawkins and Evolution

Richard Dawkins is a well-known evolutionary biologist, best known for his insights into the role of genes in biological evolution.  His criticism of religion and his defense of atheism is also well known.  In his book, “The God Delusion”, he examines thousands of religious beliefs, mostly those of Christianity, to show examples of illogic, superstition, contradictions, and anti-science content.  From this perspective, he seems to represent a most unlikely common ground with that of Teilhard, much less to provide insight into the larger picture of how the evolutionary processes of the universe continue through the human person.

That said, however, we will look at three aspects of his two books, “The God Delusion” and “The Selfish Gene” which seem to bear out Teilhard’s insights: universal evolution, the genetic replication process, and the continuation of evolution in the human species.  This week we will look at the first.

Dawkins and the Evolution of the Universe

In his book, “The God Delusion” he pauses for a moment in his seemingly endless diatribe on religion to regard a wider view of evolution itself.  In nearly all his writing, he seems content to regard evolution as a process which begins with the cell and continues through the ‘Natural Selection’ of biological species.  He is positioned well within the general scientific population which regards evolution as an Earthly process which occurs along the lines proposed by Darwin.  This perspective restricts ‘evolution’ to a process beginning some four billion years ago, some eight billion years after the ‘Big Bang’ and continues to trickle in the human species.  Dawkins adds some facets to this perspective which opens the door to the wider and deeper insights of Teilhard.

In one section of the book, he refers to a discussion with theologians at Cambridge University on the cause of existence, addressing the question of “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

“Time and time again, my theologian friends returned to the point that there had to be a reason why there is something rather than nothing. 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. “

   Earlier, he seems to also acknowledge that complexity does indeed emerge over time, but once again seems to limit such emergence to the ‘life era’:

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

   Many of my atheist friends suggest that in these statements, as an atheist Dawkins cannot possibly be agreeing with the idea of ‘God’.  Of course, if one defines God as a ‘supernatural person that creates, judges, rewards, and punishes’, they are correct.  On the other hand, if God is identified not only as a Deist “first cause”, but one which “eventually raised the world as we know it to its present complex existence”, the Deist God is neatly replaced by the God of Blondel and Teilhard.

His caveat that we must “very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers” must be also recognized.  Once again, in such a theology as Blondel and Teilhard propose, this is exactly what they set out to do.  To Teilhard, the best way of making sense of our complex language of Christianity is to do just that, and he offers the ‘reinterpretation paradigm’ of interpreting religious statements through the ‘lens of evolution’ to do so.

Dawkins even echoes Teilhard’s ‘lens’ of such reinterpretation when he says

“Other theories (of religion) miss the point of Darwinian explanations. At the very least, (these theories) need to be translated into Darwinian terms.”

   Not that Dawkins has suddenly become a theist.  He takes on Teilhard’s concept of God as he quotes Carl Sagan:

 “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.”

   And of course, he is right.  Restricting God to the agency of gravity (it is of course necessary for cosmic evolution) is like restricting a cake recipe to sugar.  Neither Dawkins nor Sagan acknowledge their own admiration of the marvelous workings of the universe as articulated by Teilhard:

“..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”

   Thus, in our first look at Richard Dawkins’ approach to evolution we find not only threads of thought that resonate with Teilhard, but also seemingly contradictory aspects of his approach to evolution.

First, there is nothing in the natural sciences to explain the aspect of ‘complexity’ as a characteristic of biological evolution.  The theory of Natural Selection only explains replication and differentiation; it does not address how these processes result in increases in complexity of the results of these processes.  He does not offer examples of how ‘natural science’ explains the ‘emergence of complexity’.

Second, it is necessary to understand how complexity increases in the components which evolve in basic matter as identified in the Standard Model of Physics.  Physics and Chemistry articulate how matter ‘develops’ in the evolution from the quark to the amino acid compounds which are necessary to the workings of the cell, but they do not explain how they ‘complexify’ as they do so.

Thirdly, we will see how he himself understands that the theory of Natural Selection does not offer a complete understanding of how the human species continues its evolution, and suggests another slightly different process at work as well.

Next Week

This week we began a look at how contemporary non-religious thinkers can show insights into evolution that not only resonate with Teilhard but can quantify his insights.

Next week we will continue our exploration of Dawkins’ thoughts with a look at how biological evolution, explained by science as ‘Natural Selection’ takes on a more universal aspect when his insights are focused on its roots in the molecular processes of DNA.

December 23, 2021 –  Teilhard’s  ‘Lens of Evolution’ and Understanding Human Life

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   How can understanding evolution contribute to a deeper understanding of reality?

Today’s Post

   Last week we concluded our multilayered look at ‘mysticism’, raising it from the image of a single person experiencing the ‘ecstasy’ of being intimate with the ‘ground of being’ that is present in everything to one in which human persons come to be what they can be through the ‘enstatic’ experience of a clearer knowledge of what lies in the liminal space between what is real and what we know about it.

This week we will embark on a series which looks into this ‘liminal’ space through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution, but this time by following the insights of contemporary authors who excel at this skill and seeing how Teilhard’s unusually optimistic forecast for the future is indeed unfolding beneath our feet as we tread the path.

What is Evolution and How Do Humans Fit in?

Nearly all of the approaches that we have taken in our look at ‘making sense of things’ have been based on the fundamental perspective in which the universe as seen as a system which has been in the process of coming to ‘be what it is’ over a long period of time.  Teilhard and others refer to this process as ‘universal evolution’ even though there seems no general acceptance of this term in either Science or Religion, our two great systems of ‘making sense of things’.

Many scientists avoid the term in referring to the development of the universe from the ‘Big Bang’ to the biological cell, and few accept the use of the term to address the continuing ‘development’ of human cultural systems.

While Christianity has come to decrease its resistance to the term, many of those comfortable with it still insist on supernatural influence.

Thus, if we are going to try to use Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ to ‘make sense of things’ from a universal perspective, it is necessary for a clearer understanding not only of the term itself but more importantly of how it can be seen to be active in human life.

As Teilhard sees it, the entire universe itself is evolving.  From his scientific vantage point this perspective is valid since everything which emerges in an evolving universe can be seen to do so due to some event from a pre-existing simpler thing.  He presents his case in great detail in his book, “The Phenomenon of Man” in which he sees evolution occurring in three phases: ‘pre-life’, ‘life’ and ‘thought’.   ‘Pre-life’ is period of the ten or so billion years following the ‘Big Bang’ postulated by Physics.  The ‘life’ era spans the period on this planet from the appearance of the cell to the appearance of the human, and the era of ‘thought’ begins some two hundred thousand years ago with the first human.

Teilhard’s unique insight is to see evolution as a single process which is active in each era, underpinning the appearance of the ever-increasing complexity which can be seen at work in each step.

The characteristic of complexity, as he sees it, takes on many forms as it increases from the activity by which more complex molecules emerge from combinations of less complex atoms all the way up the evolutionary chain to the activity by which relationships among human persons result in human ‘psychisms’ which not only move their cultural groups toward greater cohesiveness, but bestow on the participating individuals a greater measure of fullness.

His recognition reflects a true ‘widening of vision’, now become ever more capable of grasping both past and future, both material and spiritual, both singly and collectively, in a way that recognizes the presence of a universal agency in the universe.  This agency not only underpins the part we play, but more importantly, the fullness which is possible to us as we play in it.  To him, “fuller being comes from closer union and closer union comes from fuller being” at every stage of evolution in the history of the universe.

Teilhard developed his approach to such a holistic insight into evolution from his paleontological research and the general grasp of the universe as ‘dynamic’ in nature as the discovery of physics exploded in the early 20th century.  In his lifelong journey to understand the concept of increasing complexity in terms of what had become a static understanding of God, he never ceased his efforts to reinterpret both the languages of Science and Religion into a ‘language of the real’.  Such a language would permit “a clearer disclosure of God in the world”, one in which both the ‘phenomenon of Man’ and the ‘phenomenon of existence’ could be understood in common terms.

In the late nineteen forties, when he wrote his masterwork, “The Phenomenon of Man”, his projections of the future evolution of the human species seemed very idealistic.  The world had just seen not once but twice, the most catastrophic conflicts in human history.  Not only had these conflicts left much of the developed world in ruins, they raised the specter of total human eradication as a possible next step.  Even today, our increasing political, ecological, and cultural polarization sees his optimistic views of the future of humanity as highly ungrounded.  Many in the Western religious camp increasingly see the state of humanity so ‘fallen’ that only supernatural intervention can save it.

Thus, the question can be asked, “With all of this, how can Teilhard’s optimistic projections be seen as valid today?”  Are there any contemporary insights, grounded in objective data, which show Teilhard’s projections to be on target?

The answer is ‘yes’, and we will pursue them in two parts.

The first set of insights comes from Richard Dawkins, noted professor of human and biology sciences who, while contributing to the study of evolutionary biology, is also well known for his anti-religious fervor.  However, we will see in looking into his books, “The Selfish Gene” and “The God Delusion”, show his wider view of life and how human evolution can be seen to resonate with that of Teilhard.

The second set of insights comes from Johan Norberg, historian of ideas, who first takes an objective ‘evolutionary measure’ of human evolution in his book, “Progress”, then in his second book, “Open”, addresses the human structures that have emerged in history that have provided the scaffolding of human society to emerge into its current complex state.

Both books reflect both Teilhard’s optimism as well as a quantification of his projections, and we will address them in the coming weeks.

Next Week

This week we began a series which looks into two contemporary facets of Teilhard’s insights into ‘evolution’ to explore how such reflect both Teilhard’s optimism as well as a quantification of his projections.

Next week we will explore the insights of Richard Dawkins, noted professor of human and biology sciences, to see how his grasp of evolution can be seen to not only agree with Teilhard,