July 16, 2026 – Faith: Trust in the Axis of Evolution

   How can seeing universal evolution through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ enhance our confidence in life?

Today’s Post

Last week we explored how a shift in perspective in the search for meaning in traditional science and religion can open a more positive stance towards understanding and living out the ‘articulations of the noosphere’.  As reflected in the sacraments, values, and morals, we have addressed this stance from

Teilhard’s evolutionary perspective.   We saw last week how the concept of Paul’s ‘Theological Virtues’ expresses three key such attitudes which underlay our employment of these articulations.

In the series of posts on discovering the thread of evolution within each of us, which we saw as ‘finding God by finding ourselves’, we examined the thoughts of Carl Rogers, whose optimistic approach to psychology was infused with a secular approach to faith.  In this series, we saw how the virtues of Faith, Hope and Love are strongly woven into his insights on human evolution

This week we will explore this weaving as it can be seen in the virtue of ‘Faith’.

The Traditional Approach to Faith

Faith is the first of the virtues to be addressed by Paul and has been traditionally expressed as a ‘belief in things unseen’.  As interpreted by the Christian church, it asserts that we must believe in ‘revealed truths’ (eg ideas that appear in our ‘sacred’ texts and as interpreted by the church) which we do not (even often cannot) understand, and that such belief is necessary for a successful eventual passage from this world to the next.  In the more conservative Christian expressions, ‘understanding’ is unnecessary for salvation as long as ‘belief’ is present.  Since belief is pleasing to God, by this interpretation, it will therefore insure one’s salvation: the entry into ‘the next life’.  At the extreme, the more difficult the ‘truth’ is to understand (eg the virgin birth), the higher the value of belief.

Karl Rahner was one of the theologians who influenced the changes of Vatican II.  His acute theological insight into identifying issues facing the church as it progressed into the future was resonant with Pope Francis’s current project of ecclesial reform and sharply critiqued this approach to faith.

“We are often told that it is difficult to believe, and by this is meant that the truths revealed by God are beyond human understanding, that they demand the sacrifice of the intellect, and that the more opaque they are to human understanding, the greater the merit in believing them.”

    Gregory Baum expands on this critique in his book on Maurice Blondel, “Man Becoming”:

“When Christians have difficulties with certain dogmatic statements, for instance with the those on the Trinity or the eucharist, they are sometimes told by ecclesiastical authorities that there is a special merit in not understanding, in being baffled by a teaching that sounds unlikely, and in obediently accepting a position that has no other link with the human mind than that God has revealed it to men.”  “Faith in this context appears as the obedient acceptance of a heavenly message, independently of its meaning for man and its effect on human life.”  (Italics mine)

Reinterpreting Faith

As we developed our ‘principles of reinterpretation’, we saw how Maurice Blondel considered that this inability of religion to bring “meaning for man and its effect on human life” was one of the great failures of modern religion, as it severely limited the relevance it could afford to human life.  As he saw it:

“Faith in this context appears as the obedient acceptance of a heavenly message, independently of its meaning for man and its effect on human life   Man cannot accept an idea as true unless it corresponds in some way to a question present in his mind.”

   And, presaging both Teilhard’s recognition of God as manifest in the threads of evolution which are at the core of each life, as well as a principle of reinterpretation of traditional religion, Blondel goes on to say:

“To the man who accepts the Gospel in faith, it is not a message added to his life from without; it is rather the clarification and specification of the transcendent mystery of humanization that is gratuitously operative in his life.”  (Italics mine)

   As we have discussed earlier, such reinterpretation in terms of human life is necessary for religion to regain its lost relevancy.

On a purely secular level, there are few things more fundamental to human action than ‘faith’.  Surely, we act only to the extent that we believe in both our capacity to act and success of the outcome, and this has nothing to do with religion.  Our history is filled with ‘acts of faith’ which lead to actions profoundly affecting the evolution of society.  We earlier saw, for example, how the evolution of the belief in human equality leads to the West’s practice of democracy.

The difference between secular faith and religious faith can be seen in the question: what is the basis for the act of faith?  Why should we believe what we believe?  Or as Blondel asks, “what difference does a belief make in our lives?”

In the secular case, faith is built up over time, in a trial-and-error approach in which the consequences of beliefs can be evaluated as positive or negative.  Those seen as positive can be filtered through society and passed forward as laws, standards, or practices through the mechanism of culture.  An example is those recognized and adopted by society at large.  The U.S Constitutional Bill of Rights is the result of such an approach.

The many laws of science are themselves based on secular faith.  Science is based on two unprovable beliefs:  that the universe is intelligible and that humans are capable of understanding it. Over time, this belief has led to the ‘scientific method’, a sort of set of secular virtues which has proved successful in building our understanding of the universe.  Without adherence to these elements of faith, neither Western society nor its pillar of scientific endeavor would survive.

Teilhard’s perspective recognizes that in each of us there is a continuation of the fourteen or so billion years of universal activity that has brought us to this moment.  Secular faith is the intuitive, unprovable sense that not only is evolution carrying us along with it, but that its direction is from a past simplicity of the earliest components of matter to a yet unknown future state of complexity and completeness.  It is the expectation that while we are as yet unfinished, we are nonetheless embraced by a current that will carry us to future wholeness.

The Next Post

This week we began our look at the stance we can take if we are to live out Teilhard’s ‘articulations of the noosphere,’ beginning with that of ‘faith’.  We saw how the religious attitude of faith acquires new relevance if we reorient it from ‘belief in the unbelievable as a condition for being eligible for the afterlife’, to the recognition and trust that the energy of evolution flows through each of us and carries us on to a future state of wholeness.

Next week we will address the second of the ‘Theological Virtues’ that of ‘hope’.

   How can Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ help us to develop attitudes which can lead to increased ‘fullness’?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Science’s discovery of the immensity of time and the process of evolution offers a new perspective on the statements of meaning that have evolved with both Science itself and Religion.  We also saw how, as John Haught asserts in his book, “The New Cosmic Story” a third, holistic, approach emerges from these discoveries which can bring these two traditional schools of thought into increased coherence.  Seeing this potential coherence through his ‘lens’, Teilhard predicted:

“Like the meridians as they approach the poles, science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.”

   We have been exploring the topics of sacraments, morals and values over the past several weeks.  This week we will move on to ‘attitudes’, the stances which we take in relation to life, and by which such ‘articulations of the noosphere’ can be lived out.

Attitudes

There are few things more important to the way we live our lives than the attitudes we assume as we go about our daily enterprises.  This has nothing to do with religion: even secularists have attitudes, and our attitudes have immense impact on our actions.   They are also strongly rooted in our underlying beliefs.  The difference between the influence of pessimistic and optimistic attitudes on quality of life, for example, has been well documented in psychological journals, but by what ‘hermeneutical’ principle is one’s attitude determined?  Are attitudes chosen by each of us in an intellectual process by which we reason to them, or are they a result of biological pressures over which we have no control?  Are they a result of our neocortex activity or imposed on us by the stimuli of our reptilian and limbic brains?  Are they empirical or intuitional?

One of the most common underlying principles of all religions is the impetus to believe and act in accordance with some defined principles.  Often the actions are proscribed in spite of beliefs.  Examples of this can be found in the more conservative Christian expressions, in which faith is more important than reason in deciding how to act.  Nearly all contain the teaching that ‘proper’ belief is more necessary for salvation (passing successfully into the afterlife) than ‘proper’ action.  The role of ‘attitude’ in the comportment of life, while not absent in these teachings, does not seem to be paramount.

Christianity addresses attitudes in its concept of ‘virtues’.  While traditional teaching treats virtues as ‘dispositions by which we live good lives’, the traditional implication is that the ‘good life’ is the one which ends in our salvation.

At the other end of the spectrum, in the materialistic scheme of things, attitudes are seen as those dispositions which contribute to the biological process of evolution: ‘survival of the fittest’.  In this scheme, many traditional religious beliefs can be germane in their secular support of continued evolution, but the ultimate principle as discussed last week, is to be found in the interaction among elementary particles as increasingly understood by science.

Also, as discussed last week, both approaches are rooted in the past:  Religion with its doctrines of ‘truth’ firmly rooted in ancient divine pronouncements, and Science with its belief in meaning to be found at the bottom (and hence in the past) of the evolution of matter.

The Dangers of the Past

Why should such perspectives be seen as problematic?  On the one hand, hasn’t religion proven its value to society with the building blocks it has offered to civic stability?  And hasn’t Science’s incessant search for the ultimate understanding of how matter holds together led to advances in human quality of life that would have been the stuff of dreams to our grandparents?  So, why should such traditional principles be called into question?  What’s wrong with either of these perspectives?

To answer these questions, a starting place can be found in the waning influence of religion in the West.  Most surveys, particularly reflected in the Pew polls, seem to show a correlation between declining levels of traditional church participation and increasing levels of education.  The materialists gleefully interpret this as evidence that Religion is becoming less necessary for societal stability as many of its precepts become encoded in legal systems and society becomes more educated.  This attitude is reflected in the scientific community, mostly notably Stephen Hawking, in their claim that scientific discoveries are gradually eliminating a place for God in the universe.   This perspective sees that traditionally, God is now only to be ‘found in the gaps’, and as these gaps are filled by Science, there is a decreasing need for God.

But science also faces a danger in looking for meaning in the composition of simplest matter.  As we have seen, it’s been difficult for Science to include the human person in its understanding of reality.  There is no “Standard Model” for the human person like there is for inorganic matter.  In our exploration of psychology, in which Science turns its lens on the human, we have seen that there is considerable dualism.  Add to this the belief that real meaning is only to be found in the “behind and below”, and a truly bleak picture of the future of human evolution begins to emerge.  As one atheist put it, “life’s a bitch, then you die”.  Instead of seeing human evolution as a process which can increase the level of complexity of its products (which it has so far for billions of years), it is now seen with a future more of decay than enrichment.  As Haught puts it:

“The typical scientific materialist…takes decay to be finally inevitable because the totality of being is destined by what-has-been to end up in a state of elemental, lifeless disintegration.”

   Further, Haught notes that both traditional Science and Religion, with their sights fixed firmly rearward, seem complicit in their disdain for universal potential.  He notes that:

“The cosmic pessimism of so many modern intellectuals, it turns out, is a cultural by-product of the implicit despair about the physical universe that had been tolerated for so many centuries by otherworldly, religious readings of nature.”

   It is this pessimism that is at the root of the ‘dangers of the past’.  As science opens our eyes to the immensities of time and space, the seemingly impersonal processes of how they relate, and the ultimately material basis of matter, those traditionally spiritual (Haught: ‘otherworldly’) beliefs of Religion which have underpinned a positive stance to life in the past can become increasingly irrelevant.  What can replace our traditional set of principles?

As thinkers such as Blondel, Teilhard, Rohr and Haught suggest, it’s not that the underlying precepts of Science and Religion are wrong, and hence must be replaced, it’s more that their wisdom becomes immediately richer and more relevant when reoriented from the past to the future.  This reorientation occurs with the simple recognition that the universe is unfinished, in which, as Haught sees:

“(Science) professes to be highly empirical and realistic but leaves out of its survey of nature the fact that the cosmos is still in the process of becoming.  …the fullness of being, truth and meaning are still rising on the horizon.”

The Next Post

This week we have explored the phenomenon of ‘attitudes’ and saw how the traditional approach of science and religion can lead to not only the increasing irrelevance of religion but the increased pessimism of science.  Next week we will take another look at how reorienting our Scientific and Religious perspective from past to future offers an additional ‘principle of reinterpretation’.

How can Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ aid in seeing the potential confluence between science and religion?

Today’s Post

For the last several weeks we have been exploring the religious concepts of sacraments, values and morals as ‘articulations of the noosphere’: structures of the reality in which we live that, when cooperated with, can lead us to Karen Armstrong’s “greater possession of ourselves” and place us on Teilhard’s “current to the open sea”.

This week we will continue this exploration into a clearer view of human life which capitalizes on these structures.

The Holistic Perspective

Last week we saw how both the traditional scientific, materialistic, even atheistic perspectives on human existence can be brought into confluence with traditional religious perspectives with a few changes in interpretation.

• Once science expands its understanding of evolution from terrestrial biological phenomena (Natural Selection) to a universal perspective (complexification), evolution can be seen in three distinct phases united by a continuing increase of complexity in its products (pre-life, life, life conscious of itself).  In this more comprehensive perspective, there are indeed ‘articulations of the noosphere’ which foster our continued evolution.
• The theist assertion that morals are absolute imperatives issued from a divine source thousands of years ago requires that these standards of behavior are, as the materialists assert, intelligible, but also that our quest for understanding them is still ongoing.

Or, as Teilhard puts it:

“So long as our conceptions of the universe remained static, the basis of duty remained extremely obscure.  To account for this mysterious law which weighs fundamentally on our liberty, men had recourse to all sorts of explanations, from that of an explicit command issued from outside to that of an irrational but categorical instinct.”

So, putting evolution into an unfolding cosmic context leads to, as John Haught asserts in his book, “The New Cosmic Story” a third, holistic, approach.

 The Third Way

As we saw when we addressed John Haught’s three approaches to making sense of reality, he notes that at their roots, both the traditional theistic traditions and materialistic interpretations most often associated with science are rooted in the past (.https://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=202303)

Science, for its part, continues to search for understanding of the cosmos by looking backwards into the increasingly particulate components of matter and energy.  In science’s ‘Theory of Everything’, success will be declared when we understand every step of the evolution of matter from its initial state of pure energy (the ‘big Bang’) to its current state of highly complex combinations of atoms, molecules, and cells.   As Jonathan Sacks puts it, “Science takes things apart to see how they work”.  This approach leads to such beliefs as random determinism (our thoughts are the result of random firings of neurons precipitated by molecular activity), and often lead to a denial of human free will.  In other words, from this approach, meaning is to be sought from, as Teilhard puts it, “The behind and below”.  In this perspective, the future is indeterminate; it is only by understanding the past that we can understand the universe and prepare for the future.

Religion posits the validity of its beliefs in ‘revealed truth’, usually contained in ‘sacred scripture’ written eons ago.  In simpler terms, humans have been given the ‘law’ but consistently fail to live up to it.  From this perspective, the human species will fail in its enterprises, requiring an eventual imposition by God of a theistic and divine government.  While Sack’s observation that ‘Religion puts everything together to see what it means’, is correct, the criteria by which it does so assumes a perfect past from which we are ‘fallen’.

Haught notes that Teilhard (as well as Blondel, Haught, and Rohr) recognizes that the scientific concept of evolution (when freed from its biological constraints) offers religion a freedom from its ‘chains of the past’, and permits these two classical modes of thinking to be seen to have a future level of coherence that the traditional modes deny.  He also notes that the single strongest component of this new approach is simply the clarity that is brought by understanding the ‘stuff’ of science and religion in the light of a comprehensive, universal evolutionary process.

Again, from Teilhard:

   “Under the influence of a large number of convergent causes (the discovery of organic time and space, progress in the unification or ‘planetization’ of man, etc), man has quite certainly become alive, for the last century, to the evidence that he is involved in a vast process of anthropogenesis, cosmic in plane and dimensions.”

   So, if we are to find new ways of ‘employing our neo-cortex brains to modulate the instincts of our limbic and reptilian brains’, or more prosaically, ‘becoming what we are capable of becoming’, we must find new meaning in the old pronouncements.  Understanding and living life in terms of the sacraments, morals and values that we have explored can take on new meaning when we begin to understand that we are part of an evolutionary process by which we are brought into ‘greater possession of ourselves’.

To see ourselves caught up in Teilhard’s process of ‘anthropogenesis’ is to recognize that meaning is always to be sought in the future.  There can be no doubt that our bodies can be boiled down to masses of molecules and that the insights of the past are worth our attention.  However, recognition that we are ‘borne on a current to the open sea’ requires us to look past the “explicit commands issued from the outside” as proposed by Religion, and the “… irrational but categorical instincts” proposed by Science, to a future that, to our opening eyes, is truly open to us.

Teilhard proposed a spherical image of the actualizing of potential for Science and Religion to mutually foster our future evolution:

 “Like the meridians as they approach the poles, science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.”

   The shift in our stance with respect to life that Haught explores is one that turns our expectations, hopes, and actions, as Teilhard says, “Towards the future”.  This leads us to the religious concept of ‘virtue’.

The Next Post

This week we have explored how Teilhard’s understanding of cosmic evolution can bring new clarity to both the meanings proposed by materialists as well as those asserted by theists.  Next week we will extend this exploration to the stances that we take when we seek to apply the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ (sacraments, morals, and values) to our life.  It makes a difference whether or not we see such articulations as rules to be followed to achieve ‘salvation’, or the acceptance of the fate of a faceless, indeterministic universe, and we will take a look at such stances in the light of religion’s ‘theological virtues’.

   How can Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ serve to reconnect the spiritual and materialistic understanding of morality?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how legacy religious and scientific perspectives on morals are very orthogonal.   Where traditional religion insists on an absolute basis of morals, science proposes one which is relative to our understanding of science’s key agency of evolution: ‘survival’.  Today we will see how these two perspectives can be brought into coherence by employment of Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.

From Teilhard’s Insights

There are many ways in which the orthogonal perspectives of Science and Religion can be seen to align.  As we have seen many times, both Religion and Science are rife with ‘dualisms’ which choose a viewpoint from the many shades of belief on any subject.  Teilhard’s approach seeks to bring the opposing sides into confluence by understanding them in the holistic context of universal evolution and applying the techniques of reinterpretation that we have proposed.  The subject of ‘morals’ is no exception.   One way to effect such confluence is to return to Teilhard’s treatment of the two seemingly contrary positions:

“So as long as our conceptions of the universe remained static, the basis of duty (moral standards) remained extremely obscure.  To account for this mysterious law (the energy of evolution which effects increasing complexity) which weighs fundamentally on our liberty, man had recourse to all sorts of explanations, from that of an explicit command issued from outside to that of an irrational but categorical instinct.” (parenthetical statements and italics mine)

Teilhard noticed that science’s new understanding of evolution can offer an improved understanding of morality:

“And, conventional and impermanent as they may seem on the surface, what are the intricacies of our social forms, if not an effort to isolate little by little what are one day to become the structural laws of the noosphere. In their essence, and provided they keep their vital connection with the current that wells up from the depths of the past, are not the artificial, the moral and the juridical simply the hominized versions of the natural, the physical and the organic?”

   Teilhard notes that in the slow transition from ‘expansion’ to ‘compression’ that is occurring in human history, new beliefs and tactics must evolve for humanity to survive its infolding on itself.   Those practices that could be understood as normative in the ‘expansion’ stage of evolution, in which the ‘open’ capacity of the Earth allowed unlimited spreading, have worked poorly as there became less space to expand into.  The last two centuries, with their incessant and ever widening wars, offer clear evidence of it.

As we looked into finding evidence for our own evolution, we saw how Johan Norberg suggests that new paradigms, emerging in the West, are causing a reversal of the slope of this curve in the past hundred fifty years.  He suggests the cause of this change in direction to be rooted in such phenomena as

• The ridiculing of war by Enlightenment thinkers
• The calming of religious fundamentalism
• The recognition of the horror of war as improved education and increased social stability permitted a more objective look at the past.

He also suggests that globalization has offered a milieu in which the fruits of Western personal autonomy and social cohesion can spread quickly across the globe.  As a result, the global awareness that has emerged not only recognizes that it is cheaper to buy resources than to take them by force, but that fostering individual autonomy and improved human relationships can lead to a national stability which increasingly accomodates the inevitable compression of society.

In a nutshell, just as the instincts evolved in our mammalian ancestors worked well for their evolutionary history but need to be modulated by our neocortex brains to manage our own history, the ‘morals’ that guided our human ancestors as they evolved ‘upward and outward’ need to be modulated and recast as our continuing evolution, if it is to continue ‘upwards’ must now focus ‘inwards’.

To aid in such an ‘inward’ focus, Teilhard proposes the same principle of reinterpretation that was previously suggested by Blondel: to understand that human persons are products of an evolutionary process, as science teaches, requires the acknowledgment of the existence of a principle which ‘effects our becoming’, as religion teaches.  This suggests common ground between the materialist and theist perspectives:

• The materialists are correct in asserting that the basis of morals can be found in the principles of evolution. However, it is necessary to expand the understanding of evolution from terrestrial biological phenomena and open it to its universal perspective.  In doing so evolution can be seen in three distinct phases which are united by a continuation of the increase of complexity in their products.  In this integrated perspective, there are indeed ‘articulations of the noosphere’ which foster the continuation of evolution in human life, and these can be expressed in terms such as sacraments, values and morals.
• The theists are correct in asserting that these morals are indeed, at their basis, absolute. The absolute nature of these standards of behavior are, as the materialists assert, intelligible, but require our continued search for a more complete understanding of them.

So, the materialistic approach to morals needs to be placed in the full picture of evolution and take into account the presence of the agent of universal evolution in each personal life.  By the same token, the theist approach needs to be shorn of its premature dogmatism and be open to both the intelligibility of the universe and our part in it as we continue to evolve our understanding of it.

Science, with its grasp of the universe as ‘becoming’ can bring new life to religion, as asserted by John Haught and Teilhard.  As Blondel and Teilhard understood, recognizing that the human is a product of a continuously evolving universe permits a deeper understand of God as the universal principle of such evolution.  By the same token, their fresh approach to religion also serves to expand science’s understanding of this process to include the human as not only a product of evolution, but one able to respond to a new mode of evolutive energy which goes beyond the Darwinian principles of ‘chance and necessity’,

The question can then be asked, how can humans employ their new-found capacity of being aware of their consciousness in service to their continued evolution How can they be seen to be capable of ‘effecting their own complexification’?

The answer involves developing the skill of the neocortex brain in modulating the instinctive stimuli of the lower limbic and reptilian brains.  Examples of practices and beliefs that develop and strengthen this skill abound in every religious and philosophical school of thought that has emerged in human history.  The downside, of course, is that they are enmeshed and deeply entangled in hierarchies, sentimentality, and supernaturalism that can undermine their validity as ‘articulations of the noosphere’.

So, in order to be able to (paraphrasing Richard Dawkins) “explicitly divest religious belief of all the baggage that it carries in the minds of most religious believers”, it is necessary to reinterpret these beliefs in terms of human ‘complexification’ (human growth) so that their relevancy to human life and continued evolution can be more fully understood.

In simpler terms: in the human, the mechanism of evolution transforms from ‘evolutionary selection of entities’ to ‘entities which select their evolution’.

The Next Post

This week we have contrasted the ‘materialistic’ (‘atheistic’) position with that of the ‘theists’ on ‘how we should be if we would be what we can be’ and saw how a holistic perspective on evolution offers a common ground of belief that seems more consistent with both our general religious and scientific understanding not only of the universe but of our part in it.

Assuming that there are indeed ‘articulations of the noosphere’ that when observed, lead on to, as Teilhard put it, “being carried by a current to the open sea”, what do we do with them?  How can we orient ourselves to these ‘currents’?

Next week we will take our explanation of sacraments, values and morality to the next level and explore an approach to evolution which finds common ground between these seemingly orthogonal approaches to understanding human evolution.

   How can the material and spiritual approach to morality be seen to differ?

Last Week

Last week we expanded our look at sacraments into the realm of values and morals and saw how scientific materialism understands the basis of ‘correct behavior’ to be derived from the interpretations of ‘evolutionary psychology’.  From this perspective, behavior is ‘correct’ if it fosters our continued participation in the flow of evolution, understood as the continuation of ‘survival’.  The materialistic basis for morality is, then, ‘relative’.

On the other hand, the differences in behavioral standards that can be found among religions are seemingly compounded by the differences between religion and science, and further vary with different interpretations of the evolutionary process itself.  In general, however, each religion considers their behavioral standards as ‘absolute’.

Is it possible to have a coherent interpretation of values and morals?

This week we will employ Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to explore these two ends of the belief spectrum- materialism and traditional Christianity- in our search for the basis of morals.

Two Orthogonal Viewpoints

The word ‘seemingly’ is used above because the materialistic ‘evolutionary psychological’ viewpoint is based on an incomplete grasp of evolution.  As we saw last week, this understanding restricts the historical timeline of evolution to the most recent phase of ‘biological evolution’.  This narrow approach falls significantly short of the universal perspective proposed by Teilhard.  As we have frequently noted, Teilhard’s ‘lens’ sees evolution as the underlying phenomenon in all of universal history,  from the ‘big bang’ to the present.

Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection only addresses the few billion years which constitute the phase of biological evolution leading to the human person.  Teilhard identifies the nine or so billion years preceding the first cell as the inorganic ‘first phase’ of evolution, and the two hundred thousand years (or so) of human existence as the ‘third’.  As we have seen, he goes on to point out how the energy of evolution takes different forms as it proceeds through the three phases in its continuous increase of the complexity of its products.

A first step towards a more comprehensive perspective is to recognize that materialists are correct when they assert that the basis of morality should lie in the continuation of human evolution.  When seen by Teilhard’s more inclusive ‘lens’, however, Natural Selection becomes an ‘epi-phenomenon’ which rides on top of the more fundamental ‘rise of complexity’ that underpins all three phases.  The agency of the first phase can be seen in the precipitation of matter from pure energy following the ‘Big Bang’.  It can be seen as matter goes on to evolve into more complex arrangements leading to the mega-molecules which form the raw material for the first cells.

This phenomenon is only now in the early stages of being addressed by science.  The agency of the third phase by which individual persons and their societies emerge and become more complex is also poorly addressed by science, and even there in the form of highly controversial and relatively untestable theories.  Applying the well-understood process of Natural Selection as an explanation of poorly understood human evolution is like losing one’s car keys in the middle of a dark city block and looking for them at the street corner because the light is better.

So the conclusion which should be drawn from science’s discovery that we are products of evolution is less that we are to continue the urge to procreate and survive (essentially to continue to respond to the instinctual stimuli of our reptilian and mammalian brains) but that, in the human person, the energy of evolution is much more manifest in the activity of our neocortex brain, which must be employed to modulate the instinctual stimuli of our lower brains if evolution is to continue through us.

Therefore, once evolution is seen in its complete context, from the Big Bang to the present, the evolutionary basis for morality can be expanded to include those principles by which our continued evolution can be assured.

While the materialistic approach to the basis of morals can be seen to reduce standards of behavior to the instincts of our animal evolutionary predecessors, addressing the basis of morals from the traditional perspective of religion also comes with problems.  In many western expressions, morals are understood as laws given explicitly by God in the distant past and recorded in scripture.  As we have frequently seen, from this perspective, morals can also be seen more as justifying a post-life reward (or as one theologian puts it,  ”As an escape route from this life”).  The basis of morals as understood by the more conservative western Christian expressions is then ‘absolute’, even if we humans in our sinful state find them difficult to follow.

The Next Post

This week we have contrasted the ‘materialistic’ (‘atheistic’) position with that of the ‘theists’ on ‘how we should be if we would be what we can be’, The materialist, in a limited view of evolution, sees morals as ‘relative’ to ‘survival’, while the theists sees them as dictated by an all-powerful God eons ago and therefore ‘absolute’ and thus necessary for reward in the ‘next life’.

Next week we will explore how a more comprehensive perspective on evolution can be seen to offer a common ground of belief that seems more consistent with both our general religious and scientific understanding of both the universe and our part in it.

   How can Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ be used to see the evolution of morals?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how religion is not the only cultural artifact which calls attention to the energy of evolution in our lives, and how our Western culture itself is infused with such recognition.

This week we will focus Teilhard’s ‘lens’ on sacraments on the context of human values and morals.

The Basis of Morals

Humans do not generally agree on the best way to make sense of their existence, much less the most effective way to conduct their lives.  Among the many religious expressions, for example, there is wide divergence on understanding human ontology: do we emerge from a generally linear process of evolution or creation, or are our lives simply repetitions of previous lives?  Are we doomed to complete extinction when we die or in some sense do we continue existence on a separate plane, and if so, will we retain our personal uniqueness or be dissolved into an impersonal ‘cosmic all’?  Is there a ‘way’ to live life to the fullest, or is each life sufficiently unique and autonomous to ignore traditional behavioral guidelines?  Is the basis for morals ‘universal’ or unique for each person?  Are morals, standards for the conduct of human life, ‘absolute’ or ‘relative’?

Whichever of the many beliefs about human life we claim, such beliefs come with their own specific standards of behavior.  We have employed Teilhard’s ‘lens’ in the exploration of the concept of ‘sacraments’, in which certain beliefs about existence manifest themselves in the form of behaviors which are thought to be ‘normative’ to human existence.  In participating in these behaviors, the concept of sacraments suggests ways of acting in a way which is more resonant with the basic flow of energy by which our lives, and hence our society, and ultimately the universe, unfolds.  The idea of the sacraments suggests that there is indeed a ‘way’ to live life which is resonant to the rise of evolutionary energy within us, and which will lead to ‘fuller being’.

While this perspective is certainly resonant with our approach to the reinterpretation of religious beliefs, it is obvious that belief in the basis of morals is quite diverse across the patchwork quilt of Christianity, much less in the West and even more so in the wide ranges of belief found in other parts of the world.  It seems equally obvious that such a wide diversity of standards for behavior can be traced to the divergence on beliefs about human ontology.  If we disagree on how to make sense of our existence, frequently manifest as a difference in the belief in God, our standards for behavior will be strikingly different.

From the Materialist Viewpoint

A similar divergence can be seen in the increasing disagreement between ‘theists’ and ‘atheists’.  At least in the West there seems to be an increasing number of individuals who, instead of disagreeing on the nature of God, disbelieve in the existence of a ground of being itself.  This disbelief frequently manifests itself in denial not only of such traditional concepts as love, sin and morality, but in the existence of meaning itself.  Such a philosophical trend is often seen as the only logical conclusion which can be drawn from basing our personal accommodation of life on the provable findings of science.  Science’s theory of evolution is a case in point.

In the case of universal ontology, as a general rule science avoids the term ‘evolution’ to address the process by which its Standard Model articulates the universe’s increasing complexification as molecules emerge from clusters of bosons upwards through atomic structures to molecules.  While this model tracks this ‘rise’ of matter, for example, and implicitly acknowledges the increase of complexity which emerges in this emergence, it offers thus far no term which identifies this obvious phenomenon.  Further, many scientists vehemently object to using the term ‘evolution’ to describe the eight-billion-year process by which the universe effects highly complex molecules from bosons.  While they have no term for the process itself, they insist that the term must be restricted to the biological processes addressed by the theory of Natural Selection.

In the phase of evolution that emerges with the onset of living things, the ‘biosphere’, it is a common scientific concept that the living things which emerge are ‘selected by evolution’.   This idea is based on the theory of Natural Selection which sees the evolutionary process of living things as guided by the principle that they are chosen by the criteria of ‘survival’.  In this perspective, new entities which emerge in the history of evolution are either successful in surviving their environment and thus go on to continued procreation or they are unsuccessful and fade from the ‘tree of life’ as it continues to develop.

Many scientific thinkers extend the rationale of Natural Selection to evolution as it continues through the human species.  While generally agreeing that ‘morphological’ evolution still continues in humans (physiological changes due to changes in DNA) they posit that Natural Selection continues its work of ‘survival’ via cultural principles found in the organization of human society.  Not only does this approach offer a partial understanding of how changes take place in human society, but it also notes how such changes are occurring much faster than those found in morphology. Thus, a common approach to articulating this mode of evolution is to understand the structures of human edifices in terms of their ‘evolutionary selection’.  In other words, as envisioned by Richard Dawkins in his book, “The Selfish Gene”, a given philosophical, legal or cultural idea can be seen as a ‘meme’, which performs the same function in human culture as the gene in cellular evolution.  The evolutionary value of memes is judged by their contribution to the continuing survival of the human species.  Even in the human, evolution is still ‘selecting’ us.

In the scientific approach to making sense of things, therefore, concepts such as meaning, values and their associated standards of behavior, carry much less weight.  Although science does not directly address such things, some modes of science, such as evolutionary psychology, touch upon the ‘correct way’ to live.  Evolutionary psychology reduces the basis of human action to the precepts of Darwin’s theory of ‘natural selection’, in which each of our personal choices either act in support of the ‘principles’ of evolution or act against them.  Since the key principle of Darwinist evolution is understood as ‘survival’, human actions are considered to be ‘correct’ when they increase both our personal survival (so that we can contribute our genes to the ‘gene pool’) and that of our species (and our ‘memes’ to the ‘meme pool’) and in doing so insuring that the species does not become extinct.  Where this mode of science proposes behavioral correctness, it is effectively proposing values and morals consistent with this standard.

Further, from the materialistic perspective, since those morals and standards of behavior are relative to our unfolding understanding of evolution, they themselves unfold over time.  Therefore, since such understanding is quite diverse, personal morals can then be different for different persons.  Morals are therefore ‘relative’.  Still further, as in the case of genes, a wide diversity in memes may well be necessary to insure a rich ‘meme pool’ to enhance our survival potential.  From such a perspective, ‘relativity’ among morals is necessary to insure that human evolution produces the diversity necessary for nature to take all possible avenues of development, thus continuing the ramification that has been seen across the wide expanse of biology.

To evolve, therefore, we must ‘diverge’.

The Next Post

This week we continued to expand our view of sacraments, morals and values to the basis of ‘correct behavior’ and seen how the materialistic perspective is based on science’s proposition that the basis of biological evolution is ‘survival’.

Next week we will contrast this materialistic approach to the traditional religious view of this basis and explore how Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ can bring these two seemingly contradictory viewpoints into synergy.

How can the activation of the ‘energies of evolution’ be better seen in human practices?

Today’s Post

Last week we explored how the concept of ‘sacrament’ can be interpreted as ‘articulations of the noosphere’, helping us to navigate our lives by the compass of, and in cooperation with the energy of, evolution, ‘grace’, as it flows through our lives.

Although the concept of sacraments seems to have risen in the theological evolution of the West, there are many other ‘occasions of grace’ (instantiations of the energy of evolution) in our lives which are more secular but just as important to our continued personal evolution as they are to the evolution of our society.

This week we’ll take a look at some of these.

Evolutionary Beliefs and ‘Secular Sacraments’

One of the ways of moving human evolution forward that we have explored is the development of the skill of employing our neo-cortex brains to modulate the instinctual stimuli of the lower ‘limbic’ and ‘reptilian’ brains.  Such skill is called for in nearly every religious tradition in human history, but requires guidelines, ‘signposts’ to insure that such employment aligns with the ‘axis of evolution’ as it rises in our lives.

Another way to look such evolutionary ‘signposts’ is provided by Richard Dawkins, as he sees human evolution proceeding by way of ‘memes’, nuggets of cultural evolution which foster our way forward.  In his vernacular, such ‘memes’ constitute the human counterpart to molecular ‘genes’ which shape the manifestations of matter as they emerge into living things.  From this viewpoint, sacraments can be seen as examples of ‘memes’ which we use as we evolve.

An example of such a signpost is the simple adage, seemingly first voiced by Confucius in 550 BC: “Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you”.  While simple to state, it nonetheless requires a conscious decision to first understand what you would like to have done to you, then to make the conscious decision to act against what might be an instinctive motivation, such as to react in kind to a perceived threat.

Most thinkers agree that development of such skill is difficult, which acknowledges both the strength of our inherited instincts (which served our reptilian and mammalian ancestors so well) and the immaturity of the use of our human-unique neo-cortex brain.  The writings of both religion and philosophy abound with rituals designed to help the human person transcend his ‘lower’ roots.

As ‘articulations of the noosphere’, sacraments fall into this category.  They offer examples of human actions that require activation of our neo-cortex thinking centers instead of reactions to our instinctual stimuli.  In the ‘eucharist’, for example, we are called to replace our instinctive recoil from others with the conscious understanding of our common natures as ‘all made in the image of god’, or in our secular vernacular, as each possessing the spark of the ‘ground of being’ which energizes the evolution of our person.  We have seen several such examples proposed by religion, but our entire social systems are rife with those that stress objectivity over subjectivity, and deliberation over instinct, as a basis for action.  All these activities, encoded in our laws and cultural norms, are based on values that are uniquely human and which transcend such instinctive goals as survival and procreation.

We saw how Richard Dawkins understands that evolution in the human species continues by way of ‘memes’, which constitute the fibers of the fabric of culture.  These ‘memes’ are simply those insights, which when shared among the members of a group, contribute to its endurance.  Some examples of ‘secular sacraments’ can be found in such shared values as:

Human Equality 

At least in the West, the underlying concept of human equality has become widely accepted.  Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, this simple value qualifies as the basis for a true ‘articulation of the noosphere’ as it underpins several practices which can be seen to contribute to both material and spiritual (by Teilhard’s definition) successes of the West.  While there is little doubt that Western societies are still evolving, the current of human evolution can be readily traced in the rapid (by evolutionary measure) evolution of societal organization from monarchies, through monarchies with ‘charters’ which recognized rights of the non-monarchy, to the United States Bill of Rights.

Thomas Jefferson expresses this value in very clear terms in the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”.

This fundamental value, an example of a Dawkins ‘meme’, leads on to a belief that is essential to Western democracy: if each individual has the same rights, an opinion of the majority will serve as a mandate to society.  Effectively this leads to the belief that ‘majority rules’ in the enacting of laws.  As Thomas Jefferson puts it succinctly there is

“. ..no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves.”

   This, in turn, leads to the act of articulating “the will of the people”, voting.  From our perspective of reinterpretation, voting, then, is an example of a ‘secular sacrament’.  When we vote we are effectively acting out the belief that the majority opinion is normative in human society, based on the value that each person has the same rights, and hence the same potential for understanding how society should work.  Thus, by our secular definition of ‘sacrament’, the act of voting is one by which the energy of evolution can be seen to be an active element in the evolution of society.

Psychology

As we have seen, psychology is an activity in which we explore our basic self, which from our secular perspective involves finding the ‘ground of being’ as the manifestation of universal evolution in our personal lives.  As such, psychology can be a profoundly human activity, a sacrament, since what is found is that which is most human in us.
The practice of psychology depends upon the belief that an essential characteristic of the human person is ‘improvability’.  Like ‘human equality’, this is another example of a Dawkins ‘meme’ which, when acted upon constitutes yet another contribution to the continuation of human evolution via the enrichment of human life.

The Next Post

This week we expanded the view of perspectives from church-developed sacraments to ‘secular sacraments’, ones in which we engage in our everyday lives.

Next week we will take a final look at sacraments in the light of values and morals.

   How can sacraments be understood when seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’? 

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how human evolution proceeds through the trial-and-error process seen in human attempts to ‘articulate the noosphere’, and how successful attempts are captured in the ‘cultural DNA’ through the ‘tissue of culture’ as found in religion, philosophy, and laws.  This week we will continue this exploration by seeing sacraments as examples of human activity in which the work of grace, now seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, now emerges as the energy of our personal and cultural evolution.

Sacraments as ‘Signs of Grace’

In the recent posts on Jesus we saw how Jesus can be seen as a ‘signpost to God’, and discussed how he emerges in evolution as ‘evolution becoming aware of itself’.

As Western religious tradition has seen it, Jesus recognized seven aspects of human life that are critical to our ‘salvation’.  Just as Jesus was a ‘signpost to God’, these aspects were ‘signposts to grace’ and took place in events in which this ‘grace’ was most focused.  They are therefore examples of aspects of human life in which this ‘evolutionary energy’ is most active.

The idea of seeing some human activity as more significant to human life is found in other religions as well.   In his book, ‘The Souls of China’, Ian Johnson addresses the trend in which many Chinese are beginning to identify themselves as Daoist, Buddhist, Christian or Muslim after decades of having religious expression outlawed.  He explains how traditional rituals help people overcome urban anomie and answer the “pragmatic but profound issue of how to behave at critical life junctures”, such as weddings, funerals, pilgrimages, social work, and meditation.

So, as we proceeded with other religious concepts in our employment of Teilhard’s ‘lens’, the key step in this search is the reinterpretation of those traditional teachings from the perspective of reinterpretation that we have developed.  The sacraments are no exception.

What Are ‘Sacraments?’

   Christianity identifies seven events in human life that are ‘occasions of grace’: events in which our lives are enriched.  Although the church places great emphasis on the action of the church hierarchy in ‘conferring’ the grace that flows in these events, our reinterpretation approach simply sees them as events in our lives to which we must ‘pay attention’ so that we can cooperate with this flow of grace in such a way that our personal evolution, our ‘spiritual growth’ is enhanced.  Paraphrasing Teilhard, when we participate in these events we are ‘trimming our sails to the winds of life’, aligning our lives to the flow of energy that arises in the axis of evolution.

Traditional church teaching identifies seven such rituals, all of which require church hierarchy for the ‘conferring’, and all of which recognize the action of grace which takes place.  These teachings place great emphasis on both the need for the church to perform the ritual to effect the outcome of the giving of grace, and the need for our participation in them as a condition for church membership.

From Teilhard’s perspective, however, such ‘scaffolding’ can be replaced by focusing on and reinterpreting the concept of the sacraments in terms of grace as the energy of both our personal evolution and the resulting evolution of our species.  From such a perspective, the role of the church is less ‘conferring’ and more simply calling attention to the ‘signposts’.

Reinterpreting ‘The Seven Sacraments’

Baptism

Traditional church teaching sees baptism as the ‘conferring’ of the grace that will enable our eventual entry into heaven by taking away the stain of ‘original sin’.  Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens, this ‘first’ sacrament, baptism, is that which understands human birth to be a personal extension of the evolution of the universe.  Each life is another small limb on the branch of the tree of evolution, in which the energy of evolution manifests itself yet again as an element of consciousness to be valued, cared for, fostered, and understood for what it truly is.

Like all sacraments, the ritual of baptism involves the ‘cultural tissue of the DNA of evolution’ (the church and society) which is made up of the parents, the family and the community.  The ritual not only calls attention to the unique potential of human life but does it in a way that recognizes the essential nature of the community in bringing this life to maturity.  It is a steppingstone to Teilhard’s mapping of the energy of love as the play of ‘centration’ and ‘excentration’ by which we come to be what we can be.

Confirmation

In church tradition, the sacrament of confirmation ‘confers’ the grace of human spiritual growth.  Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, the sacrament of confirmation goes on to ‘confirm’ the actuation of potential which occurs as we mature, recognizing that our potential for growth is assured by our cooperation with grace, ‘the energy of human evolution’.  Just as this grace is ‘gratuitous’, unearned, so our potential for maturity is assured and can be trusted if we but recognize and cooperate with its presence in our lives.

Eucharist

In the traditions of the church, the sacrament of the Eucharist, known as ‘communion’, is the central sacrament of church unity.  From Teilhard’s perspective, it is perhaps the sacrament most germane to human evolution.  In it, we participate in a symbolic communal meal, in which we recognize that we are all part of a wider community.  As we saw earlier, seeing Jesus as ‘the Christ’ recognizes the human person as an eventual product of universal evolution, and as such each of us consists of a ‘branch’ of the axis along which this process of evolution proceeds.  From this perspective, all persons are not only ‘children of God’ (products of evolution) they are ultimately united by their share of the cosmic spark by which they come to be.  By participation in this ritual, we are reminded of this essential ground of unity, and of the necessity for cooperating with the energies of love by which we can be brought into a ‘greater possession of ourselves’ as we overcome our instinctual sense of separation from others.  In Teilhard’s words, the Eucharist is the most important of the sacraments because:

 “.. it is but the expression and manifestation of the divine unifying energy applying itself little by little to every spiritual atom of the universe.”

Matrimony

The church teaches that the sacrament of matrimony is necessary for the natural joining of human persons in the process of procreation and child rearing.  In Teilhard’s perspective, it reminds us that the road to the more complete possession of ourselves that we refer to as ‘maturity’ must be undertaken in the context of relationship.  In the joining of two persons, the play of ‘centration’ and ‘excentration’ is essential to our continued growth.  It is a reminder that we can only become who we can be by engaging in relationship: our growth is assured as much by our ability to give love as it is by our ability to receive it.  In Teilhard’s vision, love is much more a structural energy which unites us in such a way as to expand our ‘person-ness’ than an emotion which draws us to each other.

Penance

The church teaches that the sacrament of reconciliation (referred to as ‘confession’ or ‘penance’) is necessary to return our soul to a state of grace by erasing the stain placed on it by our sin and thus restoring our potential for salvation.  Teilhard’s perspective recognizes that the many impediments we can build to our relationships reflect a failure to cooperate with grace, thus impeding our personal growth.  As can be seen from a casual glance at ‘self-help’ publications, alienation is a never-ending threat, whether we find ourselves in search of internal reconnection, or in search of reconciliation to repair our relationships.  And, as in all the sacraments, Penance offers the church as a media for the internal reconciliation that is necessary to overcome these impediments.

Last Rites

The church teaches that the sacrament of the sick (also referred to as the “Last Rites’, or ‘Extreme Unction’) is sort of a ‘last chance’ for cleansing the soul before death, and therefore effecting our ‘salvation’.  However, it also recognizes material benefits, such as bearing up under pain, overcoming fear and even improving how we feel.  Teilhard’s perspective calls attention to the fact that grace is present even in death.  As one theologian expressed it, “The sacrament of the sick means we do not have to die alone.”

Again, the church provides the presence of the community and recalls our common connection.

Holy Orders

The sacrament of “Holy Orders” is often referred to as the ‘sacrament of service’.  It recognizes the church’s basic role in providing the ‘tissue of the DNA of human evolution’.

As we have seen elsewhere, this aspect of the milieu of grace can be articulated in many other ways as well.  A prime example can be seen in our political systems which attempt to codify the practices by which the fabric of our society can be knotted in such a way which insures stability without eroding the personal freedom and innovation necessary to insure the increases in human welfare such as those documented by Johan Norberg in his book, ‘Progress’.

The Next Post

This week we moved from recognizing that the milieu of grace in which we live, the energy of evolution, can be articulated to locate those sparks of energy that are most relevant to our human growth, to some specific articulations expressed in the concept of ‘sacraments’.

As we have seen elsewhere, this milieu of grace can be articulated in many other ways as well, such as in our political practices which highlight the necessity to trust the basic goodness of the human person as reflected in our belief in ‘inalienable rights’ and ‘the will of the people’.

Next week we will look into the idea of ‘secular sacraments’ in more detail.

   If spirituality occurs naturally in human life, how can it be seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the energy of evolution can be seen as active in the milieu in which we live our human lives, ‘grace’.  We also saw how the concept of ‘sacrament’, refocused by Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ is simply identification of some of the ways that this energy can be encountered.  In Teilhard’s vernacular, they point to instantiations of ‘articulations of the noosphere.’

This week we will look a little more closely at the way that Teilhard viewed the ‘noosphere’, and how such articulation is necessary to light the path to the advance of evolution through our lives.

The Noosphere

As Teilhard sees it, the evolution of our planet can be seen as the appearance of ‘spheres’, layers of evolutionary products which have appeared in succession on our planet.   He sees these spheres as:

• The ‘lithosphere’, the conglomeration of molecules which pack together under the influence of gravity, the same force by which our planetary disk precipitated out into distinct planets surrounding the Sun.
• The ‘atmosphere’ which forms as the gas molecules separate from the solids
• The ‘hydrosphere’ which forms as the atmosphere evolves into water and air
• The ‘biosphere’ which emerges as some molecules become complex enough to form cells

These ‘spheres’ are well recognized by science, and their appearance in evolutionary history is well established.

To these fundamental spheres, Teilhard adds the ‘noosphere’, literally the ‘sphere of thought’.  He sees that with the appearance of the human, our planet acquires a new layer.  As humans emerge and begin to cover the planet, he sees it as obvious that the planet is in the process of assuming a new form.  Today’s controversies over such subjects as ecology and global warning are evidence of the emerging awareness of just how significant the noosphere has become.

The Articulation of the Noosphere

As we have seen, Teilhard sees evolution proceeding through the human as a continuation of the increase of complexity that can be observed to have occurred over the preceding fourteen or so billion years.  He also notes that in each phase of evolution, from the ‘inorganic’ phase, through the ‘biological’ phase, this complexity ‘changes state’ as it increases.  In his view, the energy which drives complexification itself becomes more complex.  The Standard Model of Physics is still evolving, as the emerging theories of Quantum Physics and ‘dark’ matter illustrate, and thus offers new paradigms by which complexification in this phase can be articulated.  The theory of Natural Selection is also still evolving as it struggles to address the phenomenon of the increasing complexity of living things.  However, when it comes to understanding, much less measuring, the process of how the continuation of the rise of complexity can be seen in the human person and his culture, it is much less clear.  As many thinkers have mused, making sense of ourselves while we are evolving is like traversing a bridge while we are still building it.

Teilhard notes that all religions attempt to identify ‘how we should be if we would be what we can be’.  With the strong infusion of myths, superstitions, and dualities that are inevitable over such long periods of development (arising in the prescientific world of thousands of years ago), we are left today with inconsistent and even contradictory guidelines for our continued development.  Science does not offer much help in this area.  Those expressions of belief that claim scientific foundations are simply attempts to derive meaning from empirical data and offer little support for the faith needed to deal with the daily effort of human life.

But as Teilhard sees effective human life as learning to ‘set our sails to the winds of life’, the skills of reading the wind and tending the tiller are first necessary to be learned.   As he sees it:

“And, conventional and impermanent as they may seem on the surface, what are the intricacies of our social forms, if not an effort to isolate little by little what are one day to become the structural laws of the noosphere.”

“In their essence, and provided they keep their vital connection with the current that wells up from the depths of the past, are not the artificial, the moral and the juridical simply the hominized versions of the natural, the physical and the organic?”

It seems obvious ‘keeping the vital connection with the current’ comes down to ‘trial and error’.  Seen thusly, this is simply ‘survival of the fittest’: those things that we learn which enhance our life are collected, refined through the development of our culture, and encoded into morals and laws.  Those which don’t atrophy over time as they become seen as less valuable.

As we have seen, Richard Dawkins offers yet another insight into the issue of human evolution.  Like Teilhard, he recognizes the difference between evolution in society and as understood as ‘Natural Selection’ by biology.  In his book, “The Selfish Gene’, he proposes that evolution continues through human society by way of ‘memes’, packets of cultural information that act as the cultural parallel to biological genes.  Such ‘memes’ are echoed in what Teilhard refers to as the ‘noosphere’, which is the body of human thoughts, ideas and inventions which accumulate in human lore, rituals, books, schools, and networks over time, and is thus ‘spiritual’ in nature.

The body of insights and skills that we accumulate in our culture are, as Teilhard sees it, ‘articulations of the noosphere’.  They can be understood, as Dawkins suggests, as the ‘genetic material’ of human evolution, weaving their way into the thread of universal evolution as they prompt the continued evolution of the human person.

By this criterion, sacraments can be understood as examples of behavior that are passed from generation to generation via the cultural ‘tissue’ of religion.  Effectively they are signs of the play of evolutive energy as it flows through human life: the ‘DNA of human evolution’.

Religion is not the only place where such noospheric articulations can be found.  As we saw in our focus of Teilhard’s ‘lens’ on spirituality, a secular example can be found in a fundamental axiom of our government.  It is at the basis of the idea of a ‘representative government’, and often described as the ‘will of the people’ so essential to democratic governments.  While not finding articulation per se in the new American constitution and bill of rights, Thomas Jefferson was very clear in his concept of the validity of this ‘consensus in government’ as an ‘articulation of the noosphere’:

“I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be other that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.  I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves.”

   This exercise of ‘trust of the people to govern themselves’ is a secular example of an ‘articulation of the noosphere’.  The ‘meme’ of human equality can be seen here as one which, as Jefferson asserted, rises in the teachings of Jesus, evolves through such things as societal norms, then ‘charters’, and finally blossoms unequivocally in the laws which flow from the Constitution of the Unites States.  When we engage in such activity as the process of voting, we are implicitly connecting with one of the threads of evolution as it runs through human evolution.  This activity is effectively a ‘secular sacrament’ which, if we choose to see it, points to an underlying agency of the energy which moves us forward: ‘grace’

Grace

As we have seen, the coming to be of the universe involves an underlying energy by which things unite in such a way that results in increased complexity of the product of the uniting.  Or, as Teilhard puts it

“Fuller being from closer union and closer union from fuller being”

   We have also seen how this energy is just as essential to matter as matter is essential to it.  This is the core of Teilhard’s insight into applying the term ‘spirit’ to this agency which is the essential manifestation of this energy.  We also saw how science is beginning to address this elusive agent in its approach to ‘information’.

Traditionally, religion has addressed this agency in metaphorical terms, seeing it as a ‘flow’ of supernatural life in human affairs.  With Teilhard’s insistence that this flow is the natural manifestation of evolutionary energy in human life, he moves its focus from the emotional connection between humans to the ontological connections which effect their personal evolution.

From this perspective, the metaphor of ‘flow’ becomes stronger.  Teilhard uses it when he says,

“Those who set their sails to the winds of life will always find themselves borne on a current to the open sea.”

   The term ‘grace’ is very common in Western religion, but it finds many diverse expressions in the many forms that Western religion takes.  From our perspective of interpretation, grace can now be seen as the current into which we can insert ourselves if we are to be borne to fuller being.  Grace is simply the current manifestation of that same energy which has, for fourteen billion years, ‘raised the complexity of the universe to its current level’ (paraphrasing Dawkins).

But, as we have noted, it is very elusive indeed, as science has yet been unable to quantify it, and religion seems to require supernatural sources for it.  Teilhard insists that recognition of it is necessary for our continued evolution.  To ‘set our sails to the winds of life’ we must first learn to recognize the wind.

That’s where the idea of ‘sacrament’ comes in.

The Next Post

This week looked a little deeper into Teilhard’s insights; the evolving understanding of ‘how we should be if we would be what we can be’, which he refers to as ‘articulation of the noosphere’ and saw how such insights contribute to the continuation of the thread of evolution as it rises through the human.

We saw that such articulations are essentially the ‘cultural DNA’ of our evolution, but that their recognition is essential if we are to cooperate with them.

Next week we will move onto reinterpreting sacraments through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.