Tag Archives: evolution in human life

April 1, 2021– From Values to Attitudes for Life

Leave a reply

 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.  As 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 hermeneutics.  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 materialistic 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 ‘hermeneutic’ as discussed last week, is to be found in the interaction among elementary particles as increasingly understood by science.

As discussed last week, both approaches are rooted in the past:  Religion with its doctrines of ‘truth’ firmly rooted in divine pronouncements of long ago, 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 pre-biological matter.  In our exploration of psychology, in which Science turns its lens on the human, we have seen that there is considerable dualism. (10 Nov 2016).  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 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 hermeneutic?

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 more rich and relevant when reoriented from the past to the future.  This reorientation occurs with the simple recognition that the universe as 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 decreasing relevance of religion but the existential 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’.

March 25, 2021 – Values, Morals and Sacraments- From ‘Either-Or’ to ‘Either-And”

Leave a reply

Today’s Post

For the last several posts 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 Teilhard’s “current to the open sea”.

This week we will continue this exploration into modes of human life which capitalize on these structures: ‘ways to be what we can be’.

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 in the post of September 12, 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.

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”.  Such beliefs as random determinism (our thoughts are the result of random firings of neurons precipitated by molecular activity) often lead to a denial of human free will.  In other words, from this perspective 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 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 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 which 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’, 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’ when we engage in these activities.

To see ourselves caught up in Teilhard’s process of ‘anthropogenesis’ is to recognize that meaning is always to be sought in the future.  No doubt that our bodies can be boiled down to masses of molecules and that the insights of the past are worth our attention, but 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 ‘the virtues”.

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’.

March 18, 2021– Values, Morals and Sacraments- Overcoming Orthogonality

Leave a reply

The secular side of values, morals and sacraments 

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 take a look at how these two perspectives can be brought into coherence.

From Our Secular Viewpoint

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.  Our secular 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?”

   As we saw in our post on ‘Navigating the Noosphere’, Teilhard notes than 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 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.

A more profound insight is suggested by Norberg.  He 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 a national stability which is increasingly comfortable 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 evolution, which still continues ‘upwards’ much now focus ‘inwardly’.

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

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 down side, 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.

March 4, 2021 Values, Morals and Sacraments

Leave a reply

The evolutionary basis of morality

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 very Western culture itself is infused with such recognition.  Looking at sacraments in the context of human values and morals, this week’s post addresses the secular perspective on morals and their basis.

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.  The last few posts have explored 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 that we are 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 secular 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 disbelief 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.  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 within 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 ‘selected’ 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 means found in the organization of human society.  Not only does this approach offer a partial understanding of how changes take place in human society, it 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 are 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 Darwinistic 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, 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 our secular reinterpretation approach can bring these two seemingly contradictory viewpoints into synergy.

February 25, 2021 – ‘Secular’ Sacraments

Leave a reply

 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 in this blog 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 really does align 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 the ‘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 taken a look at 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 of 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 have seen 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.  This simple value qualifies, in our secular search, 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 our secular 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 secular perspective, 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 as active in the evolution of society.

Psychology

As we saw in in the posts beginning December 8, 2016,, psychology is an activity in which we explore our basic self, which from our secular perspective involves finding the ‘ground of being’ via the 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.

January 28, 2021 – Spirituality and Evolution

Leave a reply

      How can the phenomenon of spirituality be seen in evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we introduced the concept of spirituality as a natural phenomenon, and saw how it can be understood as underpinning the continuation of human evolution as seen in the development of human ideas.  This week we will broaden our look to see the essential part played by spirituality in universal evolution.

The Spiritual Basis of Evolution

We have seen in our secular perspective of God how the principle metric of evolution can be seen as the increase in complexity over time, and how this increasing complexity has yet to be quantified by science but yet is critical to science’s understanding of how the universe unfolds.  As John Haught puts it

“The obvious fact of emergence- the arrival of unpredictable new organizational principles and patterns in nature- continues to elude human inquiry as long as it follows … naturalism in reducing what is later-and-more in the cosmic process to what is earlier-and-simpler.   A materialist reading of nature leads our minds back down the corridor of cosmic time to a state of original subatomic dispersal- that is to a condition of physical de-coherence.”

  We have also seen how the emergence of complexity in universal evolution underpins the principle by which “later-and-more” entities can emerge from those which are “earlier and simpler”.  Teilhard sees an energy at work by which this happens at every rung of evolution.  At the rung of fundamental particles, it can be seen in the effecting of electrons from bosons, then the effecting of atoms from electrons, and the effecting of molecules from atoms.  At the rung of the human person, it is the energy which unites us in such a way that we become more complete.  Teilhard recognizes that at the human level this energy manifests itself as ‘love’.

   Thus, as Teilhard see it, the essential process at work in the universe can be seen in every stage of its emergence as

 “Closer union from fuller being, and fuller being from closer union”

   It is at work, therefore, as we look backward in time at all previous steps of evolution.  While science does not yet have a term for this energy, the religious term is ‘spirit’.

As Teilhard points out, in the collection of his thoughts, “Human Energy”, therefore, the roots of this essential ‘complexifying’ energy of evolution are deeply embedded in the ‘axis of evolution’.

“Spirituality is not a recent accident, arbitrarily or fortuitously imposed on the edifice of the world around us; it is a deeply rooted phenomenon, the traces of which we can follow with certainty backwards as far as the eye can reach, in the wake of the movement that is drawing us forward.  ..it is neither super-imposed nor accessory to the cosmos, but that it quite simply represents the higher state assumed in and around us by the primal and indefinable thing that we call, for want of a better name, the ‘stuff of the universe’.  Nothing more; and also nothing less.  Spirit is neither a meta- nor an epi- phenomenon, it is the phenomenon.”

   As Teilhard sees it, this ‘secular’ approach to spirituality overcomes yet another dualism that is common to religion: spirit vs matter.

“Spirit and matter are (only) contradictory if isolated and symbolized in the form of abstract, fixed notions of pure plurality and pure simplicity, which can in any case never be realized.  (In reality) one is inseparable from the other; one is never without the other; and this for the good reason that one appears essentially as a sequel to the synthesis of the other.  The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals (itself in) a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self-conscious.”

   Teilhard is making an essential point about spirit and matter, the ‘stuff of the universe,’ here.  He sees matter evolving to higher levels of complexity (‘synthesizing’) under the influence of the energy of complexification (‘spirit’), and the increased complexity which results from such synthesis is therefore capable of more complex interaction.  This increased material level of complexity is a manifestation of an increased level of spirit.  To Teilhard, spirit is “nothing more; and also nothing less” than the energy of evolution.

Universal Spirituality and Dualism

He goes on to elaborate how the ‘spirit/matter’ dualism so endemic in religion is resolved by the realization that instead of spirit and matter in opposition to each other, they are simply co-operative aspects of the ‘stuff of the universe’ as it emerges and continues to evolve to levels of greater complexity:

“The problem of the world, for our minds, is the association it presents of two opposed elements (spirit and matter) in a series of linked combinations covering the expanse between thought and unconsciousness.  Now if consciousness is taken to be a meta-phenomenon, this dualism in motion is simply and verbally noted, without any attempt or even any possibility of interpretation.  If this dualism is pushed aside as an epi-phenomenon, it is conjured out of sight.  But it is simply and harmoniously resolved, on the other hand, in a world in which consciousness and its appearance are regarded as the phenomenon.  Everything then takes its natural place in a universe in process of changing its spiritual state…And hominization (the appearance of the human) merely marks a decisive and critical point in the gradual development of this change.”

   In Teilhard’s perspective, therefore, the basic process of universal evolution can now be seen as a process of matter “changing its spiritual state’.  ‘Spirit’ can now be seen as that which underlies the very axis of evolution, finally becoming fully recognizable in the human person and his society.

Science and The Agency of Spirituality

If spirituality is indeed an agency by which matter becomes more complex over time, it should be capable of being addressed empirically by science.  Richard Dawkins suggests that it will ultimately be found to consist of a simple process, a “’bootstrapping crane’ which raises the complexity of matter over time”.

As we saw in our look into ‘spirit’ as the ‘third person’ of the Trinity, Paul Davies notes that a new branch of science, ‘Information Theory’ posits a ‘quantum of information’ in each grain of matter which directs it toward connections with other grains which result in products whose characteristics are more complex than the original components.  He sees such activities in the capability of the complex molecule, DNA, to direct the production of the cell’s energy source, ‘proteins’ by RNA molecules.  In this action, the ‘blueprint’ of DNA amounts to a ‘software’ which guides the RNA’s enrichment of the ’hardware’ of the cell.

Teilhard simply extrapolates this process backward to the subatomic processes described in the Standard Model of physics and forward to the cellular complexification charted by the biological theory of Natural Selection, thence to the commonly observed interactions among human persons which stimulate both their personal growth and the development of their societies.

The Next Post

This week we took a look at the concept of spirituality from Teilhard’s secular perspective, and saw how spirituality is a phenomenon essential to the process of evolution as it lifts the universe to ‘its current level of complexity’.

Next week we will continue our exploration of Christian concepts by applying this perspective to the Christian concept of ‘grace’.

January 14, 2021 – The Secular Side of The Trinity

Leave a reply

Understanding the ground of being from three perspectives

Today’s Post

Last week we summarized the history of the last facet of the complex God that emerged in just a few hundred years after the death of Jesus: the ‘Trinity’.  We also noted how this concept emerged at the same time that the new church began to become part of Roman society and how it began to evolve into a hierarchical institution which became increasingly dependent on adherence to dogma.  As its teachings became more articulated, truth became more ‘an object of faith’ required to assure salvation than a collection of insights for living.  It didn’t help that the new church was now becoming an essential part of the Roman structure which in turn required a new level of adherence to dogma to insure a unified and therefore stable society.

Yet, as we saw from Karen Armstrong’s observation, the teaching of ‘Trinity’ was “simply baffling”, and from Richard Rohr that this teaching seems “furthest from human life”.

With all this, what secular sense can be of an assertion that God is “Three divine persons in one divine nature”?

The Secular Side of the Trinity

From our secular viewpoint, once the Trinity is put into Teilhard’s evolutionary context it becomes possible to see it as not only much simpler but more importantly, more relevant to human life.  From Teilhard’s perspective we have seen how God can be reinterpreted from a supernatural being which is the ‘over and against of man’ who creates, rewards and punishes; to the ‘ground of being’, the basis for the universe’s potential for evolution by way of its increase in complexity over time.  In applying this perspective to Jesus, we saw how he can be reinterpreted from a sacrifice necessary to satisfy such a distant judgmental God, to the personification of this increase in complexity as it rises through the human person: a ‘signpost to God’.  In the same way we can see a third manifestation of this ‘axis of evolution’, the ‘Spirit’, in the energy which unites the products of evolution in such a way as to effect this increase in complexity.

More specifically, we can begin to see how this ‘triune God’ can be seen to be ‘personal’.   The synthesized collaboration of these three principles of evolution effects what we know as the product of evolution that we refer to as ‘the person’.

Christianity puts names to these three aspects of the ground of being:

  • ‘Father’ as the underlying principle of the becoming of the universe in general, understood as the potential of the ’stuff of the universe’ to ‘make it make itself’
  • ‘Son’ as the manifestation of the potential for the products of evolution to eventually become ‘personal’; a potential which is active in every step of evolution in which increasing complexity emerges
  • ‘Spirit’ as the ‘energy’ by which particles of matter unite in such a way as to result in increases in complexity

As we have noted frequently, Teilhard describes this third ‘person’, this third manifestation of the ground of being as it exists in the human, as love:

“Love is the only energy capable of uniting entities in such a way that they become more distinct.”

   And, as he sees it, the essential function of the rise of complexity in the convergent spiral of cosmic evolution:

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

   In addressing this last agent of becoming, we can now see more clearly how John’s astounding statement begins to make secular sense:

“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”

  Thus, Teilhard locates the ’Spirit’ squarely in the axis of evolution, as the manifestation of the energy which powers evolution through its rising levels of complexity.  We have seen in Science’s ‘Standard Model’ how the energies which are manifest in forces such as the atomic strong and weak forces, electricity and magnetism, gravity and chemistry all collaborate in raising the universe from the level of pure energy at the ‘Big Bang’ to that of matter sufficiently complex to provide the building blocks of life.  With the concept of the ‘Spirit’ we can now see how this enterprise continues to raise reality into manifestations of complexity which are aware of their consciousness.

A purely secular approach to ‘spirit’ can be seen in the new scientific subject of ‘information’.  To Paul Davies, information is simply the quanta in each particle of matter which guides its unification with other particles.  His analogy is that this ‘quanta’ can be seen as the ‘software’ contained in each grain of matter, the ’hardware’.

An example of this dyadic action can be seen in the potential of Hydrogen to unite with Oxygen to form the molecule of water.  The ‘information’ of the Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms is not simply passed on to the new offspring, water, it itself is enriched by becoming more complex in the process.  The evolved quanta of information contained in the molecule of water has a new and enriched potential of unifying with many other molecules, and the resultant molecules also have new characteristics and potentials not found in their less complex components.  Thus, the three ‘triune’ aspects of evolution are evident in this simple example:

  • A component of matter has the potential to unite with other components (quantified by its ‘information or ‘software’’)
  • The process required to perform the connection is mapped in the ‘information’
  • The resultant new component (with new characteristics and potentials absent in its predecessor components) emerges with its new and more complex quanta of ‘information’

In this very simple but purely secular example we can see a reflection of the Trinity:

  • The ‘Son’ is reflected in the ‘information’, effectively the ‘software’ of the component
  • The ‘Spirit’ is reflected in the ‘energy’ necessary to effect unification according to the ‘information’
  • And the ‘Father’ is reflected as the ‘potential’ of the components to unite

In addition to how the Trinity can be seen in these examples, we can also return to Teilhard’s image of the ‘convergent spiral’ of cosmic evolution.   As we saw when we looked at Teilhard’s model of the structure of universal evolution, the three aspects of the Trinity can be understood as the human manifestations of the three basic steps by which the universe proceeds at all stages in its journey toward increased complexity.

We can also see how this energy continues to manifest itself in raising the complexity of living matter through the process of Natural Selection.  Natural Selection, first identified by Charles Darwin, offers a partial explanation of how species advance from one stage of evolution to another.  It does not address how the products of evolution at latter stages show evidence of increased complexity, but it does explain how the ramification of species offers many avenues of for ‘complexification’.

Human persons are clearly located on one of these avenues of evolution.  Understanding the ‘Spirit’ at the level of the human person is simply understanding how evolutionary products aware of their consciousness (human persons) can consciously cooperate with this energy to be united in such a way as to advance their individual complexity (their maturity) and therefore continue to advance the complexity of their species.

Last week we noted that Richard Rohr decried how the increasing hierarchy and dogmatism of the Christian church increased the distance between man and God by decreasing the relevance of its essential message.  From our secular perspective, we can now see how it is possible to understand the Trinity in terms now seen as relevant to personal life.  Rohr offers a reinterpretation of the traditional Christian trinitarian terms as an integrated understanding of the Trinity which is directly relevant to human life:

“I believe that faith might be precisely that ability to trust the Big River of God’s providential love, which is to trust the visible embodiment (the Son), the flow (the Spirit), and the source itself (the Father). This is a divine process that we don’t have to change, coerce, or improve. We just need to allow it and enjoy it.  Faith does not need to push the river precisely because it is able to trust that there is a river.”

The Next Post

This week we saw that how adding the concept of ‘Spirit’ to those of the ‘Father’ and the ‘Son’ completes an understanding of the ‘the ground of being’, the basis of the universe’s ‘coming to be’ in general.  More importantly, we saw how we can begin to understand how this agent of evolution which has “raised the world to its current level of complexity” (Richard Dawkins) is active in our individual lives, as we begin to understand ourselves as personal offspring of the ‘axis of evolution’.

Over the past several weeks, we have addressed the three fundamental beliefs of Christianity: God, Jesus and The Trinity, from our secular perspective, showing how ‘reinterpretation’ can empirically refocus their relevance to human life.

Christianity, however, piles many layers of belief and practices on top of these three precepts.  In order to, as Richard Dawkins suggests, ‘divest them of the baggage’ that they carry, is it possible to use our principles of reinterpretation to achieve a similar refocus?

Next week we will begin to do this, first addressing the underlying concept of ‘spirituality’, and how it can be seen in the light of our secular inquiry.

January 7, 2021 – The Cryptic Concept of the ‘Trinity’

3 Replies

 What can ‘three persons in one God’ mean?

 Today’s Post

Last week we took a final look at Jesus from our secular perspective, noting how quickly the highly integrated understanding of John became a victim of the endless human trend toward dualism.  From our secular perspective, we saw how John’s vision strengthened the immediacy (immanence) of God in human life and how Teilhard sees Jesus as the ‘signpost’ for this spark of universal becoming.  From Teilhard’s insight, this spark, found in all the products of evolution, is only capable of being recognized as such by the human person.  In our final look last week, we saw how easily the labyrinthine statements emerging from the pronouncements of theologians can be ‘reinterpreted’ into statements about the human person, and by doing so increase their relevance to human life.

The evolution of the concept of Jesus and ‘the Christ’, did not end with the pronouncements of the Council of Nicaea, but set the stage for a following inquiry into the ‘nature’ of God.  This week we’ll take a look at this third stage of the theological evolution of the concept of God: the Trinity.

The History of the Trinity

As Bart Ehrman notes in his book, “How Jesus Became God”, unlike God, Jesus and ‘the Christ’, the Trinity isn’t addressed as such in any of the books of the Old or New Testament.  The idea of God as the supreme supernatural creator somehow intertwined in human life is a common thread of the Jewish scriptures (the ‘Old Testament’).   As we have seen, the understanding of Jesus and ‘the Christ’ evolves over time in the New Testament into the early days of the new Christian church, but the concept of a third ‘person’ wasn’t developed until late in the first three hundred years of its existence.

Richard Rohr relates the history of the idea of ‘the Trinity” as it began in the Eastern Church and later moved to the West:

“The Cappadocian Fathers of the fourth century first developed this theology, though they readily admitted the Trinity is a wonderful mystery that can never fully be understood with the rational mind, but can only be known through love, prayer, and suffering. This view of Trinity invites us to interactively experience God as transpersonal (“Father”), personal (“Christ”), and even impersonal (“Holy Spirit”)—all at once.”

   The idea of something (or someone) involved in the formation of the universe, and in how this process is reflected in human life, shows up even in the Old Testament.  It is strongly suggested by Jesus, for example, in his statement to the apostles that a ‘Spirit’ (an ‘advocate’) would be sent after he was gone.

It wasn’t until the early days of the church’s theological development that this agent began to be considered ‘God’ in somehow the same way that the relationship between Jesus and ‘the Christ’ was being considered.

In a nutshell, the new church began to consider God as being ‘triune’, somehow composed of three separate but unified ‘persons’ whose agency in reality was reflected in three separate facets.  The most commonly used terms ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Spirit’ are of little use in making sense of this complex concept.  Thus in the same way that the church required belief without understanding (as we saw in the final determination of Nicaea that Jesus was both God and Man) as an ‘act of faith’ necessary for salvation, it was soon to follow with the statement that God was also ‘three divine persons in one divine nature’.

And, in the same way that the controversy over the nature of Jesus was debated up until the Nicaean council, that of the Trinity continued to be debated.  As the Arian controversy over the ‘nature’ of Jesus began to dissipate following the Nicaean council, the debate moved from the deity of Jesus to the ‘equality’ of the ‘Spirit’ with the ‘Father’ and ‘Son’.  A key facet of this controversy lay in the lack of scriptural clarification of the ‘Spirit’ as a person of God in the same way as was the ‘Son’.  On one hand, some believers declared that the Spirit was an inferior person to the Father and Son, emerging as a result of the ‘love between the Father and the Son’.  On the other hand, the Cappadocian Fathers argued that the Spirit was a third person fully equal to the Father and Son.

This controversy was brought to a head at the Council of Constantinople (381) which affirmed that the Spirit was of the same substance and nature of God, but like Jesus, a separate person. Gregory of Nazianzus, who presided over this council offered this erudite but ultimately vacuous explanation:

“No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendor of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Three than I am carried back into the One. When I think of any of the Three, I think of him as the whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking escapes me”.

  As Karen Armstrong concludes in her book, “A History of God”,

“For many Western Christians . . . the Trinity is simply baffling”.

   Richard Rohr agrees with Armstrong that of all the Christian statements of belief, that of the Trinity can seem furthest from human life and thus can tend to reduce the relevance of Christian teaching to human life.  The church didn’t make it easier with Nazianzus’ cryptic statement, or by declaring such statements to be ‘objects of faith’ which must be believed without understanding even though such belief was a prerequisite for salvation.  But as we saw last week, faith is much more than adherence to precepts, it is an essential aspect of human existence.

So, what secular sense can be made of this strange teaching?

The Next Post

This week we saw how the new Christian church expanded its concept of God from the Jewish ‘Father’ to a complex triune but difficult to grasp concept.

Next week we will consider this concept of a ‘triune’ God from the perspective of our search for ‘The Secular Side of God’.

December 24, 2020 – The ‘Second Coming’

Leave a reply

December 24, 2020 – The ‘Second Coming’

Will Jesus ‘come again’?

 Today’s Post

In the last six weeks we have addressed the subject of Jesus from five perspectives, seeing how this subject itself evolves from the somewhat conventional understanding found in the three synoptic gospels in which Jesus is seen as one of the many ‘holy men’ that would have been familiar to the Jews of the time, to the unprecedented understanding of him as somehow ‘one with the Father’:  divine, eternal and yet still human.

We then saw how such an audacious claim matured from one requiring ‘cognitive dissonance’ to one which falls naturally and cohesively into the concept of an evolving universe in which the key aspect can be seen as ‘increasing complexity’.

We then saw last week how the evolution of thinking about Jesus, found in the theological development following his death, eroded the immediacy of both Jesus and God, as well as minimizing the concept of ‘the Christ’ as the ‘axis of evolution’ found in Paul and John.

This week we will look at a sixth facet of the ‘Jesus story’, that of the idea of his ‘second coming’, one which appears several times both in the Old Testament as well as the New.  Can this cryptic forecast also be re-interpreted into a secular perspective via our principles?

 The ‘Coming’
   The idea that Jesus would literally return is found in several places in the Old Testament.  Many read Isiah’s prophesies as suggesting not only the coming of Jesus, but a later literal appearance by God in which ‘He’ would assume control over humans who will have once again lost their way.

Matthew seems to address this concept more than the other synoptic gospel authors, citing Jesus as saying in Chapter 12

“For the Son of Man will come in His Father’s glory with His angels….  Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.”

In Chapter 24, he follows with a description of the event

”At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory”

Of course, the most famous treatment comes in Revelation, which provides a colorful and dramatic description upon which many of the more conservative Christian expressions focus as they frequently see ‘signs’ of this coming in reports of today’s events.  Some, disgusted with the state of the world as seen in these events, are reported to engage in activities which they believe would stimulate this event, effectively ‘forcing God’s hand’.

Much argument has ensued in the history of Christianity on how such lines of scripture are to be understood, with the Liturgical expressions leaning toward a metaphorical understanding, and the Evangelical expressions toward one which sees them as literal forecasts.

How can they be seen to fit within our secular perspective?

Teilhard, the Noosphere and the ‘Second’ Coming

The approach we have taken thus far is to consider making ‘sense of things’ from Teilhard’s perspective of universal evolution.   In keeping with our secular insights into Jesus as the human face of the rising sap of complexity in the tree of universal evolution (‘the Christ’), Teilhard offers his concept of the ‘noosphere’.  As we have seen, the noosphere is simply the accretion of insights and inventions which occurs as humanity evolves. Beginning with the transmission of oral traditions thousands of years past, signs of the continuation of evolution can be seen today in the tight swaddling of data contained in, for example, our educational systems and global communication media.  In such things our evolution as a species is escorted beyond the instinctual trappings of our mammalian ancestors into ever new ways to ‘be human’.  As we evolve, this ‘noosphere’ evolves in a way that continuously fosters the growth of our understanding and in doing so refocuses our navigation of human life.

As we saw in our series on the evolution of human welfare last February, Johan Norberg documents examples of such ‘growing of understanding’ and ‘refocusing of navigation’ in nine distinct and empirically articulated facets of life on our planet.  Each one of these reflects a facet of how the noosphere both becomes enriched by and in turn enriches the human species.  How can such examples be seen in the light of in our discourse on the ‘secular side’ of Jesus?

A clue to such insight can be seen in Luke’s report of Jesus’ reply to queries from followers of John the Baptist.

“Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor.”

The signs that Jesus chooses to identify himself to John are ones which are focused on human welfare.  He makes no reference to ‘salvation’ or to ‘right behavior’, but instead identifies those things in which benefits to human welfare can be seen.  This suggests that a manifestation of the ‘presence of Jesus’ can always be found in instances of increased human welfare.

This brings us back to Teilhard’s insight that that the appearance of Jesus in history, as the human manifestation of the underlying spark of creation by which the universe ‘complexifies’, constitutes a turning point in history.  As we have seen from his perspective, Jesus focusses on the twin concepts of the importance of the human person and the value of relationships, and hence their function as cornerstones of human evolution.  This turning point initiates a slow accretion in human history of the painful but inexorable rise of the human desire for an autonomy which is ballasted by harmony and which therefore eventually leads to the concepts of person and equality so critical to Western society.

As we have seen in Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress”, he carefully and objectively documents nine facets of human welfare which have significantly improved in just the past hundred fifty years.  As he points out, this exponential increase did not spring from thin air, it was presaged by the long, often agonizing, efforts of humans when, as Karen Armstrong says, “Enlightened persons would discover within themselves the means of rising above the world”.  And, as Norberg points out, it required a collective valuing of two critical aspects of humanity: the importance of the person, (requiring the formal codification in civil legal systems of ‘human freedom’} on the one hand, and the necessity for viable and productive ‘human relationships’ (enforced by objective and efficacious laws) on the other.  All of Norberg’s improvements in human welfare appear more frequently in countries which embrace democratic civil norms, and the number of such countries has increased by large amounts during this period.

So, how does this data reflect a ‘coming of Jesus’?  As the passage from Luke suggests, the presence of Jesus can be found in the things he lists.  Citing Norberg’s list of worldwide human improvements, we might paraphrase Jesus:

“Go back and report to what you have seen and heard: More of the hungry are fed, they have less disease, they are more educated, they live longer and are less destitute, they are subject to less violence and fewer wars, they are becoming more sensitive to their environment and more subject to laws which grant them more autonomy while fostering increasing harmony.”

Thus, the ‘coming of Jesus’ does not constitute a single event, but is tangible in the rise of human complexity which is manifest in its improvements in human welfare.

The Next Post

This week we addressed Jesus from a sixth perspective, that of the ‘Second Coming’.  We have seen, through John, Paul, Teilhard, and now Norberg, how ‘the Christ’ is a continually active agent in the evolution of the cosmos, present in the ever continuing increase of complexity seen in all stages of the universe’s coming to be, and Jesus as the manifestation of this agency as it flowers in the human person.  The ‘Second Coming’ is less an event than it is a process, and the fruits of this process can be seen in the increase in human welfare which springs from its acknowledgement.
Building on this new view of Jesus, next week we will look at Jesus from a seventh and final perspective:  That of the traditional church concepts of Incarnation and Redemption.

December 3, 2020 – Jesus As “Evolution Become Aware of Itself”

2 Replies

Today’s Post

Last week we began to move from the first three facets of Jesus, Paul and the Synoptic gospel scriptural depictions to John’s intuition of Jesus as “The Word made flesh”.  Last week, we saw how Jesus can be seen from Teilhard’s perspective as the personization of the essential core of universal evolution by which the cosmos becomes more complex over time.  We saw how the scriptural treatment of Jesus shows a distinct evolution, as he is shown first as a very human teacher of wisdom, then as ‘the Christ’, who was ‘exalted by God’ due to his sacrificial act, and finally to Jesus, the human face of the Cosmic Christ, who was so integrally a part of God that ‘he’ had coexisted with ‘him’ through eternity.

John’s Bold Step

As we have seen, John sees Jesus in a way that is quite different from Paul and the authors of the synoptic gospels.  While Jesus’ teachings certainly address how we should behave, and Paul goes on to articulate such proper behavior, John sees Jesus’ teachings as addressing how we should be if we would be whole.  This moves from seeing Jesus as a prescription for salvation to one for being fully human.   John then goes on to explore God from an ‘ontological’ perspective.

The idea of ‘The word made flesh’ is much more than a ‘metaphor’, and goes well beyond seeing God using Jesus to communicate to us what we must do to get to heaven.   In his innovative insight, John is showing us how Jesus is the manifestation of God in human form so that we can better understand how we should be if we would have ‘abundant life’.   By insisting that “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God and God in him”, John is not saying that we should love God because ‘he’ loves us, or as a prerequisite for salvation.  Effectively, John is saying that when we love we are cooperating with the key principle of life by allowing it to flow through us when we love, and thus are borne onward to amore complete state of personhood.

John does not tell us to love God, he tells us that we must ‘abide in love’, which Teilhard understands is to immerse ourselves in the fundamental energy of the universe, which is now seen as reflected in humans as love itself.  This requires openness, trust, and ultimately cooperation with the basic energy of the universe that even an atheist such as Richard Dawkins can acknowledge, raises the world to an increasing level of complexity.

In Teilhard’s words:

” 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 seas.”

   So in just a handful of years, a single lifetime, a blink in the evolution of the universe, we see the Christian understanding of Jesus evolving from a teacher whose morality seemed grounded in preparation for ‘the coming’, to one who offers a sacrifice to an angry, judgmental God who has withheld his love to humans due to an ancient sin, to one rewarded (“exalted”) with divinity for his sacrifice, to one whose ‘divinity’, whose ‘oneness with God’ was in place at the moment of creation of the universe.   At the same time, we see an evolution of the understanding of God as well, from a God whose primary characteristic was ‘judgment’ to one whose very nature was ‘love’.

So, Who and What Was Jesus?

So, how do we reinterpret the traditional ‘religious’ understanding of Jesus into one consistent with our ‘secular’ perspective?

When viewed through Teilhard’s lens of universal evolution, Jesus can now be seen as the human face of the heart of evolution finally pulled from the shadows and revealed ‘in full light’; less a group of metaphors than a recipe, a blueprint for the increase in complexity that is no less present in human evolution than it has been constant in the fourteen billion years of universal becoming.

As Teilhard points out, the long sweep of evolution from the big bang to the present time, from pure energy to entities become aware of their awareness, is punctuated by ‘changes of state’.  In order for complexity to increase, matter must constantly find new ‘modes of being’ in which unprecedented and extraordinary changes in form and function occur.

The findings of science have shown how this can be clearly seen in each such critical point of evolution:

– energy to matter

– simple granularities (bosons, quarks, electrons) to atoms

– atoms to molecules

– molecules to cells

–  cells to neurons

– neurons to brains

– brains to consciousness

– consciousness to awareness of consciousness

To this progression we can now add another critical point: from awareness of consciousness to awareness of the evolution of consciousness.  In Jesus, through the insights of John, we can now see the beginning of the awareness that our personal growth is the continuation of the agency of being that powers all evolution, from the big bang onwards.  And as John points out, the energy which powers this growth can now be understood to have become manifest in the human as love.  John pulls the heart of evolution from the shadows and reveals it ‘in full light’.  In John, God, Jesus, personal fulfillment and love are less a group of metaphors than ingredients for a recipe for human evolution.

We have seen in several posts how Teilhard shows how the fundamental nature of love strongly differs from the romantic or sentimental emotional attraction so often celebrated in our culture.  Teilhard calls it for what it is: the current manifestation of the universal attraction between entities that causes their continued evolution.  And in Jesus, as chronicled by John, we can see the first stirrings of such an understanding of this basic principle.

God, to John, is not a ‘creator’, ‘out there’, ’over and against’ mankind, but the universally integrated set of agents which, as Dawkins observes, “.. raises the world to its current level of complexity”.

So, just as we have seen Teilhard’s reinterpretation of God from a ‘divine person who rewards and punishes’ to the cohesive agency which underlies evolution as it progresses from pure energy to the human person, we can reinterpret Jesus from the holy, even divine person who shows us how we should relate to God and each other in order to merit salvation, to the personal manifestation of the fundamental energy by which we come to be and grow as a result of this thread of evolution which rises in us.

Indeed, even as Jesus is ‘evolution become aware of itself’, he also represents the point in human history where the universal power of love as the creative force which powers our continued evolution first begins to be recognized.

If universal evolution can be understood as a tree, ‘the Christ’ can be seen as the sap which rises in this tree which produces a product, a ‘fruit’ that can be seen in the person of Jesus.  Having seen the fruit of the tree of evolution, the whole of the tree can be seen more clearly, as well as our place in it.

‘Christ’ as the Name For Evolutionary Energy

The secular community, in general, is not in favor of using the term ‘Christ’ to label the rising thread of complexity which can be seen to rise in the universe.  Materialists are prone to deny it as ‘allowing a divine foot in the door’.  The term itself is tangled in the Christian ‘economy of salvation’, and is commonly associated with the person of Jesus.  The problem, however, comes when another term is sought to identify this thread.
Science has only recently begun to address this evolutionary thread, and these beginnings can be seen in the areas of Complexity Science and Information Science, but other than beginning to quantify how this thread can be empirically identified, a generic name so far has been elusive.  Thus Teilhard’s use of the term, even with its religious association, can still be understood in a secular context.

Another problem arises when Jesus is asserted as the single face of this universal trend towards complexity.  If this thread rises in evolution, then any recognition of it is a manifestation of it, no matter where or when on our planet it can be found.   As Karen Armstrong describes in her book, “Great Transformations”, during the ‘Axial Age’

 “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.  They were becoming fully “Self conscious” “

   Thus any recognition of this elusive thread of ontology in the human person is effectively an awareness of ‘the Christ’, no matter what term we use to identify it

That said, however, it is important to see how easily such a secular aspect of reality as ‘the Christ’ fits into the ancient set of intuitions present in the Judeo-Christian belief system.  In keeping with Richard Dawkins recommendation that religion needs to be ‘divested’ of the baggage that it has accumulated in its many thousand years of development, such a divestment (which we have referred to as ‘reinterpretation’) brings this ontological side of Jesus to the fore.

In doing this, the gap between empirical science and intuitive religion is narrowed, offering science a bridge to the treatment of the human person (Information and Complexity Science) , and to religion and increased relevancy to human life.

The Next Post

This week we took a fourth look at a way that the person of Jesus can be reinterpreted from traditional understanding to the secular understanding of him as the critical point in history in which evolution can be seen to become ‘evolution become aware of itself’.  Next week we will look at a fifth way in which this secular approach can offer insights into the human condition and how evolution can proceed through both the human person and society at large.