How does Teilhard use his ‘lens’ to open the door to connecting to God?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the recognition of the ‘core of person’, and the realization that such a core is also a manifestation of Karen Armstrong’s ‘immortal spark’, is that which connects us to the universal agency which ‘sustains and gives life to the entire cosmos’. While this recognition may well bring us closer to a clearer understanding of God, it still does not address how a relationship with such a God is possible.

This week we’ll apply Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to the opening of that door.

Teilhard’s Seven Steps of Meditation

All religions include rituals that are intended to put us in touch with the ultimate ground of being, be it the Eastern Brahman or the Western God. One practice common to most of them is ‘meditation’, the goal of which is both increased awareness of ourselves and of this ultimate life force which lies at our core.

Of course, while each expression may have the same goal of finding both our ‘true’ selves and this ‘core’, each brings its unique presuppositions to the practice. As a result, the word ‘meditation’ often brings with it a presumption of some religious dogma or hermeneutic, hence introducing this concept here might be seen as distinctively contrary to the ‘secular’ approach employed in Teilhard’s ‘lens’. As we shall see, however, echoing Richard Dawkins, “the divesting of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries” works equally well as a method for experiencing God as it did for his definition.

We’ll start with an example of Teilhard’s use of his ‘lens of evolution’, which closely follows Maurice Blondel in understanding God as the ‘immanent ground of being’. Teilhard described this experience of meditation in his book, “The Divine Milieu”. This description is independent (“divested of the baggage”) of most traditional religious assumptions and demonstrates a framework for a ‘personal contact’ with God as we are exploring.

Step 1: Recognizing the Facets of our Person

“And so, for the first time in my life, perhaps, I took the lamp and, leaving the zones of everyday occupations and relationships, where my identity, my perception of myself is so dependent on my profession, my roles- where everything seems clear, I went down into my inmost self, to the deep abyss whence I feel dimly that my power of action emanates.”

Here Teilhard begins with an exploration of the ‘scaffolding’ of his person: those influences which affect the development of personality: beliefs, faiths, and fears. How much of who we are and what we believe have we consciously accepted, as opposed to those facades which we have erected as a protective skin to ward off the dangers of life?

Step 2: Moving past the Safety of the Scaffolding

“But as I descended further and further from that level of conventional certainties by which social life is so superficially illuminated, I became aware that I was losing contact with myself. At each step of the descent, with the removal of layers of my identity defined from without, a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me. “

How can we begin to objectively see ourselves, steeped in our facades and scaffolding as we are? What happens when we begin to recognize these facades and scaffoldings, and try to imagine the consequence of divesting ourselves of them? How can we ultimately trust that what lies beneath is indeed ‘trustworthy’? Upon what can we place our faith in our capacity for the ‘dangerous actions’ that we must undertake each day?

Step 3: Encountering the Font of Our Consciousness

“And when I had to stop my descent because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet, and from it flowed, arising I know not from where, the current which I dare to call my life.”

Where does our life come from? Every day we are barraged by stimuli from our instinctual brains, fears, elations, and ideas that arrive unbidden from what we refer to as our ‘unconscious’. One philosopher refers to our life as “what happens while we were making other plans”. How does that happen?

Step 4: Facing the Intangibility of the Font

“What science will ever be able to reveal to man the origin, nature, and character of that conscious power to will and to love which constitutes his life? It is certainly not our effort, nor the effort of anyone around us, which set that current in motion. And it is certainly not our anxious care, nor that of any friend of ours, which prevents its ebb or controls its turbulence.

We can, of course, trace back through generations some of the antecedents of the torrent which bears us along; and we can, by means of certain moral and physical disciplines and stimulations, regularize or enlarge the aperture through which the torrent is released into us.”

While we might well recognize that there is a font from which flows the stuff from which we are made, it cannot be empirically articulated. Whatever the source, it is beyond our grasp.

Step 5: Accepting Our Powerlessness Over The Source of Our Life

“But neither that geography nor those artifices help us in theory or in practice to harness the sources of life. My self is given to me far more than it is formed by me. Man, scripture says, cannot add a cubit to his nature. Still less can he add a unit to the potential of his love, or accelerate by another unit the fundamental rhythm which regulates the ripening of his mind and heart. In the last resort, the profound life, the fontal life, the new-born life, escapes our life entirely.”

In addition to our inability to rationally and empirically articulate this flow of life into us, we are also unable to control it. Our only choice is to accept it and come to enough appreciation of it that we are able to cooperate with it.

Step 6: Recognizing our Entwinement in the Fabric of Existence

“Stirred by my discovery, I then wanted to return to the light of day and forget the disturbing enigma in the comfortable surroundings of familiar things, to begin living again at the surface without imprudently plumbing the depths of the abyss. But then, beneath this very spectacle of the turmoil of life, there re-appeared before my newly-opened eyes, the unknown that I wanted to escape.

This time it was not hiding at the bottom of an abyss; it disguised itself, its presence, in the innumerable strands which form the web of chance, the very stuff of which the universe and my own small individuality are woven. Yet it was the same mystery without a doubt: I recognized it.”

Teilhard recognizes not only the source of life within us, but how this source is also interwoven into the ‘innumerable strands which form …the very stuff of which the universe and my own small individuality”

Step 7: Recognizing the Face of the Ground of Being

“Our mind is disturbed when we try to plumb the depth of the world beneath us. But it reels still more when we try to number the favorable chances which must coincide at every moment if the least of living things is to survive and succeed in its enterprises.

After the consciousness of being something other and something greater than myself- a second thing made me dizzy: Namely the supreme improbability, the tremendous unlikely-hood of finding myself existing in the heart of a world that has survived and succeeded in being a world.

At that moment, I felt the distress characteristic to a particle adrift in the universe, the distress which makes human wills founder daily under the crushing number of living things and of stars. And if something saved me, it was hearing the voice of the Gospel, guaranteed by divine success, speaking to me from the depth of the night:

“It is I, be not afraid.”

How do I dare believe that whatever is at the source of my being, indeed of all being, it is nonetheless (As Blondel puts it) ‘on my side’? How is it possible to see this ‘fontal’ life which pours into me at each moment as an individual instantiation of the general forces which have brought (and are still bringing) the universe into fuller being? How do I dare trust that these forces, welling up over billions of years, will continue to well up in me.? How can I begin to recognize, trust and more importantly cooperate with this inner source of energy so that I can be carried onto a more complete possession of myself?

In this short but very personal and straightforward description of the journey into himself, Teilhard offers an outline of meditation that is ‘secular’ but addresses the full gamut of a quest for the ‘ground of being’ that is within us that we call God.

Secular Meditation

There is nothing religious about these seven steps. The assumptions about the nature of the universe that science and biology assert, once the phenomenon of increasing complexity is added, are all that is necessary to state them. As Teilhard suggests, the addition of this phenomenon, while not yet a specific scientific theory, is not only necessary for inclusion of the human person into the scope of scientific enquiry, it is also necessary for the process of universal evolution itself.

A universe without increasing complexity would not evolve.

There is a similarity between these seven steps and the very successful “Ten Steps” of Alcoholics Anonymous. The foundational step of exploring and learning to trust oneself is at the basis of much of Western thinking. Psychology, as we will see in the next few weeks, can therefore be seen as ‘secular meditation’.

The Next Post

This week we explored Teilhard’s approach to meditation as a skill through which we can make contact with our ‘core of being’, and through this with God. We saw his meditation exercise in the practical and secular seven steps he took in his search for the ‘cosmic spark’ which enlivens all things.

Next week we will move on to see how psychology can be seen as a form of “secular meditation”.

How do we use Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to find God in our lives?

Today’s Post

Last week we focused Teilhard’s ‘lens’ on the history of ‘looking for God’, and how the focus of the Christian church slowly shifted from the intimacy expressed in Jewish tradition to the Greek-influenced ‘over against’ decried by Blondel.

This week we will continue our employment of Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to refocus upon the process of finding God in human life.

The Search for the ‘Cosmic Spark’

As we have seen, Teilhard asserted that any search for God begins with a search within ourselves:

“It is through that which is most incommunicably personal in us that we make contact with the universal “

Most of the ancient sages, including Jesus, point to the belief that the most essential core of our being must be uncovered for us to attain our most authentic expression of being. This isn’t necessarily the ‘happiest’ or ‘most powerful’ state, but rather one in which we are ‘more complete’ and more aware of and able to achieve our full potential as persons.

Karen Armstrong, in her sweeping narrative, “The Great Transformation” identifies several areas of common ground among the six lines of thought (Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, Monotheism in Israel and philosophical rationalism in Greece) in four parts of the world that constituted a new understanding of God and Self in the ‘Axial Age’ (900-200 BCE). She describes one of the earliest such insights in the Upanishads as:

“There is an immortal spark at the core of the human person, which, when participated in – was of the same nature as – the immortal Brahman that sustained and gave life to the entire cosmos. This was a discovery of immense importance, and it would become a central insight in every major religious tradition. The ultimate reality was an immanent presence in every single human being.”

Armstrong saw this emerging realization as

“For the first time, human beings were systematically making themselves aware of the deeper layers of human consciousness. By disciplined introspection, the sages of the Axial Age were awakening to the vast reaches of selfhood that lay beneath the surface of their minds. This was one of the clearest expressions of a fundamental principle of the Axial Age. Enlightened persons would discover within themselves the means of rising above the world; they would experience transcendence by plumbing the mysteries of their own nature, not simply by taking part in magical rituals.”

Through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’, God can be seen as the upwelling of complexity in evolution, the ‘cosmic spark’, that leads to the ‘person’. From his perspective, we can begin to see how ‘plumbing the mysteries or our own nature’ is a primary means of connecting to the ‘mystery of all nature’. It opens the door to an approach to “Finding God”.

Each of the Axial Age’s six lines of thought brought their own practices to this undertaking. Further, with the seemingly inevitable duality that emerges in each new philosophy, many different and often contradictory practices emerged within each of the lines. Within Christianity, for example, the influence of Greek thinking led to seeing God as ‘other’, as opposed to a universal agent of being and growth at the core of our person.

So, as it is easy to see, the path toward a connection to this inner source of life recognized by nearly all religions, is not a simple thing. Finding a way to do so without being bound by the scaffolding and facades which abound in the canons of traditional religion can be a very difficult undertaking.

The Next Post

This week we began to address the search for God as an active, immanent agent of our personal life. But this does not answer the second part of our question: what does it mean to say that we can have a ‘relationship’ with such a God? Having seen how we are connected to God by participating in this cosmic upwelling of complexity, next week we will address the undertaking of such a relationship.

How can God Be Considered as a ‘person’?

Today’s Post

Last week we addressed the uniquely Western concept of ‘the person’, and asked the question: “Given the perspective of Teilhard and science in general, how can the phenomenon of ‘person’ as understood in the West be brought into resonance with our working definition of God?”:

“God is the sum total of all the forces by which the universe unfolds in such a way that all the entities that emerge in its evolution (from quarks to the human person) each have the potential to become more complex when unified with other entities.”

How can God be a ‘person’? This week we will address this question.

‘Personization’ in Universal Evolution

Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, the ‘person’ is a product of evolution which emerges as an effect of increasing complexity over long periods of time. If we are to understand God in terms of the definition proposed above, where does the characteristic of ‘person’ come in? If a person is a product of evolution, and God is a person, does this mean that God evolves?

To Teilhard, the phenomenon of ‘complexification’ (increasing complexity over time) is the essence of the cosmic upwelling that we refer to as ‘evolution’. Once the agent of complexity is added to the scientific canon of forces as found in the Standard Model of Physics and Biology’s theory of Natural Selection, not only does evolution as we know it become possible, but Teilhard shows how this increase in complexity can be seen to lead to the advent of ‘personness’ as found in the human.

As any educated atheist would point out, isn’t this teleology? In teleology, one reasons from an endpoint (the existence of humans) to the start point (the purpose of evolution is to create humans). In such teleology, creation exists for the purpose of making humans. Teleology therefore seeks to rationalize history in terms of what has emerged. Teleology is frequently used by fundamental Christianity, which sees God as intending humanity as the goal of ‘his’ creation.

Stephen Jay Gould, noted atheistic anthropologist, asserted that “rewinding the tape of evolution” would not necessarily result in the emergence of the human. He believed that the many random events which have occurred in history, such as asteroid impacts which, by effectively wiping out entire species, cleared the way for the rise of mammals. He suggests that other, different, accidents would have had other different outcomes, which would not have necessarily led to the emergence of humans.

While offering this insight as an attack on teleology, Gould’s statement nonetheless reflects his belief that evolution would still have proceeded through any combination of such disasters, and would therefore have continued to produce new species, just not necessarily mammals. It does not acknowledge that such continuation of life would have also reflected a continuing rise of complexity in order to proceed. Therefore, conditions permitting, evolution would still have had the potential to produce an entity of sufficient complexity to have eventually become aware of its consciousness.

Therefore, a different play of the tape of evolution which does not produce a human person is only part of the picture. Recognizing that the increasing complexity of any emergent entity would have led to some sort of consciousness is the other part.

Teilhard asserts that this potential for ‘rising complexity’ to eventually lead to consciousness is a phenomenon of the universe itself. While entities recognizable as ‘human persons’ may not be evolving elsewhere in the universe, the probability of the appearance of entities aware of their awareness is not insignificant. Therefore, Teilhard sees the agent of complexity at work everywhere in the cosmos, and given the appropriate conditions, it will raise its constituent matter to higher levels of awareness:

“From this point of view man is nothing but the point of emergence in nature, at which this deep cosmic evolution culminates and declares itself. From this point onwards man ceases to be a spark fallen by chance on earth and coming from another place. He is the flame of a general fermentation of the universe which breaks out suddenly on the earth.”

Evolution, therefore, requires complexification, which results in consciousness which leads to personization.

So, if God is to be understood as the ‘sum total of all forces’ (as proposed in our working definition), and the essential evolutive force is understood as that of ‘complexification’, then, among all the other forces (gravity, electromagnetism, chemistry), God can also be seen to be active in the ‘force of ‘personization’.

How can Teilhard’s lens be focused to see this force in play?

The Next Post

This week we began to use Teilhard’s lens to understand how God can somehow be considered ‘a person’ by recognizing how the upwelling of complexity in universal evolution slowly, as Teilhard phrases it, “declares itself”.

Next week we will refocus his lens to see how this declaration manifests itself in human evolution.

’Is God a ‘person’?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how an outline of the nature of the fundamental principle of existence could be derived from the writings of Richard Dawkins, well-known atheist. In keeping with Dawkins’ secular worldview, we saw how this outline offered an excellent start to addressing God through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’. Based on this brief outline, a working definition of God emerged:

“God is the sum total of all the forces by which the universe unfolds in such a way that all the entities that emerge in its evolution (from quarks to the human person) each have the potential to become more complex when unified with other entities.”

With Dawkins’ outline of the fundamental aspects of God, this working definition, and the principles of reinterpretation that we have developed, this week we will address reinterpretation of the traditional Christian concept of God as ‘person’.

‘Person-ness”

The concept of the ‘person’ is somewhat unique to the West. It is related to the fundamental Jewish concept of time as seen as flowing from a beginning to an end, unlike the cyclical and recursive concept of time as found in the East. It also sees personal growth as the process of becoming not only ‘whole’, but distinctively so, as opposed to the Eastern concept of human destiny fulfilled in the loss of identity as merged into the ‘cosmic all’. This Western concept of ‘person-ness’ is one into which the idea of evolution fits readily, which leads to the religion-friendly idea of emergent complexity.

The idea of the human person emerging from the evolutionary phenomenon of neurological development is also unique to the West. While there is still much disagreement on how (or even whether) the person, with his unique mind, is separate from random neurological firings in the brain, the idea of the ‘person’ is well accepted. At the level of empirical biology, however, the distinction is difficult to quantify.

Nonetheless, Western society has proceeded along the path that however the neurons work, the effect is still a ‘person’, and recognized as such in the laws which govern the societies which have emerged in the West. While materialists can still claim that consciousness results from random neurological activity and that the basis for our consciousness is ‘just molecular interactions’, very few Westerners doubt the uniqueness of each human person.

Further, this concept of the person as unique provides a strong benefit to Western civilization. While perhaps rooted in the Jewish beliefs which underpin those of Christianity, the Western concept of ‘the person’ nonetheless underpins the other unique Western development: that of science. The evolution of language and use of both brain hemispheres led to the Greek rise of ‘left brain’ thinking (empirical, analytical) from the legacy modes of the ‘right brain’ (instinct and intuition), thus laying the groundwork for science.

As Jonathan Sacks sees it, when the two great threads of Greece and Jerusalem came together in Christianity, this framework evolved from a way of thinking to a disciplined facet of human endeavor. As many contemporary thinkers have observed, it is this connection between the uniqueness of the person (and the associated concepts of freedom) and the power of empirical thinking that account for the unique successes of the West. As Teilhard asserts, (and Johan Norberg thoroughly documents in his book, “Progress”):

“…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.”

Not surprisingly, the uniqueness of the person is reflected in Western religion. Further, while the many different expressions of the three major monotheistic religions might disagree on the specifics, they all agree that persons are somehow uniquely connected to God, and that therefore God is in some way a ‘person’ who saves and damns, rewards and punishes, and provides guidance for life.

Our working definition (above) and our outline of the attributes of God from the last post, however, do not explicitly reflect such an aspect of the Ground of Being. Does this mean that from our point of view God is not a person?

‘Person-ness’ and God

The earliest human societies were all painfully aware of the forces in their environment which they could neither explain or control, such as weather, earthquakes, predators and sickness. They commonly attributed these forces to the work of intelligent beings, gods, as being in control of all these mysterious phenomena. Most of them imagined these gods as being human-like, but with much greater power. In the earliest societies, the many aspects of their mysterious environment were personified, even given names.

As society evolved, and humans grouped themselves into increasingly larger units, from families, to clans, to cities, to states, their emerging ruling hierarchies resulted in kings, sultans and other ‘heads of state’. Many societies evolved their understanding of the gods in similar ways, resulting in an ‘anthropomorphism’ of the gods: “like us but more powerful”.

When Jewish belief moved from a pantheistic understanding of ‘the gods’ to belief in a single god, the person-like aspect of this god was preserved. As Christianity began to emerge, it took with it the concept of God as ‘a person’. The writings of thinkers from Irenaeus through Augustine to Aquinas identify the attributes (as well as the gender) of God as personal. ‘He’ is omniscient (knows everything), omnipotent (all powerful) but still judgmental, and capable of jealousy and anger.

Such characteristics invite contradictory interpretations. If God gets angry or jealous, generally considered negative human behaviors, how can ‘he’ be said to be ‘good’? If he is all powerful, how can he permit evil? If he knows everything in advance, then the future is predetermined and how can human freedom be possible?

On the other hand, if God is not a person, in what way can humans be considered as ‘made in his image’? How is it possible to have a relationship with ‘him’ if ‘he himself’ is not a person?

So, with all that, Richard Dawkins’ question remains unanswered.

The Next Post

Next week we will begin to address these questions. Are our starting definition and list of attributes for the Ground of Being antithetical to the time-honored Western concept of God as ‘person’, or can the long development of the unfolding cosmos somehow be understood as compatible with our human personness?

How can God be more clearly seen through the ‘principles of interpretation’?

Last week we concluded the identification of nineteen ‘principles of reinterpretation’ that can be used to address the traditional tenets of Western religion. Since all religions in some way address and attempt a definition of the underlying ‘ground of being’, that of ‘God’, we will begin here.

A Starting Place

The concept of God as found in the many often contradicting expressions of Western religion can be very confusing. Given the dualities which occur in the Old Testament (such as punishment/forgiveness, natural/supernatural), layered with the many further dualities introduced by Greek influences in the early Christian church (such as body/soul, this world/the next), and topped by many contemporary messages that distort the original texts (such as the “Prosperity Gospel” and “Atonement Theology”) this is not surprising. It can be difficult to find a thread which meets our principles of interpretation without violating the basic findings of science while staying consistent with the basic Western teachings.
A perhaps surprising starting place might come from the writings of one of the more well-known atheists, Richard Dawkins. Professor Dawkins strongly dislikes organized religion, but in his book, “The God Delusion”, he casually remarks

“There must have been a first cause of everything, and we might as well give it the name God. Yes, but 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 (process) which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence.”

Here we find an excellent outline of the nature of the ‘fundamental principle of existence’ that resonates well with our nineteen principles.

– It must be the first cause of everything
– It must work within natural processes
– It must be an agent active in all phases of evolution from the Big Bang to the appearance of humans
– It must be an agent for increasing complexity
– It must be divested of “all the baggage” (such as magic and superstition) of many traditional religions
– Once so divested, “God” is an appropriate name for this first cause, even by educated atheistic criteria.

Dawkins goes on to claim that such a God cannot possibly be reconciled with traditional religion. Paradoxically, he fails to grasp how acknowledging the existence of such a “first cause” which raises everything to its current state of complexity is indeed at the core of all religion and offers an excellent place to begin our search. Our process for this is of course that of ‘reinterpretation’.
For an example of such reinterpretation, in our preliminary outline above we find a reflection of Pope John Paul II’s statement on science’s relation to religion:

“Science can purify religion from error and superstition.”

So here in this starting place we can begin to see a view of God that is antithetical to neither science nor religion, but one in which John Paul II echoes Teilhard when he sees it as one in which:

“Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”

Both John Paul II and Richard Dawkins recognize that Christianity has developed a complex set of statements about God. How is it possible to put these statements into a context which is consistent with the simple outline offered above: to ‘divest them of their baggage’? This is the goal of ‘reinterpretation’.
The way to go about it? We will use those nineteen ‘principles of reinterpretation’ which we identified in the last two posts to ‘divest the baggage’ in which the traditional statements about God are frequently wrapped.

A Preliminary Definition of God

A simple working definition of God, consistent with both science and religion might be
“God is the sum total of all the forces by which the universe unfolds in such a way that all the entities that emerge in its evolution (from quarks to the human person) each have the potential to become more complex when unified with other entities.”
The question could be asked, “But isn’t this just Deism?”. In summary, the Deists, most notably represented by Thomas Jefferson, conceived of a ‘ground of being’ which was responsible for everything which could be seen at that time. In their minds, in order to strip “the baggage” from the religious expressions of their time, God had to be understood as a designer and builder of the world, but once having built it, retired from the project.
However, theirs was a static world and in no need of continued divine involvement once ‘creation’ was accomplished. As they saw it, Man, given his intelligence by God, was capable of successfully operating the world independently from its creator.
The Deists were off to a good start, but without the grasp of the cosmos and its underlying process of evolution that we have today, they were unable to conceive of a continuing agent of a yet undiscovered evolution which continually manifests itself in increasing complexity. Their static world postulated either an uninvolved God or (as they saw traditional religion’s belief) a God continually tinkering with his creation. Thus we can first understand the idea of a ‘ground of being’ as resonant with both science and a ‘reinterpreted’ religion with a few simple observations. However, Professor Dawkins goes on to dismiss the possibility that a human person could have a relationship with a God such as his above assertion suggests. How is it possible to ‘love’ God? To understand Him (sic) as ‘father? How can such an understanding lead to a relationship conducive to our personal search for completeness?

The Next Post

Next week we will begin to address such questions to examine conventional conceptions of God through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, starting with that of ‘person’.

Part 1: Principles from Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.

Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at Blondel’s suggestion of ‘reinterpretation’ as a method of recovering the relevance of religion to human life and as a step toward recognizing its value as a tool for evolution.
This week we will look at six of Teilhard’s ‘principles’ which can be useful in this recognition.

The Evolutionary Principles of Reinterpretation

Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ offers a basis for principles which will be valuable in our search for the gold of relevance that is embedded in the raw ore of traditional religious thought. He offers six insights as a basis for such principles:

– First, Teilhard notes that evolution occurs because of a fundamental characteristic of matter and energy which over time organizes the ‘stuff of the universe’ from very simple entities into ever more complex forms. This principle can be seen to continue in the ongoing evolution of the human person.

– Thefr Principle: We grow as persons because of our potential for growth, which comes to us as a particular instantiation of the general potential of the universe to evolve
– Secondly, he notes that all things in the universe evolve, and the fundamental thread of evolution can be seen in the phenomenon of increasing complexity.
The Principle: The increasing complexity of the universe is reflected in our individual increase in complexity, which in the human manifests itself as personal growth
– A third observation is that physics addresses the principle by which elements of matter are pulled into ever more complex arrangements through elemental, natural forces (The Standard Model). Without it, the universe would have stayed as a featureless cloud of energy. This process continues to manifest itself in living things (Natural Selection) and can be seen today in the unitive forces of ‘love’ which unite us in such a way that we become more human.
The Principle: Just as atoms unite to become molecules, and cells to become neural systems, so do our personal connections effect our personal growth and through this evolution of ourselves and our societies
– In a fourth observation, he notes that adding the effect of increasing complexity to the basic theories of Physics and Biology also unites the three eras of universal evolution (pre-life, life, human life). As such, it provides a thread leading from the elemental mechanics of matter and energy through the development of ever more complex neural systems in Natural Selection to the ‘awareness of awareness’ as seen in humans.
The Principle: This ‘thread’ therefore continues its universal agency to be active in every human person in the potential of our personal ‘increase in complexity’, which of course is our personal growth.
– In his fifth observation, Teilhard, as well as Sacks and Rohr, as does Aldous Huxley, in his “Perennial Philosophy”, all see this primary human skill as the subject of nearly every religious and philosophical thought system in human history. These systems all offer paradigms and rituals for understanding the nature of the reality which surrounds us as necessary for us to be able to fulfill our true human potential.
The Principle: The true evolutionary core of a religious teaching is that which leads to increasing the completeness of the human person.
– In his sixth insight, Teilhard notes that “We must first understand, and then we must act”. If our understanding is correct, then an appropriate action can be chosen. If we act in accordance with what is real, our actions will contribute to both our personal evolution (our process of becoming more whole) as well as the evolution of our society. As Teilhard puts it,
“Those who spread their sails in the right way to the winds of the earth will always find themselves borne by a current towards the open sea.”
Or, As Richard Rohr puts it,
“Our lives must be grounded in awareness of the patterns of the Universe.”
The Principle: Authentic religion helps us to be aware of and cooperate with the creative energies which effect the universal phenomenon of evolution”

The Next Post

This week we looked at Teilhard’s six ‘evolutionary’ principles that we can use in our search for reinterpretation of religion. Next week we will consider some additional principles from other sources that we will employ as we examine religious teachings for their relevance to human life.

How can we use Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ to recognize religion’s potential as an evolutionary tool?

Today’s Post

Last week we recognized the waning influence of religion in Western societies and addressed the need to rethink traditional beliefs in terms of human life to tap into their wellsprings of insight and recover their relevance. We identified the concept of ‘reinterpretation’, first proposed by Maurice Blondel, and expanded eloquently by Teilhard de Chardin as the essential step for such relevance. This week we will take a first step toward this goal by setting the stage for such new insight.

The Process of Reinterpretation

From the earliest days of human thought, humans have attempted to understand the workings of their environment, to make sense of it, and to better relate to it. The whole of human history, from both science and religious viewpoints, contains a record of such activities. Human artifacts such as legal and moral codes document our attempts (in Teilhard’s words) to “articulate the noosphere”.

This articulation always involves searching and growing, which in turn requires the readiness to replace previous, outworn concepts with ones more consistent with a constantly expanding grasp of the universe.

With religion, according to Blondel, such ‘replacement’ consists of discarding all the superstitious, anthropomorphic, and otherworldly statements of belief, much like Jefferson did in forging his assertion of human equality based on his reinterpretation of the Gospels. In the resulting perspective God becomes the ‘core’, the “ground of being”, the ever-present agency which underlies everything as it ‘comes to be’.

In Blondel’s process of interpretation, this leads to new artifacts. Statements can be made from the new perspective which emerges from our understanding that we are embedded in a process of ‘coming to be’. To Blondel, it makes a difference that we see ourselves as ‘dynamic’, not static. We are ‘becoming’.

Teilhard expands and refines this approach by seeing the essential act of ‘becoming’ through his ‘lens of evolution’. From his perspective, this ‘becoming’ can be quantified by the increasing complexity of the ‘stuff of the universe’ over time which underpins the evolution of the entire universe. His insight provides the single thread which unites the three eras of universal evolution (pre-life, life, human life), and which is the key to explaining how humans ‘naturally’ emerge.

Teilhard understood that the evolutionary energy by which cosmic particles unite to increase complexity is just as present in the human activity of love as it is in the uniting of electrons and protons to become atoms.

He decomposed our individual and collective evolution into four steps:

– we always begin with a certain plateau of understanding in the first step,

– we then address those things which don’t work under our previous worldview in the second.,

– then in the third step we strip out those perspectives,

– and finally in the fourth step we go on to find a better vantage point, and eventually build new constructs.

Principles of Reinterpretation

So, if we can agree on the process, what about the guidelines? What signposts can we follow when we go about ‘stripping our conventional artifacts’? What principles do we employ when we take on the very difficult job of attempting an objective perspective on our subjective inner prejudices and attitudes? Many of these perspectives are so fundamental as to be nearly instinctual. We didn’t consciously develop them; they come with the subconscious acceptance of the beliefs and practices of parents, teachers, and society in general during our formative years. Overcoming them, therefore, requires us to lose the comfort and security of well-worn beliefs and begin a risky search for replacements.

The first step, therefore, is to follow thinkers like Blondel, Teilhard, Sacks and Rohr along this arduous path.

Blondel notes that all of us are to some extent already on this path. The simple realization that we must constantly attempt to see others objectively and to transcend our ego and self- centeredness if we are to have deep relationships with them, is a first step along this path. This need for overcoming ego is a basic tenet for nearly every religion. It is therefore a basic ‘principle of reinterpretation’.

Therefore, when we set out along the road to reinterpreting our traditional beliefs, we must be armed with such principles. As we will see, application of these principles to the many, often contradicting statements of Western religion will permit us to recognize the ‘core’ that Teilhard identifies and uncover their relevance to our lives.

Teilhard’s Approach to Interpretation

Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ has guided us thus far in our search for a universal perspective on ourselves. Teilhard’s unique approach to the nature of reality provides insights into the fundamental energies which are at work in the evolution of the universe and hence, as products of this same evolution, are at work in our own personal evolution as well. His insights compromise neither the theories of physics in the play of elemental matter found in the ‘Big Bang” nor the essential biological theory of Natural Selection in the ongoing evolution of living things. Instead, they bring them together into a single, coherent, continuous process which unites the pre-life, life, and human life eras of cosmic evolution. These insights also show how the ‘knowledge of consciousness’ which makes the human person unique in the biological kingdom is rooted in the cosmic scope of evolution.

This uniqueness, unfortunately, has been often addressed by science as an ‘epi-phenomenon’ or as just a pure accident. Teilhard instead places it firmly on the ‘axis of evolution’, that of increasing complexity. Doing so thus affords us a lens for seeing ourselves as a natural and essential product of evolution.

As Teilhard saw it, such a comprehensive understanding of evolution is therefore an essential step toward understanding the human person, how we fit into the universe, and how we should relate to it if we would most completely activate our human potential.

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at Blondel’s suggestion of ‘reinterpretation’ as a method of recovering the relevance of religion to human life.

Next week we will look at some different approaches to how our perspective of the basic things in our lives can change: how we can ‘reinterpret’.

How can we use Teilhard’s lens to rethink religion as an essential tool for evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Maurice Blondel, early in the last century, addressed the increasing irrelevance of religion in terms of its increasing emphasis on the ‘supernatural’, and how returning its focus to the human person was necessary for our continued evolution. His recommendation was that religious doctrines be ‘reinterpreted’ in the light of the findings of science to recover their relevance to human life. Or, as Teilhard would have it, they need to be examined through the ‘lens of evolution’
This week we will see how Blondel’s suggestion can be implemented.

Reinterpreting Religion

Blondel is difficult to read today, but Gregory Baum offers a clear summary of his insights in his book, “Man Becoming”. He notes that Blondel saw an impediment to the relevance of Christian theology in its tendency to focus on ‘God as he is in himself’ as opposed to ‘God as he is to us’.   Jonathan Sacks echoes this tendency, noting that the main message of Jesus focuses on the latter, while the increasing influence of Plato and Aristotle in the ongoing development of Christian theology shows a focus on the former. Both writers point out that this historical trend in the development of Christian theology is reflected in a focus on what and who God is apart from man. This results, as Sacks notes, in the introduction of a new set of dichotomies which were not present in Judaism, such as body vs soul, this life vs the next and corruption vs perfection. Such dichotomy, they both note, compromises the relevance of the message.  An example of this dichotomy can be seen in the ‘Question and Answer’ flow of the Catholic Baltimore Catechism:

“Why did God make me?
God made me to know, love and serve Him in this life so that I can be happy with Him in the next.”

   This simple QA reflects several aspects of such dichotomy.
– It presents the belief that ‘this life’ is simply a preparation for ‘the next’. This life is something we must endure to prove our worthiness for a fully meaningful and happy existence in the next. Therefore, our purpose in life is simply to make sure that we live a life worthy of the reward of heavenly existence when we die. As such, it has no implicit meaning.
– As follows from this perspective, we can’t expect meaning and the experience of happiness in human life.
– Ultimate meaning is understood as ‘a mystery to be lived and not a problem to be solved’. Understanding only happens in the next life.
– Happiness is a condition incompatible with the evil and corruption that we find not only all around us, but that we find within ourselves
– Life is essentially a ‘cleansing exercise’, in which our sin is expunged and which, if done right, makes us worthy of everlasting life.
As both Blondel and Sacks noted, the increasing Greek content of this perspective in Christian history slowly moves God from the intimacy reflected in Jesus, Paul, and John into the role that Blondel identifies as the “over/against of man”. It is not surprising that one of the evolutionary branches of Western belief, Deism, would result in seeing God as a powerful being who winds up the universe, as in a clock, setting it into motion but no longer interacting with it.

Dualism and Reinterpretation

So, where does this leave us? Most Western believers seem to be comfortable living with these dualities (not to mention the contradictions) present in their belief systems in order to accept the secular benefits of religion such as:

– a basis for human action
– a contributor to our sense of place in the scheme of things
– a pointer to our human potential
– a contributor to the stability of society

   While these benefits might be real, many surveys of Western societies, especially in Europe, show a correlation between increasing education and decreasing belief. Is it possible (as the atheists claim) that the price for the evolution of human society is a decrease in belief? That the increasing irrelevancy of religion is a necessary byproduct of our maturity?
Or is it possible that solutions to the ills of Western society require some connection to the spiritual realm claimed by religion? Put another way: is it possible to re-examine these claims to uncover their evolutionary values? How can the claims of religion be re-understood (‘re-ligio’) in terms of their secular values? Is it possible to look at them, as Karen Armstrong asserts, as “plans for action” necessary to advance human evolution? If so, religion certainly has the potential to recover the relevancy that is necessary for any tool with the potential of moving evolution forward.
To move toward such re-understanding, we will look at the idea of ‘reinterpretation’ itself, to explore how the perspectives of Teilhard, Blondel, Armstrong, Rohr and Sacks can be applied to the process of reinterpreting our two thousand years of religious doctrine development.
Considering that our lives are built on perspectives and beliefs that are so basic as to be nearly instinctual, how can we come to see them differently? Our histories, however, contain many stories of such transformations, and the unfolding of our sciences and social structures are dependent upon them.

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at Blondel’s suggestion of ‘reinterpretation’ as a method of recovering the relevance of religion to human life.
Next week we will look at some different approaches to how our perspective of the basic things in our lives can change: how we can implement the process of ‘reinterpretation’.

How can we use Teilhard’s lens to understand religion as necessary to evolution?

Today’s Post

For the past several weeks we have been tracing John Haught’s recognition that both religion and science need to evolve to effect the synthesis necessary to form a tool for dealing with the ‘risks of religion. In this series we have noted that both science and religion clearly have developed ‘tools’ for dealing with our evolution, but that these tools, effective as they have been shown to be, are still a work in progress. Last week we refocused Teilhard’ lens on religion’s ‘articulation of the noosphere’.

This week we will see at how religion’s side of this relationship must evolve if is to hold up its side of such potential synthesis.

Why Should Religion Evolve?

As Jonathan Sacks sees it, the secularization of Europe happened not because people lost faith in God, but because people lost faith in the ability of religious believers to live life peaceably together. More gradually, but also more extensively, Western Christianity has had to learn what Jews had been forced to discover in the first century: how to survive without power. From his perspective

– no religion relinquishes power voluntarily

– the combination of religion and power leads to internal factionalism, the splitting of the faith into multiple strands, movements, denominations, and sects

– at some point, the adherents of a faith find themselves murdering their own fellow believers

– it is only this that leads the wise to realize that this cannot be the will of God

What is needed, therefore, is for religion to continue to evolve, to recognize that many of the criticisms of the more well-spoken atheists are on target, and that most of the new findings of science only threaten the least reasonable aspects of religion as seen in such things as superstition, biblical literalism, dualism and focus on the afterlife. The fundamental belief in a principle of reality that is ‘on our side’, an evolutionary process in which we can realize our potential, and a recognition of the need for love are only found in religion. They need to be stressed anew for it to recover its relevancy to human life.

How can Religion Evolve?

What inhibits religion’s potential as a tool for ‘making sense of things’? It was only a few generations ago that religion was at the focus of all societies, but most respected polls today show a trend of decline in religion’s importance to society.

Although still clearly in the minority, the atheist voice has risen strongly in this same time frame. One consistent thread of this voice sees the religious viewpoint becoming completely replaced by an objective, materialistic and atheistic worldview in the near future. Popular, learned, and eloquent voices, such as Richard Dawkins, Oxford professor of “Public Understanding of Science”, is one of many who have written copiously of the many contradictions and superstitions that can be found in Western religion as well as a significant lack of grounding in the physical sciences. Science itself contributes to this trend as modern medicine and technology continue to extend their power to improve human welfare.

So, given these trends, how can religion move back to the center of human enterprise, equal to science in its application to the human need to ‘make sense of things’? Maurice Blondel, an early twentieth century French philosopher, addressed the problem of relevance in religion:

“A message that comes to man wholly from the outside, without an inner relationship to his life, must appear to him as irrelevant, unworthy of attention and unassimilable by the mind.”

With this succinct assertion, Blondel not only identifies the heart of the problem, but also opens the door to a path to returning relevance to religion. His observation suggests that this path requires religion to understand and express its beliefs in terms of human life as opposed to providing information about the ‘supernatural’, that which is “wholly from the outside”.

We have discussed religion as a ‘tool’ for us to continue our evolution at both a personal and societal level. Blondel proposes a ‘tool’ by which religion can realize its potential to improve its capability of helping us do just that.

The tool is ‘reinterpretation’.

The Next Post

This week we have seen how Jonathan Sacks echoes Teilhard’s call for a fresh approach to the potential synergy between religion and science. Like Teilhard, he concludes that the success of the West requires a balanced synergy between science and religion if it is to continue.

Next week, we will expand Maurice Blondel’s suggestion of ‘reinterpreting religion’ to recover its relevance to human life.