Today’s Post

Last week we explored a simple shift from locating ultimate meaning in the past, by both religion and science, to locating it in the future, as Teilhard’s concept of universal evolution asserts.  We saw how such a shift of perspective not only opens up new relevance to traditional religion, but affords an overcoming of the historical dualities and dangers of both science and religion, and can thence lead to a new synergy between them.  This week we will look at how such a reorientation not only adds to the richness of science and religion, but how such a change of stance offers an additional ‘principle of reinterpretation’ to our search for the ‘Secular Side of God’.

Reorienting Religion Towards the Future

In a series of earlier posts, we looked at ‘principles of reinterpretation’ which could be applied to traditional Christian teachings if we were to examine them for their secular meanings.  In this series, we noted our use of the insights of Teilhard de Chardin in establishing these principles:

“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 are at work in the continuation of evolution through the human person.  His insights compromise neither the theories of Physics in the play of elemental matter following the ‘Big Bang” nor the essential theory of Natural Selection in the increasing complexity of living things, but instead brings them together into a single, coherent process.”

Based on last week’s post, and indebted to both Teilhard and John Haught, we delved into a very basic and powerful approach to reorientation which highlights the underlying problems of both traditional science and religion in making sense of our lives.

We saw that this reorientation is simply a shift of perspective from locating ‘meaning’ in the past to positing it in the future.  Again, paraphrasing Haught

“While traditional religion locates the fullness of being appearing in the past, a ‘timeless fiat accompli’, and science locates it in a set of mathematically perfect principles extant at the ‘Big Bang’, an ‘anticipatory set of eyes’ sees it as a dramatic, transformative, temporal awakening.”

   Or, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins saw it, as a

“Gathering to greatness/Like the oozing of oil”:

   However, we can take this further in our search for the attitudes which we can adopt in the process of living out Teilhard’s ‘articulations of the noosphere’, sacraments, morals and values that we addressed in the last two posts.  We can add the development of Haught’s ‘anticipatory set of eyes’, as a reinterpretation principle that emerges when we look to an unfinished but positive future as the basis for our faith in life.  In summary, to reinterpret our Christian set of beliefs into secular terms, we must also understand the universe, and hence our lives, as being ‘in process’, consisting of the development of Haught’s ‘anticipation’, and requiring attitudes which are firmly focused on the future.

The Three ‘Theological’ Virtues

Thus, the logical next step after establishing the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ as found in sacraments and morals, would be establishing the ‘stance’ that we must take if we are to embrace such articulation and further the cause of human development as we continue the long rise of complexity as it unfolds in the human species.

The first Christian theologian, Paul, addressed the teachings of Jesus as found in the three synoptic gospels.  He was the first to recognize that Jesus was more than just another itinerant preacher (of which there were many to be found at the time), but a human manifestation of the creative energy of God.  In Paul, we find not just a repetition of the ‘stories of Jesus’ found in the three synoptic traditions, but a synthesis, a ‘boiling down’ to the essentials, the key points, found in them.  One such synthesis was expressed in what the church has come to refer as the “Theological Virtues”.

Paul presents these three virtues as the three facets of human attitude that recognize and enhance our response to the life of God within us, as taught by Jesus.  According to Paul, when we ‘practice’ these virtues, when we adopt them as attitudes that we take on as we live our everyday life, we are opening ourselves to, cooperating with, the flow of grace as it courses through our lives.    In theological vernacular, then, virtues are “interior principles of the moral life which directs our relationship with God and others”.

From our secular perspective, they are the stance we take when we live our lives in a way that capitalizes on the flow of evolutive energy as it rises in our individual lives.  In our secular terms, we are orienting ourselves to Teilhard’s ‘currents which bear us towards the open sea’, the energy of evolution.  We are aligning our lives to the ‘axis of evolution’.

So, virtues can be understood as the basis of the actions we take that are consistent with the sacraments, values and morals that serve as the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ which provide the framework for our continued evolution.  While morals can be understood as ‘blueprints’ for the scaffolding of the edifice of a life which is aligned along the axis of evolution, virtues address the skills which are necessary to construct and maintain such an edifice.  We have explored the ‘blueprints’ in the past few posts, but we now turn to the attitudes that are appropriate to live them out in such a way as to better become what it is possible for us to become.

As we noted last week, by introducing the concept that we are ‘borne along by the currents of evolution’, Science offers a unique ‘principle of reinterpretation’ to religion.  Understanding ourselves, and the universe, as being in the state of ‘becoming’ permits religion to overcome not only its excessive dogmatism but also much of its dualism.  At the same time, religion can offer a ‘principle of meaning’ to science in which, as we have seen, the locus of meaning shifts from the past to the future.

The three facets of the ‘stance’ that we can take to work together as we reorient ‘towards the future’ are labelled by theology as ‘faith, hope and love’.  In our reinterpretation, this involves turning from the theological focus as attitudes necessary for salvation, to attitudes which enable us to cooperate with Teilhard’s ‘currents of life’.

Looking at these attitudes from our secular point of view:

Faith is the recognition that there exists in each of us some component of the energies by which the universe has been lifted to its current stage of complexity.  It recognizes that this component is neither summoned by us as a result of our ‘good works’, nor extinguishable by our ‘bad works’.  In a term most often used by theologians, it is ‘gratuitous’: a gift.  Faith, then, can be understood as trusting this current to take us to Karen Armstrong’s ‘greater possession of ourselves’.

Hope is the belief that this current will continue to effect our complexity in the terms by which we have measured it over the prior fourteen or so billions years: increased ‘personness’ marked by increased centeredness, enhanced individuality and deeper relationships.  With hope, we expect that ‘fuller being’ will result from the energies of evolution as they continue within us.  More simply, hope can be understood in Blondel’s assertion that “God is on our side”.  As John Haught saw it, “..it is the sense that something ontologically richer and fuller is coming into the universe” through us.

Love is our increased capacity to cooperate with the energy of evolution as it rises through our personal growth and our connectivity with others.  It is the current manifestation of the same energy which connects electrons to form atoms, atoms to form molecules, molecules to cells, to neurons and eventually to consciousness.  Each step of which united previous products of evolution to effect new and more complex products just as we unite among ourselves to become products of increased wholeness.

These three ‘attitudes’, stances that we can take in our turn towards the future, are deeply intertwined.  One cannot have faith in any enterprise without hope of a favorable outcome, which would be impossible to achieve without the faith and the collaboration (love) to get there.  Hope is necessary to overcome our instinctual recoil from the closer union that results from greater love which in turn requires a level of faith in our own capacity for such union and trust that such a union will bring us to a higher state of being.  And finally, love is the basic energy of the universe become manifest in human life, without which our personal evolution is impossible.

The Next Post

This week we have transitioned from the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ to the stance, the attitude, that we can take if we are to make the most of the articulations reflected in sacraments, values and morals of our culture.  We saw that the key aspect of a ‘forward’ approach to making sense of the universe is to change the orientation of traditional Science and Religion from the past to the future, and how this reorientation can be reflected in the stance we take toward living life.

Next week we will look a little more deeply at religion’s three traditional aspects of this stance, beginning with the ‘virtue’ of ‘Faith’.

 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’.

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’.

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.

 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.