Tag Archives: evolution in human life

August 6, 2020 – How Can God Be Located?

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Looking For God

 Today’s Post

Last week we moved from a working secular definition of God to seeing how this God is manifest in the roots of our personal development, and how these roots are extensions of the upwelling of complexity that underpins cosmic evolution.  This week we will move on to explore how the concept of a ‘personal relationship with God’ emerges naturally from these insights.

The History of Looking For God

Thus far, we have come to a ‘secular’ concept of God without recourse to scripture, dogma or miracles.  While this may well be consistent with Professor Dawkins’ recognition that such a non-supernatural force is indeed at work in the ”raising of the world as we know it into its present complex existence”, it does not address what’s involved in a personal relationship with such a force.

We can start with Teilhard’s assertion that

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

   If Teilhard’s assertion is correct, it seems clear that the very act of being a person is the starting point for experiencing such a God.  If the God that we have defined is indeed the essential center of our existence, and this essential center lies along the axis of the unfolding of the universe, it would seem that finding such a transcendent source of ourselves would be very straightforward.  The myriad and oft- confusing and contradictory methods offered by the many world religions are evidence that this isn’t necessarily the case.

A case in point can be seen in the many instances of ‘dualism’ which can be found in our own Western expressions of Christianity.  This was addressed in our exploration of the history of Christianity:

“Much more so than Judaism, Jonathan Sacks asserts, Christianity divides: body/soul, physical/spiritual, heaven/earth, this life/next life, evil/good, with the emphasis on the second of each.  He sees the entire set of contrasts as massively Greek, with much debt to Plato.  He sees these either/or dichotomies as a departure from the typically Jewish perspective of either/and.”

As Sacks points out, this duality tends to move God from the intimacy found in Judaism (and in the teachings of Jesus) to a distance that can only be overcome through the bewildering matrix of rituals of atonement, forgiveness and salvation which have come to characterize expressions of Christianity.  This point of view, captured in Blondel’s fear that as we regard our relationship with God from the standpoint of ‘we are here and God is there’, our search for God is sabotaged at the very outset.

Not that Christianity only expresses such distance.  If one takes John at his word, “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”, Blondel’s statement that “It is impossible to say, “I am here and God is there”” makes much more sense.  It acknowledges that the act of God’s creative energy in me is necessary for me to make such a statement.

Blondel, Teilhard, Sacks and the contemporary theologian Richard Rohr all decry how this message of John, a logical conclusion from the teachings of Jesus and the theology of Paul, is frequently lost in the subsequent evolution of the Greek-influenced Church.  Thomas Jefferson, an early practitioner of Dawkins’ goal of “stripping the baggage” from traditional Christianity, sought to extract the essential morality of Jesus from the webs of duality which grew as Christianity was increasingly influenced by Greek philosophy.

This duality undermines the search for God within.  If we start with the assumption that “We are here and God is there”, the search is hobbled at the start.

All such searches begin with the facades and scaffolding that we inherit from our beginnings, which become frameworks which make it safe for us to act in a world saturated with unknown and potentially dangerous consequences of those actions.  They may keep us safe in such a world, but like all walls, keep us enclosed at the same time.   To discover our inner reality requires awareness, negotiation and selective discarding of these artifacts.

This requires an open mind, and as universally acknowledged, a mind is a difficult thing to open.

This is not a new problem.  The subject of searching for our inner core has been the subject of religious thought for many centuries.  While the approaches developed by the many religious expressions might be bewildering and often contradictory, there are nonetheless many common aspects.

The Search for the ‘Cosmic Spark’

Last week we saw that if Teilhard’s assertion is true that

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

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

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

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

Armstrong saw this emerging realization as

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

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

Each of the Axial Age’s six lines of thought brought their own practices to this undertaking.  Further, with the seemingly inevitable duality that emerges in each new philosophy (as addressed in Part 6 of our History of Religion) many different and often contradictory practices emerged even within each of the lines.  Within Christianity, as we saw, the influence of Greek thinking led to seeing God as ‘other’, as opposed to an universal agent of being and growth at the core of our person.

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

The Next Post

This week we began to address the search for God as an active, immanent agent of our personal life.

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

 

July 25, 2020 –God and the Phenomenon of Person

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How Can God Be Considered as ‘Personal’?

 Today’s Post

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

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

Is God a ‘person’?

This week we will address this question.

 ‘Personization’ in Universal Evolution

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

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

As any educated atheist would point out, isn’t this teleology?  In teleology, one reasons from an endpoint (the existence of humans) to the start point (the purpose of evolution is to create humans).  In such teleology, creation exists for the purpose of making humans.  Teleology therefore seeks to rationalize history in terms of what has emerged.  Teleology is frequently used by fundamental Christianity, which sees God as intending humanity as the goal of ‘his’ creation.  This accusation was discussed back in April 15, 2015.

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

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

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

Teilhard asserts that this potential for ‘rising complexity’ to eventually lead to consciousness is a phenomenon of the universe itself.  While entities recognizable as ‘human persons’ may not be evolving elsewhere in the universe, the probability of the appearance of entities aware of their awareness is not insignificant.

Teilhard, therefore, sees the agent of complexity at work everywhere in the cosmos, and given the appropriate conditions, will raise its constituent matter to higher levels of awareness:

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

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

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

 ‘Personization’ In The Human

So, from this perspective we can see that the human person emerges from evolution not in a single discontinuous step, but instead from a slow accretion of characteristics layered one upon another over a long period of time.  Cells evolve from single-cell to multiple-cell entities, adding sensory and mobility characteristics which unite through increasingly complex centers of activity via increasingly complex neural circuits.  There is not a single entity in this long line of development that does not proceed from a less-complex precursor.

There are two seeming discontinuities in this process.  The first is seen in the appearance of the cell itself.  At one instance in the evolution of our world, it is swimming in a primordial soup of very complex molecules.  At the next, many of these molecules are functional parts of an enclosed and centered entity, the cell.  As Teilhard notes:

“For the world to advance in duration is to progress in psychical concentration.  The continuity of evolution is expressed in a movement of this kind.  But in the course of this same continuity, discontinuities can and indeed must occur.  For no psychical entity can, to our knowledge, grow indefinitely; always at a given moment it meets one of those critical points at which it changes state.”

   The advent of the cell is such a ‘change of state’ in which increasing complexity results in something totally different from its predecessor, but still composed of the same basic elements.

The ‘person’ is the second example of such ‘change of state’.  Materialists argue that the differences between humans and their non-human ancestors are too small to be of significance, denying any uniqueness to the human person.  This is true at the levels of morphology and supported by the evidence of DNA. It is just as true that human persons, through their unique ‘awareness of their consciousness’, are clearly separate from the higher mammals.  They represent the outcome from the same significant type of ‘change of state’ as seen in the advent of the cell.

Therefore, while human persons are clearly a ‘product of evolution’, their level of complexity has increased from ‘consciousness’ to ‘awareness of consciousness’.  It is in this new level of being that we find ‘the person’.  And in finding it, we can now expand our definition of God:

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

To which we add:

“In the recognition of the comprehensive forces by which the universe unfolds, the one which causes things to unite in such a way that they become more complex, conscious and eventually conscious of their consciousness (eg, the person) can be only be understood as personal.”

   As Teilhard sees it, the person is “.. nothing but the point of emergence in nature, at which this deep cosmic evolution culminates and declares itself”.  In such declaration, evolution itself can be seen as ‘ultimately personal’.  From this perspective, the human person is “…the flame of a general fermentation of the universe which breaks out suddenly on the earth.”

Thus God is not ‘a person’ (by Teilhard’s definition, a product of evolution) but the ultimate principle of ‘personness’.

The Next Post

This understanding of the evolution of ‘personness’, while locating the personal agency of evolution in the sum total of evolutionary forces, answers the question “Is God a person?”  It does however lead to the question of a human-God ‘relationship’. Humans are learning how to align themselves with many of the other aspects of ‘the ground of being’, which accounts for human evolutionary succe3ss thus far. How can such awareness of the personal aspect of these forces be seen to provide a basis of similar alignment?

Next week we will address this side of the question of personness, and explore how the concept of God as an agent of ‘personization’ can be extended to that of understanding ‘him’ as an agency of evolution with which we can have a relationship.

 

July 16 2020 – The Concept of ‘God as Person’

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What Is a ‘Person”?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how an outline of the nature of the fundamental principle of existence could be derived from the writings of Richard Dawkins, well-known atheist.  In keeping with Dawkins’ secular worldview, we saw how this outline offered an excellent starting place to finding “The Secular Side of God”.  Based on this brief outline, I proposed a working definition of God:

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

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

‘Person-ness”

The concept of the ‘person’ is somewhat unique to the West.  It is related to the fundamental Jewish concept of time as seen as flowing from a beginning to an end, unlike the cyclical and recursive concept of time as found in the East.  It also sees personal growth as ‘becoming whole’ as opposed to the Eastern concept of human destiny fulfilled in the loss of self as merged into the ‘cosmic all’.  This Western concept of ‘person-ness’ is one into which the idea of evolution fits readily, which leads to the religion-friendly idea of emergent complexity.

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

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

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

We also saw how when the two great threads of Athens and Jerusalem came together in Christianity, this framework evolved from an intuitive way of thinking to a disciplined and objective facet of human endeavor.  As many contemporary thinkers have observed, it is this connection between the uniqueness of the person (and the associated concept of freedom) and the power of empirical thinking that account for the unique successes of the West.  As Teilhard asserts, (and Johan Norberg thoroughly documents in his book, “progress”):

“…from one end of the world to the other, all the peoples, to remain human or to become more so, are inexorably led to formulate the hopes and problems of the modern earth in the very same terms in which the West has formulated them.”

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

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

 ‘Person-ness’ and God

The earliest human societies were all well aware of the forces in their environment which they could neither explain nor control, such as weather, earthquakes, predators and sickness.  They commonly attributed these forces to the work of intelligent beings, gods, who were in control of all these mysterious phenomenon.  Most of them imagined these gods as being human-like, but with much greater power.   In the earliest societies, the many aspects of their mysterious selves were seen as persons, even given names.

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

July 9 2020 – Applying the Principles of Reinterpretation To The Concept of God

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

A Starting Place

The concept of God as found in the many often contradicting expressions of Western religion can be very confusing.  Given the dualities which occur in the Old Testament (such as punishment/forgiveness, natural/supernatural), layered with the many further dualities introduced by Greek influences in the early Christian church (such as body/soul, this world/the next), and topped by many contemporary messages that distort the original texts (such as the “Prosperity Gospel” and “Atonement Theology”) this is not surprising.  It can be difficult to find a thread which meets our principles of interpretation without violating the basic findings of science while staying consistent with the basic Western teachings.

A perhaps surprising starting place might come from the writings of one of the more well-known atheists, Richard Dawkins.   Professor Dawkins strongly dislikes organized religion, but in his book, “The God Delusion”, he casually remarks

“There must have been a first cause of everything, and we might as well give it the name God.  Yes, but God is not an appropriate name (unless we very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers). The first cause that we seek must have been the simple basis for a (process) which eventually raised the world as we know it    into its present complex existence.”

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

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

Dawkins goes on to claim that such a God cannot possibly be reconciled with traditional religion.  Paradoxically, he fails to grasp how acknowledging the existence of such a “first cause” which raises everything to its current quantum of complexity is indeed at the core of all religion and offers an excellent place to begin our search.  Our process for this is of course that of ‘reinterpretation’.

For an example of such reinterpretation, in our preliminary outline above we find a reflection of Pope John Paul II’s statement on science’s relation to religion:

“Science can purify religion from error and superstition.”

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

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

Both John Paul II and Richard Dawkins recognize that Christianity has developed a complex set of statements about God.  How is it possible to put these statements into a context which is consistent with the simple outline offered above: to ‘divest them of their baggage’?  This is the goal of ‘reinterpretation’.

The way to go about it?  We will use those ‘principles of reinterpretation’ which we identified in the last two posts to ‘divest the baggage’ in which the traditional statements about God are frequently wrapped.

A Preliminary Definition of God

A simple working definition of God, consistent with both science and religion might be

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

The question could be asked, “But isn’t this just Deism?’.  When we addressed this question, we noted the differences between our definition and that of Deism.  In summary, the Deists, most notably represented by Thomas Jefferson, conceived of a ‘ground of being’ which was responsible for everything which could be seen at that time.  In their minds, in order to strip “the baggage” from the religious expressions of their time, God had to be understood as a designer and builder of the world, but once having built it, retired from the project.

However, theirs was a static world and in no need of continued divine involvement once ‘creation’ was accomplished.  As they saw it, Man, given his intelligence by God, was capable of successfully operating the world independently from its creator.

The Deists were off to a good start, but without the grasp of the cosmos and its underlying process of evolution that we have today, they were unable to conceive of a continuing agent of a yet undiscovered evolution which continually manifests itself in increasing complexity.  Their static world postulated either an uninvolved God or (as they saw traditional religion’s belief) a God continually tinkering with his creation.
Thus we can first understand the idea of a ‘ground of being’ as resonant with both science and a ‘reinterpreted’ religion with a few simple observations.  However, Professor Dawkins goes on to dismiss the possibility that a human person could have a relationship with a God such as his above assertion suggests.  How is it possible to ‘love’ God?  To understand Him (sic) as ‘father?  How can such an understanding lead to a relationship conducive to our personal search for completeness?

The Next Post

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

July 2 2020 – How Can Religion Be Reinterpreted to Recover Its Relevance?

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Part 2: Principles from Maurice Blondel, Jonathan Sacks, Karen Armstrong,  Richard Rohr and John Haight 

Today’s Post

Last week we took a relook at the insights of Teilhard de Chardin, extracting six principles which we will employ as we move on to reinterpreting religious teaching for their relevance to human life.  This week we will look at additional principles from other sources.

Reinterpretation Principles From Maurice Blondel

As we discussed in the post of May 26, in his book, Man Becoming, Gregory Baum describes the work of Maurice Blondel as he addressed the traditional teachings of Christianity in the light of science’s increasingly universal perspective.  In summary, Blondel saw the Catholic Church’s approach to theology as diminishing in relevance to human life.  Blondel was one of the first Catholic philosophers to call for ‘reinterpreting’ church teachings to reverse this trend, and in doing so proposed several ‘Principles of Reinterpretation’.  Some of these are:

  • Since we cannot know ‘God as He (sic) is apart from man’, we must understand that each statement that we make about God carries with it an implied assumption about humans and the reality in which they live. By applying that implied assumption, we can reinterpret a teaching in terms of our lives.

The Principle:  “Every sentence about God can be translated into a declaration about human life”

  • As Teilhard was later to expand upon, the energies of evolution which have effected ‘Man’s Becoming’ continue to be active in his continued personal evolution. The onset of complexity that began in the ‘Big Bang’ continues to be present in human life and manifests itself in our potential for increased understanding and becoming.  Most religious teachings seek to put us in touch with this current of energy by which we grow.

The Principle:  “There is no standpoint from which a human person can say, “I am here and God is  there”.  The presence of God is an essential agent in his saying of it”.

The Principle:  “(Religious teaching) is not a message added to our life from without; it is rather the clarification and specification of the transcendent mystery of humanization that is fundamentally operative in our life.”

  • Any teaching must be relevant to be able to have an effect on our lives.

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

The Principle: “Man cannot accept an idea as true unless it corresponds in some way to a question present in his mind”

  • Our response to reality is a necessary factor in our personal growth

The Principle: “A person is not a determined being, defined as it were by its nature.  A person comes to be, in part at least, through his own responses to reality.”

 Reinterpretation Principles From Karen Armstrong (The Great Transformation)

  • In keeping with Blondel’s insistence on elements of existential value in religious teaching, Karen Armstrong also offers principles for reinterpretation

The Principle:  “Instead of jettisoning religious doctrines, we should look for their spiritual kernel.  A religious teaching is never simply a statement of objective fact: it is a program for action.”

  • Echoing both Teilhard and Blondel, she criticizes attempts to make sense of God on human terms, which can introduce anthropomorphism into the concept of God. She agrees with both the Jewish and Eastern approach to understanding God differently.

The Principle:  “It was unhelpful to be dogmatic about a transcendence that was essentially undefinable”

Reinterpretation Principles From Jonathan Sacks (The Great Partnership)

  • All religions contain dualisms that in their inherent contradiction undermine their ability to map the road to human growth.

The Principle:  “Any teaching that departs from the underlying unity of the universe will be detrimental to successful application to human life”

  • This principle points the way to understanding how evolution continues to proceed through the human person and society. Science quantifies this observation by showing that neurological evolution has evolved our central neural system (the brain) in three stages:
    • Reptilian: Basic instinctual life sustaining functions: breathing, vascular management, flight/fright reaction
    • Limbic: Appearance of instinctive emotional functions necessary for the longer gestation and maturation of mammals
    • Neo-Cortex: Appearance of the potential for mental processes independent of and capable of mediating the stimuli of the ‘lower’ brains.

The Principle: Human evolution can be understood as the increasing skill of employing the ‘higher’ neocortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of the ‘lower’ brains.

Reinterpretation Principle from Richard Rohr

  • Good religion always acts as a unifying principle in our lives

The Principle:  “Whatever reconnects (re-ligio) our parts to the Whole is an experience of God, whether we call it that or not.”

Reinterpretation Principle from John Haight (The New Cosmic Story)

  • Religion needs to be consisting with the ongoing insights of the universe discovered by science

The Prinicple:  “…every aspect of religion gains new meaning and importance once we link it to the new scientific story of an unfinished universe.”

An Overarching Principle

  • And finally, a principle which is echoed by each of these thinkers:

The Principle: ”The underlying truth of a teaching, and the key to its relevancy, can be found in its power to bring opposing points of view into a cohesive whole”

The Next Post

This week we completed our collection of ‘principles of interpretation’, nineteen principles that we will use as we examine the insights, concepts and teachings of Western religion for their relevancy to human life.  It should be noted that these principles are not derived from traditional religious thought.  They are general principles, secular in nature, which can be applied to religious thought.

Next week we will begin our inquiry by addressing the basic cornerstone of all religions, the fundamental ground of being, the ‘first cause’ which underlays the universe: God.

June 25 2020 – How Can Religion Be Reinterpreted to Recover Its Relevance?

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Part 1: Evolutionary Principles of Reinterpretation

Today’s Post

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

The Process of Reinterpretation

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

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

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

In Blondel’s process of interpretation, this leads to new artifacts: statements which are made from the new perspective which emerges from our understanding that we are embedded in this process of ‘coming to be’: we are not static, we are ‘becoming’.

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

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

He decomposed our individual and collective evolution into four steps:

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

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

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

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

 Principles of Reinterpretation

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

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

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

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

Teilhard’s Approach to Interpretation

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

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

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

The ‘Evolutionary’ Principles of Reinterpretation

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

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

The Principle: We grow as persons because of our potential for growth, which comes to us as a particular instantiation of the general potential of the universe to evolve

  • Secondly, he notes that all things in the universe evolve, and the fundamental thread of evolution can be seen in the phenomenon of increasing complexity.

The Principle: The increasing complexity of the universe is reflected in our individual increase in complexity, which in the human manifests itself as personal growth

  • A third observation is that physics addresses the principle by which elements of matter are pulled into ever more complex arrangements through elemental, natural forces (The Standard Model). Without it the universe would have stayed as a formless cloud of energy.   This process continues to manifest itself in living things (Natural Selection) and can be seen today in the unitive forces of ‘love’ which unite us in such a way that we become more human.

The Principle:  Just as atoms unite to become molecules, and cells to become neural systems, so do our personal connections effect our personal growth and through this evolution of our societies

  • In a fourth observation, he notes that adding the effect of increasing complexity to the basic theories of Physics and Biology also unites the three eras of universal evolution (pre-life, life, human life) as it provides a thread leading from the elemental mechanics of matter and energy through the development of ever more complex neural systems in Natural Selection to the ‘awareness of awareness’ as seen in humans.

The Principle: This ‘thread’ therefore continues its universal agency to be active in every human person in the potential of our personal ‘increase in complexity’, which of course is our personal growth.

  • In his fifth observation, Teilhard, Sacks and Rohr all see this primary human skill as the subject of nearly every religious and philosophical thought system in human history. These systems all offer paradigms and rituals for understanding the nature of the reality which surrounds us as necessary for us to be able to fulfill our true human potential.

The Principle:  The evolutionary core of a religious teaching will always lead to increasing the completeness of the human person.

  • In his sixth insight, Teilhard notes that “We must first understand, and then we must act”. If our understanding is correct, then an appropriate action can be chosen.  If we act in accordance with what is real, our actions will contribute to both our personal evolution (our process of becoming more whole) as well as the evolution of our society.  As Teilhard puts it,

“Those who spread their sails in the right way to the winds of the earth will always find themselves borne by a current towards the open seas.”

       Or, As Richard Rohr puts it,

“Our lives must be grounded in awareness of the patterns of the Universe.”

The Principle:  Authentic religion helps us to be aware of and cooperate with the creative energies which effect the universal phenomenon of evolution

The Next Post

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

June 18, 2020 – How Can We Rethink Religion?

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Today’s Post

For the past several weeks we have been looking at the two great systems of thought that have emerged as humanity has attempted to ‘make sense of things”. In this series we have noted that both science and religion clearly have developed ‘tools’ for dealing with our evolution, but that these tools, effective as they have been shown to be, are still a work in progress.
Last week we addressed how the activities of our ‘left’ and ‘right’ modes of thinking, properly synthesized, can offer great potential to ensure our continued evolution. In the course of our discussion, however, we noted the necessity of both to continue to evolve from their current incomplete states to one in which this partnership can mature.

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

Why Should Religion Evolve?

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

– no religion relinquishes power voluntarily

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

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

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

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

How can Religion Evolve?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The tool is ‘reinterpretation’.

Reinterpreting Religion

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

An example of this dichotomy can be seen in the ‘Question and Answer’ flow of the Catholic Baltimore Catechism:

“Why did God make me?

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

   This simple QA reflects several aspects of such dichotomy.

    • It presents the belief that ‘this life’ is simply a preparation for ‘the next’.   This life is something we have to endure to prove our worthiness for a fully meaningful and happy existence in the next. Therefore our purpose in life is simply to make sure that we live a life worthy of the reward of heavenly existence when we die.
    • As follows from this perspective, we can’t expect meaning and the experience of happiness in human life.
      • Ultimate meaning is understood as ‘a mystery to be lived and not a problem to be solved’. Understanding only happens in the next life.
      • Happiness is a condition incompatible with the evil and corruption that we find not only all around us, but that we find within ourselves
      • Life is essentially a ‘cleansing exercise’, in which our sin is expunged and which, if done right, makes us worthy of everlasting life.

As both Blondel and Sacks noted, the increasing Greek content of this perspective in Christian history slowly moves God from the intimacy reflected in Jesus, Paul and John into the role that Blondel called the “over/against of man”. It is not surprising that one of the evolutionary branches of Western belief, Deism, would result in seeing God as a powerful being who winds up the universe, as in a clock, setting it into motion but no longer interacting with it.

Dichotomy and Reinterpretation

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

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

While these benefits might be real, many surveys of western societies, especially in Europe, show a correlation between increasing education and decreasing belief. Is it possible that (as the atheists claim) the price for the evolution of human society is a decrease in belief? That the increasing irrelevancy of religion is a necessary byproduct of our maturity?

Or is it possible that solutions to the ills of Western society require some connection to the spiritual realm claimed by religion? Put another way: is it possible to re-look at these claims to uncover their evolutionary values? How can the claims of religion be re-understood (‘re-ligio’) in terms of their secular values; to look at them, as Karen Armstrong asserts, as “plans for action” necessary to advance human evolution? Certainly, if so, religion has the potential to recover the relevancy that is necessary for any tool with the potential of moving evolution forward.

In order to move toward such re-understanding, we will look at the idea of ‘reinterpretation’ itself, to explore how we can best apply the perspectives of Teilhard, Blondel, Armstrong, Rohr and Sacks to the process of re-interpreting our two thousand years of religious doctrine development.

The Next Post

Considering that our lives are built on perspectives and beliefs that are so basic as to be nearly instinctual, how can we come to see them differently? Our histories, however, contain many stories of such transformations, and the unfolding of our sciences and social structures are dependent upon them.

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

June 11, 2020 –How Do Science and Religion Need Each Other?

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Today’s Post

Last week we looked at Teilhard’s eight ways of seeing the natural confluence between religion and science. As we saw, Teilhard understands them to be natural facets of a synthesized understanding of the noosphere, and therefore potentially of benefit to continued relevance to human life.

This week we will take a look at how another thinker sees this potential for a closer and more beneficial relationship. Jonathan Sacks, former British Chief Rabbi, comes at this subject from a slightly different perspective. While Teilhard situates traditional dualities into an evolutive context to resolve them, Sacks understands them in the context of the two primary modes of human understanding intuition and empiricism.

Sacks On the Evolution of Religion

Teilhard of course placed religion (as he does all things) into an evolutionary context as one strand of ‘universal becoming’. His understanding of the mutual benefit of a synthesis between science and religion is focused on their paired value to the continuation human evolution.

Sacks, in his book, “The Great Partnership”, stays closer to home, focusing on religion’s potential to help us to become what we are capable of becoming. From this perspective, religion, properly understood and applied, is a mechanism for our personal growth in the context of our collective growth. As discussed previously, Sacks sees the evolution of human thinking in the unfolding of religion and the evolution of language, and thus as a slow movement towards a balance between the ‘left’ and ‘right’ hemispheres of the human brain. In this way, the cooperation between religion and science can be seen as simply a more balanced and harmonious way of thinking in which the traditional ‘dualities’ (as seen by both Teilhard and Sacks) can be resolved.

Science’s Need for Religion

With this in mind, Sacks agrees with Teilhard’s insight on the unique understanding of the person as the cornerstone of its success in improving human welfare. Like Jefferson, he also recognizes the role that religion has played in the evolution of society:

“Outside religion there is no secure alternative base for the unconditional source of worth that in the West has come from the idea that we are each in God’s image. Though many have tried to create a secular substitute, none has ultimately succeeded.”

   The ‘none’ to which he refers can of course be seen in those countries which tried to create a “social order based on materialistic lines”. These examples can be seen in Stalinist Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and the Kim family’s North Korea.

As he sees it, the problem arises when an alternative to religion’s value of the human person is sought. Sacks locates the failure of such searches in science’s inability to address human freedom. As he sees it:

“To the extent that there is a science of human behavior, to that extent there is an implicitly denial of the freedom of human behavior.”

   He sees this duality at work in Spinoza, Marx and Freud, who argued that human freedom is an illusion, but notes that “If freedom is an illusion, so is human dignity”. Hence when human dignity is denies, the state no longer viable.

Sacks agrees with the success of science in overcoming the superstitions that so often accompany religion, but notes that it does not replace the path to ‘meaning’ offered by religion. He summarizes these two facets of human understanding:

“Science takes things apart to understand how they work. Religion puts things together to show what they mean.”

   For science to be effective, its statements must be objectively ‘proved’, and the means of doing so are accepted across the breadth of humanity. Both the need for such rigor and the success of its application can be seen in the many aspects of increased human welfare (effectively advances in human evolution) as seen in our series on Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress”.   Clearly the ‘scientific method’ is a significant root of human evolution.

However, as we noted in this series, Norberg recognizes the cornerstones of human evolution as human freedom, innovation and relationship. These three facets of the human person are not ‘provable’, and which existence, as we saw above, is even denied by many ‘empiricists’. Since they are active in the sap of evolution, they also must be in the root.

At the level of the human person, Sacks observes that “Almost none of the things for which people live can be proved.” He offers the example of ‘trust”:

“A person who manages the virtue of trust will experience a different life than one to whom every human relationship is a potential threat.”

     Therefore, any group in which all the members can trust one another is at a massive advantage to others. As evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has argued, this is what religion does more powerfully than any other system.

Religion’s Need for Science

Just as the left- brained perspectives of science are in need of the right-brained balance of religion, as implicitly recognized by Norberg, so the perspectives of religion are in need of balance from science.

The claims of all forms of religion are based on metaphorical beliefs, many of which cannot be held by those who are powering the ‘progress’ curve outlined by Norberg. As we saw in the case of Thomas Jefferson, he systematically stripped the gospels of such ‘miraculous’ teachings to reveal what he considered to be the bedrock of “The Teachings of Jesus” which he in turn applied to his underlying (and unprovable) assertions of the value and dignity of the individual human person.

Many educated persons believe that scientific insight will eventually replace religion as the basis of human action. It is certainly true that in the past two hundred or so years, many religious teachings have become unacceptable due to the rise of empiricism, such as the formal blaming of the Jewish race for the death of Jesus, the seven literal days of creation, and so on. The continuing influence of religion in many parts of the world is due more to its ability to push back on state corruption and savagery than its teachings on reincarnation and virgin births. But with the increasing evolution of state structures more benign to the human person, such as that found in democracies, the underlying importance that religion places on the individual human person plays a larger role.

For religion to continue to play a role in this evolution, it must be seen as relevant. As Sacks sees it:

“Religion needs science because we cannot apply God’s will to the world if we do not understand the world. If we try to, the result will be magic or misplaced supernaturalism.” 

The Road to Synthesis

So, how do we get to the point where right- and left- brain process are balanced? Sacks addresses what happens when we don’t:

“Bad things happen when religion ceases to hold itself answerable to empirical reality, when it creates devastation and cruelty on earth for the sake of salvation in heaven. And bad things happen when science declares itself the last word on the human condition and engages in social or bio-engineering, treating humans as objects rather than as subjects, and substitution of cause and effect for reflection, will and choice.”

   He recognizes that science and religion have their own way of asking questions and searching for answers, but doesn’t see it as a basis for compartmentalization, in which they are seen as

completely separate worlds. Like Teilhard, he sees the potential for synergy “..because they are about the same world within which we live, breathe and have our being”.

He sees the starting point for such synergy as “conversation”, in hopes that it will lead to “integration”. From Sacks’ perspective:

“Religion needs science because we cannot apply God’s will to the world if we do not understand the world. If we try to, the result will be magic or misplaced supernaturalism.”

   By the same token, he goes on:

“Science needs religion, or at the very least some philosophical understanding of the human condition and our place within the universe, for each fresh item of knowledge and each new accession of power raises the question of how it should be used, and for that we need another way of thinking.”

   Even though Sacks doesn’t place his beliefs in an explicitly evolutionary context, he does envision a more whole human person which emerges as a result of a more complete balance between the influence of the ‘right’ and ‘left’ brains (modes of engaging reality). In this sense, he echoes Teilhard’s belief of ‘fuller being’ resulting from ‘closer union’.

The Next Post

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

Next week, in keeping with Teilhard’s expressed need to rethink religion, we will look at how religion must continue its own evolution in order to hold up its end of the relationship with science.

June 4 – Religion and Science: Bridges to Partnership

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Today’s Post

Last week we once again noted the evolutionary progress that can be seen in the secular world, effecting a startling increase in human welfare over the past hundred fifty years. We also noted that the continuation of this trend is not inevitable. It is possible for ‘noospheric risks’ to undermine the continuation of human evolution. As Teilhard asserts, however, the potential of science and religion, properly focused, conjoined and applied, can emerge in the form of tools which will help us make our way.

This week we will look at eight of his assertions to understand the potential for religion’s confluence with science.

The Evolutionary Potential of Religion

Teilhard notes that Christianity, of all the world’s religions, in its fundamental teachings is well placed for such a partnership with science to overcome ‘noospheric risks’.

His first observation is that Christianity differs from other religious perspectives in its primacy of the person:

“.. the (Christian) doctrine of the personal universe … is already virtually realized and lived within Christianity.”

   Like Teilhard, Jefferson recognized this personalistic focus of Christianity, and saw it as necessary for the success of a democratic form of government. Teilhard recognized the value of attaching primacy to the concept of the person not only in human affairs, but as necessary for understanding the entire evolution of the universe.   Teilhard first identifies complexity as the key metric of universal evolution, then goes on to trace how this complexity eventually manifests itself as person-ness in evolution’s most recent stages.

Second, he notes how this primacy of person is captured in the Christian concept of ‘incarnation’, which can be seen through Teilhard’s insights as an impetus for the development of ‘the person’ that is the cornerstone to continued human evolution:

” The degree to which Christianity teaches and offers a prospect of universal transformation can never be sufficiently stressed. By the Incarnation God descended into nature to ‘super-animate’ it and lead it back to Him: this is the substance of the Christian dogma.”

   Here Teilhard’s concept of God as the fundamental agent of the rise of complexity that powers universal evolution overlaps with John’s core Christian insight that “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”. The Christian claim that the universal agent of evolution’s increasing complexity is somehow present in each of its products is unique among all the world’s religions. It clearly reflects the belief that whatever is happening in our lives as we grow is powered by a universal agency for such growth.

Third, Teilhard also takes note of how the core elements of Christian theology are not only compatible with science’s understanding of the ‘natural’ world, they can be enhanced by it. Teilhard, like Blondel before him, understood how the scientific concept of evolution offered a more complete understanding of religion’s ancient teachings:

“… we are apparently beginning to perceive that a universe of evolutionary structure… might well be…the most favorable setting in which to develop a noble and homogenous representation of the Incarnation.”

“… does not (Christianity) find its most appropriate climate in the broad and mounting prospect of a universe drawn towards the spirit? What could serve as a better background and base for the descending illuminations of a Christogenisis than an ascending anthropogenesis?”

   “Drawn towards the spirit” of course invokes Teilhard’s reinterpretation of ‘spirit’ as ‘increased complexity’, with ‘Christogenisis’ as the personal aspect of this increased complexity. With this observation, Teilhard ‘closes the loop’ between a science which struggles to understand the fundamental force of evolution by which the intensity of its complexity is increased (“drawn towards the spirit’) and a religion loosed from its moorings of superstition, hierarchy and a spirituality which has become detached from the noosphere.

Science and Religion: Getting From Here To There

In the fourth insight, Teilhard addresses science with his belief that to live the noosphere we must understand it:

“Man is… an object of unique value to science for two reasons.

(i) (The human person) represents, individually and socially, the most synthesized state of order which the stuff of the universe is available to us.

(ii) Collectively, he is at present the most (fluid) point of the stuff in course of transformation.

   For these two reasons, to decipher man is essentially to try to find out how the world was made and how it ought to go on making itself. The science of man is the practical and theoretical science of hominisation. “

   In the fifth insight, he recognizes, however, that the emergence of science was not without its seeming competition with religion.

“To outward appearance, the modern world was born of an anti-religious movement: man becoming self-sufficient and reason supplanting belief. Our generation and the two that preceded it have heard little but talk of the conflict between science and faith; indeed it seemed at one moment a foregone conclusion that the former was destined to take the place of the latter.”

   This sentiment was strongly evident in the earliest claims of the superiority of empiricism over that of intuition, such as that which appeared in the Enlightenment and addressed by Stephen Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”

However, as Pinker undertakes the slippery subject of personal happiness in this book, he is forced to recognize the significant correlation between meaning and life satisfaction. He fails to note that the empirical nature of science prevents incorporation of personal ‘meaning’ into its insights.

Jonathan Sacks addresses this meaning/understanding dichotomy:

“Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean. The difference between them is fundamental and irreducible. They represent two distinct activities of the mind. Neither is dispensable. Both, together, constitute a full expression of our humanity. They are as different and as necessary as the twin hemispheres of the brain. It is in fact from the hemispherical asymmetry of the brain that the entire drama of the mutual misunderstanding and conjoint creativity of religion and science derive.”

   In his sixth insight, Teilhard, goes on to envision a future relationship between science and religion in which their viewpoints capitalize on Sack’s potential synergies, and they begin to approach a synthesis in which the ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ content of human evolution are finally recognized as two facets of a single thing:

“But, as the tension (between science and religion) is prolonged, the conflict visibly seems to be resolved in terms of an entirely different form of equilibrium- not in elimination, nor duality, but in synthesis. And the reason is simple: the same life animates both. “

Here Teilhard summarizes his understanding of how the empiricism of science and the intuition of religion, the traditionally understood ‘left’ and ‘right’ brain perspectives that Sacks highlights, can now be seen as two potentially integrated and synthesized human enterprises. Long envisioned as the opposite sides of a deep-seated duality, Teilhard sees them as destined to bring us to a more complete understanding of ourselves and the noosphere which we inhabit.

In his seventh insight, Teilhard summarizes his belief that such synthesis is necessary for the continuation of human evolution:

“Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge– the only one that can embrace the past and future of evolution so as to contemplate, measure and fulfil them.”

   As we have seen, Johan Norberg, in his book, “Progress”, implicitly agrees when he cites the three factors of freedom, innovation and relationship as essential for the continuation of the human progress, the essence of human evolution. In showing how these three factors are critical to secular progress, he is in implicit agreement with Teilhard that “neither (science nor religion) can develop normally without the other” and with Sacks that “Both, together, constitute a full expression of our humanity”.

In an eighth insight, Teilhard notes that ‘the person’, the current manifestation of universal evolution, is poorly addressed by science:

“Up to now, Man in his essential characteristics has been omitted from all scientific theories of nature. For some, his “spiritual value” is too high to allow of his being included…in a general scheme of history. For others his power of choosing and abstracting is too far removed from material determinism for it to be possible, or even useful, to associate him with the elements composing the physical sciences. In both cases, either through excessive admiration or lack of esteem, man is left floating above, or left on the edge of the universe.”

   For such an oversight to be corrected, science must widen its scope to include the universal agency of ‘complexification’ including its manifestation in both human and social forms.  The progress of human evolution cannot wait for such phenomenon to become ‘objectively’ understood and empirically quantified, it must somehow continue with enough ‘subjective’ understanding for us to be able to move forward. This recursive dance of intuition and empiricism is necessary for both science and religion to move towards the synergy envisioned by Teilhard

The Next Post

This week we saw eight of Teilhard’s insights that underlay his assertion that the continuation of human evolution requires a synergy between science and religion.

We also cited Jonathan Sacks’ insights on these two ‘domains of thought’ and next week will look a little more deeply into how they can better team to assure this continuation.

May 28– Religion and Science: Different But Compatible Evolutionary Tools?

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Today’s Post

Last week, we looked at religion’s concept of morality, and saw how these insights offer a rethinking of traditional religion’s potential as a tool for ‘stitching together’ the fabric of society. Teilhard sees morality evolving from proscription to prescription for religion to realize its potential as a tool for insuring our continued evolution. He saw how rethinking morality is one way for religion to recognize its role as a tool for understanding the noosphere, and by doing so to be able to assist us in living it in such a way that we can become fully and authentically human.

This week we turn our focus to the other great human enterprise, science, to begin exploring how a revitalized religion, better focused on an evolving noosphere, might better work with an obviously effective science in realizing our human potential.

Evolution Everywhere

In this series, we have frequently noted that, as asserted and quantified by Johan Norberg (‘Progress’), it is possible for us, with properly focused eyes, to recognize threads of this evolution happening all around us. Norberg offers, as the Economist identifies, “A tornado of facts” which quantify the many ways that human welfare proceeds by the correct application of human freedom, innovation and relationship throughout the world. Norberg’s examples of increased human welfare are without a doubt tangible evidence of the ways in which the human species can be seen to continue its evolution.

We have also seen that Norberg considered human freedom, innovation, and relationships to be essential for such progress to proceed, which is why the earliest examples of this progress appeared in the West, with its unique emphasis on all three.

By the same token, we have noted that these three characteristics are addressed poorly by science, and its companion secular ‘disciplines’ such as economics and politics.   Norberg’s three cornerstones of progress initially only appear in the West, as a slowly building consequence of society influenced by its Christian roots in the uniqueness of the person.

Jefferson’s claim that

“I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves” was a recognition of such uniqueness, but it was not an insight derived from any empirical source. His inspiration for such an unprovable concept was none other than his own excerpts from the New Testament, known as the “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth”:

“We all agree in the obligation of the moral precepts of Jesus, and nowhere will they be found delivered in greater purity than in his discourses.”

Thus our claim that in religion, for all its creaky hierarchy, superstitions and contradictions, and even its many instances of hostility to Norberg’s three building blocks of freedom, innovation and relationships, we can still find threads of the current which must be maintained if it is to carry us forward.

We have Jefferson to thank for both a clearer understanding of the noosphere, and how its structure in human affairs has evolved from Enlightenment principles intermixed with Christian values, even though it can be seen as initially “dripping” with the accouterments of medieval worldview.

As Norberg quantifies at length, this clearer understanding of the unfolding of human evolution clearly articulates the success of the West in providing a milieu which has effected a degree of stability not only unprecedented in human history, but which has slowly permeated into the rest of the world.

Steven Pinker (“Enlightenment Now”) recognizes how this unfolding can be seen in the West as a “tide of morality” which is effecting an “historical erosion of racism, sexism and homophobia”. It is not coincidental that these three negative aspects of society have all, at one time (and even today) been paramount in all religions. Pinker sees in this tide the effect of ‘empiricism’s superiority over intuition’, a sentiment underpinning the beliefs found in the Enlightenment. However, as do many thinkers influenced by the Enlightenment, he fails to recognize that in the essential beliefs of Jefferson, reflecting those of Jesus, the key kernel which makes such a tide possible is the recognition of the essential importance of the human person. Without this belief, essentially unprovable and thus ‘intuitive’ rather than ‘empirical’, the tide would not surge, it would ebb.

Enter Religion

And this, of course, is where religion comes in. We have taken a long look at ‘risks’ to the noosphere, and saw that even with the unconscious ‘tide’ that Pinker cites, there’s no guarantee that it will ultimately prevail over the ‘risks’ to the noosphere that we identified a few weeks back.

At the basis of these ‘risks’ is the necessity for us to choose to continue to power this tide. We saw that it is possible for humans to simply allow fear, pessimism and disbelief to weaken their will to continue.  When this happens, the ills of “racism, sexism and homophobia”, always lurking in the background, will resurge.

Pinker notes, for example, that although the rate of suicide is declining everywhere across the world, it is increasing in the United States. Increased welfare, it would seem, is no bulwark against despair. This, of course, is the ultimate duality: Faith in human progress seems to be declining in the first society to provide evidence of the progress itself.

We have looked at examples of how evolution is proceeding through contemporary secular events, as prolifically documented by Norberg and Pinker, but as many of their critics note, they spend little time addressing the downside, the ‘evolutionary risks’ of these examples. While this does not diminish the reality of the progress that they document, neither does it address the risks.

Teilhard believed that religion, properly unfettered from its medieval philosophical shackles, its overdependence on hierarchy, and its antipathy towards science, is well suited to address these ‘downsides’.

We noted last week that Teilhard asserted that religion, if it is to indeed rise to its potential as a tool for dealing with these ‘noospheric risks’, must find a way to enter into a new phase of contribution to this process:

“At the first stage, Christianity may well have seemed to exclude the humanitarian aspirations of the modern world. At the second stage its duty was to correct, assimilate and preserve them.”

We have taken a look at a key facet of religion, ‘morality,’ to understand how this concept can be reinterpreted in terms of building blocks for continued human evolution. How can religion itself be reinterpreted in this same way? Teilhard’s answer to this question was to see a way forward for religion and science to overcome the traditional religion-science duality:

“Religion and science are the two conjugated faces of phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge- the only one that can embrace the past and future of evolution so as to contemplate, measure and fulfil them.”

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at science and religion as ‘partners’ for managing the noosphere, particularly in managing the human-initiated risks to it, but recognizing that traditionally, they have been understood as opposites in a long-standing duality.

Next week we will look a little deeper into how Teilhard understood the potential confluence between these two powerful modes of thinking, and how they could be brought into a fully and integrated human response to the challenges of evolution.