Tag Archives: Reinterpretation of Religion

October 1, 2020 Where Do Science and Religion Fall Short?

Finding the way for Science and Religion to reinforce each other

Today’s Post

We have moved from seeing the need to reinterpret both science and religion to an understanding of God from Teilhard’s more ‘science-friendly’ viewpoint, and science as way of making sense of things which offers religion a door to an understanding in which it can recover its relevancy.

With such a reinterpretation, religion emerges as a new, more relevant and more immediate referent for personal growth, while science’s field of regard expands to encompass the energies of personal life.

This week we will take a look at how these two traditional ‘cosmic stories’ can not only move toward increased resonance, but toward higher synergy as they become more relevant to human life, more comprehensive, and collaborate as agencies which foster continued human development.

Telling The ‘Cosmic Story’

We have seen how an integrated understanding of the cosmos affects both of our lives and our participation in the larger society. We have also noted the many dualisms that face us as we attempt to integrate traditional principles of wholeness into our lives. Science and religion obviously represent rich sources of concepts which we can use, but at the same time, both within themselves and between themselves, can be found many contradictions as well as concepts neither helpful nor relevant to human life.

John Haught, Research Professor at Georgetown University, offers a way to look at this situation from the center of what we have been referring to as ‘the terrain of synergy’. In his perspective, outlined in his book, “The New Cosmic Story”, science and religion represent our two traditional ways of doing this.

In this book, he critiques the ‘stories’ traditionally told by science and religion, and argues for a third story which offers an integrated perspective on what is clearly a single, integrated cosmos.

He stands well back from the traditional stories, addressing them as two categories of lore which address the same thing: the cosmos.

The first category he labels as “archaeonomy” which is the traditional, empirically-based, left-brained story told by science.
The second category is the story told by traditional, intuition-based, right-brained religion, which he labels, “analogy”

He also envisions a third story, slowly emerging today, as we learn more about the universe on the one hand, and become less patient with the dualisms of traditional religion on the other, He labels the third perspective, which offers a synergistic reinterpretation of both, as “anticipation”. This story is told from the perspective of the ‘whole brain’.

These three categories of stories serve not only as a taxonomy of insights into the cosmos, but also as a guide to understanding our place within it. He notes that any story which purports to address the universe is by definition incomplete if it does not address the human person. In this he echoes Teilhard, Paul Davies, Jonathan Sacks and Richard Rohr, all of whom we have met in previously.

The ‘Archaenomic’ Story

We have looked in some detail at the story which mainstream science tells, particularly at how science, so obviously adept in building technology and increasing our creature comforts, seems to be marking time at the phenomenon of the human person. In Haught’s telling, and in implicit agreement with Davies and Teilhard,

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

And, recognizing this ‘corridor’ as Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’, he goes on to say

“Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ (eg consciousness aware of itself) has been part of the universe from the start. So hidden is this interior side of the cosmos from public examination that scientists and philosophers with materialist leanings usually claim it has no real existence.” (Parentheses mine)

He goes on to comment how such an ‘archaeonomic’ story avoids the very human characteristics that have emerged in evolution:

“…how little illumination materialistic readings of nature have shed not only on religion but also on life, mind, morality and other emergent phenomena.”

And, I would add, how little illumination on human happiness.

Not only, as he notes, does the archaeonomic perspective fall short of addressing these very human manifestations of life, but adds a dystopian outlook as well:

“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.”

He sees this pessimistic perspective as one which ignores the very basis of science: that of evolution:

“(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 ‘Analogic’ Story

He is neither sparing of the traditional religious story.

“Analogy has appealed to religious people for centuries, but it remains intellectually plausible only so long as the universe is taken to be immobile.”

He proposes Teilhard’s method of making sense of religion by putting it into the context of evolution:

“Once we realize that nature is a gradually unfolding narrative, we cannot help noticing that more is indeed coming into the story out of less over the course of time, and that it does so without miraculous interruptions and without disturbing invariant physical and chemical principles. It is intellectually plausible only as long as the universe is taken to be immobile. The wrongness in religion is a signal that the universe is still far from being fully actualized.”

Next Week

This week we took another look at the human enterprises of science and religion, this time from the insights of John Haught. In doing so we saw that even though both have played a critical part in the evolution of human society, and in understanding our individual lives, neither perspective is without need of further evolution if the whole of universal existence, and our part in it, is to be better understood.

Next week we will see how Haught sees a path to synergy of both systems that can facilitate such a journey. In addition to these two ‘stories’, he also sees a third story as slowly emerging today as we learn more about the universe and become increasingly dissatisfied with traditional religion He titles this third ‘story’, “anticipation”.

These three categories of stories serve not only as a taxonomy of insights into the cosmos, but also as a guide to understanding our place within it. In this endeavor Haught echoes Teilhard, Paul Davies, Jonathan Sacks and Richard Rohr.

September 17, 2020 – The Search for The Core of self

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Freud, Teilhard and Rogers

Today’s Post

In the last two weeks we have followed Carl Rogers as he described his observations of a client in the process of finding his kernel of person-ness: what we have referred to as “secular meditation”. He also describes what emerges when we begin to trust and cooperate with this fundamental energy which Teilhard identifies as the ‘thread of evolution’, and Karen Alexander as the ‘cosmic spark’, as it rises in us

This week we will take a summary relook at the three approaches we have addressed in the past few weeks, those of Sigmund Freud, Teilhard and Carl Rogers, as they relate to the process of ‘secular meditation’ in search of a ‘core of personness’.

From Freud: the Dark Side

Even the most casual study of human history reveals a ‘dark side’ of humanity. All of the great books of ancient religions recognize it and warn against a turgid undercurrent which thwarts our ‘better nature’. To make things worse, with the explosion of popular media in our time, we are awash in the hyperventilating but financially rewarding reports of dystopia.

Sigmund Freud was the first to systematically apply the emerging practices of science to a study of the human person, and as we saw a few weeks ago, assembled a magnificent edifice of concepts, terminology and theory which was applicable to diagnosis and treatment of human emotional problems.

Unfortunately, as we also saw, his premise of the dangerous nature of the basic human, combined with his disdain for organized religion, colored this remarkable undertaking with a deep-seated pessimism that was to permeate his ‘school’ of psychology.

Freud’s view of human ontology was surely influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, in which the human was seen to evolve from a non-human animal ancestor. Freud held that this evolution explained the source of our ‘dark’ side, and hence had to be overcome if we were to rid ourselves of our ‘psychoses’. The “taming of ourselves” required the “taming of the ancestral animal within”.

While Freud (and Darwin) accurately identify these roots and how they affect us, they don’t take into account another perspective on such evolution. Teilhard remarked on the ‘transitional’ states of evolution, such as the formation of particles of matter from raw energy, atoms from subatomic particles, cells from highly complex molecules, and self-aware persons from otherwise conscious animals. He points out that in every case the first manifestations of each of these ‘new’ entities initially are virtually indistinguishable from their predecessor. He refers to the earliest, prokaryotic (non-nucleus) cells as emerging ‘dripping in molecularity’. If it were possible to see them in a population of highly complex, non-living molecules (such as amino acids), it would be very difficult to distinguish them. In contrast, at the evolutionary level of, say, neurological cells, the uniqueness of living tissue has become obviously different from complex molecules.

Teilhard sees the same thing happening with the human. Were it possible to see the first homo sapiens individual in a jungle filled with pre-humans, how would we tell them apart? Today there would be no problem with such an observation.

We humans have indeed emerged as animals with more complex brains, but that makes all the difference. The pre-humans, with only their reptilian and limbic brains, are at the mercy of their instinctual stimuli. The reptiles fight or fee, breathe, eat and procreate according to their basic, instinctual brain stimuli. Mammals add new powers of nurturing offspring, clannish connections and improved adaption to environment changes. These new behaviors, due to their new limbic brain, are in addition to the stimuli from their reptilian brains, and endow them with more instinctive evolutionary fitness.

Even though we humans have a third layer to our brains, the instinctual stimuli of the lower brains is still active, but the neo-cortex provides the capability of modulating them. I have suggested that the key manifestation of evolution in the human person can be found in the evolving skill of the neo-cortex to ‘ride herd’ on the instinctual stimuli of the lower brains.

So, even though Freud correctly recognizes the ‘dark side’, his assumption that the kernel of the person is dangerous does not take into account that it is through engagement with this kernel that the human evolves from the emotional immaturity of the child toward the personal wholeness of the mature adult. It’s not that the child’s essence is negative, but that its growth towards maturity is incomplete.

From Rogers: Toward the Light

As we have seen, Carl Rogers assumes a view of our personal evolution that is quite different from Freud. He assumes that each human person comes into the world with a quantum of potency, and that instead of being broken, is incomplete and capable of personal evolution –growth– towards increased being.

It should be noted that Rogers’ articulation of the emerging characteristics of a maturing person are purely secular. His methods are those of science: observe, theorize, and test. They require no adherence to religious belief (and are often antithetical to some), but rather a basic, fundamental belief in the trustworthy nature of the basic self, and a willingness to cooperate with it.

While there might not be a universally accepted list of the characteristics of human happiness or articulation of human potential, Rogers’ list of the characteristics displayed by a person in the process of growing is not only an excellent beginning but universally applicable.

Combined with the unique (and universal) nature of Rogers’ therapeutic relationship, ‘religious’ concepts such as belief, faith and love not only take on a new, secular, meaning, but one more relevant to human life.

Rogers’ approach offers a structure for a true, secular, employment of secular meditation as a means to self-discovery.

From Teilhard: The Light Itself

As we have frequently seen, Teilhard starts from the ‘other end’, describing how the ‘ground of being’ is manifest in the very basic manifold forces which power the evolution of the universe itself. He describes how these forces combine to effect all that we can see, and not only the human as a species but active in individual human persons as well. In his view (and that of Blondel, Rohr and others), it is impossible to distinguish where these forces leave off and where we begin since each act of such distinguishing requires the action of this force as it rises in us.

Freud, Rogers and Teilhard in a Nutshell

Freud applies science to atheism, “It is Id, be very afraid”

Rogers applies experience to science, “It is myself, I am trustworthy”

Teilhard applies science to religion. “It is I, be not afraid”

As Teilhard affirms, finding ourselves is finding the thread of universal evolution as it rises in ourselves. As Rogers discovers, the legacy that we receive as our basic human human birthright can be trusted to power our growth towards more complete being. God can not only be found, ‘He’ can be embraced.

The Next Post

After identifying God as the agent of evolution,

by which things increase in complexity over time,

through which the process of evolution is possible,

from the big bang to the human,

as products of evolution: even in our individual lives,

with which we can come into contact

by searching for the kernel of ourselves

using the emerging insights of science

the next post will now go on to the final stage of Relating to God: the secular side of ‘Loving God’

September 3, 2020 – Psychology as Secular Meditation- Part 3

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What is found as we find ourselves?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how psychology has evolved from Freud’s analysis and diagnosis to a guided inner search for the authentic self and hence can be seen as a secular meditative experience.

This week we will explore one of the pivotal practitioners of such psychology to see how this ‘guided inner search’ can unfold and what can be expected from it.

Carl Rogers

Dr. Carl Rogers was one of the psychologists who was key to the evolution of psychology from Freud’s analysis and diagnosis to a very personal level of psychotherapy which focuses on the inner search for self. Rogers was one of the earliest psychologists to depart from the then-traditional viewpoint that sees the therapist as a clinically objective analyst, sitting above and against the analyzed, translating the patient’s feelings and actions into prepackaged characteristics derived by Freud such as libido, ego, and superego.

Rogers’ goal was to uncover hidden motivations and use the clarity of such insights to motivate clients to change their behavior, taking a decidedly different approach from Freud. He speaks of his perspective in the introduction to his book, “On Becoming a Person”:

“It is about a client in my office who sits there by the corner of the desk, struggling to be himself, yet deathly afraid of being himself- striving to see his experience as it is, wanting to be that experience, and yet deeply fearful of the prospect. I sit there with that client, facing him, participating in that struggle as deeply and sensitively as I am able. I try to perceive his experience, and the meaning and the feeling and the taste and the flavor that it has for him. I bemoan my very human fallibility in understanding that client, and the occasional failures to see life as it appears to him, failures which fall like heavy objects across the intricate, delicate web of growth which is taking place. I rejoice at the privilege of being a midwife to a new personality- as I stand by with awe at the emergence of a self, a person, as I see a birth process in which I have had an important and facilitating part.”

Obviously this is quite different from the relationship that Freud formulates, as can be summarized by Rogers’ understanding of the role of the therapist:

“How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?”

instead of,

“How can I diagnose, treat, cure, or change this person?”

The goal of both approaches is treatment of the individual, but the methods and the implicit assumptions are clearly different.

Rogers echoes Teilhard’s ‘ontological’ insight into love when he states that

“Change appears to come about through experience in a relationship”.

He states his overall hypothesis:

“If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other person will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change, and personal development will occur”.

In Rogers’ approach, the therapist’s role changes from “analyst” to “facilitator”. His approach changes from assuming that the person to be found is “dangerous” to seeing it as “a reliable base for human growth”.

Rogers expands on this approach:

“The individual has within himself the capacity and the tendency, latent if not evident, to move forward to maturity. In a suitable psychological climate this tendency is released, and becomes actual rather than potential. He sees this potential as evident in his capacity to understand those aspects of his life and of himself which are causing him pain and dissatisfaction. This is an understanding which probes beneath his conscious knowledge of himself into those experiences which he has hidden from himself because of their threatening nature. As a result, the person who emerges tends to reorganize his personality and his relationship to life in ways which are regarded as more mature.”

Further,

“It is my hypothesis that in such a relationship the individual will reorganize himself at both the conscious and deeper levels of his personality in such a manner as to cope with life more constructively, more intelligently, and in a more socialized as well as a more satisfying way”.

So against the Freudian belief that man is basically irrational, and that his impulses, if not controlled will lead to the destruction of self and others, Rogers sees the human person as capable of becoming freer, less defined by the past and more open to the future as he grows. Since the basic nature of the human person is constructive and trustworthy, as the person matures he will become more creative and live more constructively.

How Is This ‘Meditation’?

We can see how the process described by Rogers is highly resonant with Teilhard’s description of his meditation from a few weeks ago.

Step 1: Recognizing the Facets of our Person

“…understanding those aspects of his life and of himself which are causing him pain and dissatisfaction.”

This is exploration of the ‘scaffolding’ of his person: those influences which affect the development of personality: beliefs, faiths and fears but provide a degree of emotional safety. Rogers describes how this difficult task can be facilitated by the therapist.

Step 2: Moving past the Safety of the Scaffolding

Moving past those “experiences which he has hidden from himself because of their threatening nature”.

Once the client begins to become aware of these ‘scaffoldings’, Rogers shows how the therapist can provide a safe way of exploring both the ways that the client is being inhibited by them as well as tactics to be employed in overcoming them.

Step 3: Encountering the Font of Our Consciousness

“…the other person will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth,”

In Rogers’ insight, this process leads a client to realize that at his core, he is a trustworthy agent who can safely experience, own and trust his emotions and insights.

Step 4: Using this insight to live a more complete life

“the individual will reorganize himself at both the conscious and deeper levels of his personality in such a manner as to cope with life more constructively, more intelligently, and in a more socialized as well as a more satisfying way”.

As Karen Armstrong puts it, such a person ‘inhabits his humanity more fully”

The Next Post

Having established the perspective of seeing the basic human self as constructive and trustworthy, and the role of the therapist as ‘facilitator’, Rogers went on to observe how these characteristics precipitated positive changes in the lives of his clients. Next week we will see how he saw such growth taking place.

August 20, 2020 –Psychology as ‘Secular Meditation’- Part 1

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The Beginnings

Today’s Post

Last week we showed how Teilhard’s description of his meditation can be seen in terms of Karen Armstrong’s secular search for the ‘immortal spark’: that essential agent of cosmic evolution which increases complexity which eventually manifests itself as our core. While Teilhard inevitably takes the tone of Western religious tradition, we saw how his approach to meditation is nonetheless basically secular.

This week we will carry this one step further: to look at how meditation, the traditional religious search for self, underlies a practice entirely devoid of religious belief: psychology.

The Appearance of Psychology

The increasing depth of the way that human persons began to experience themselves in the emerging awareness of their unique human person seen in the “Axial Age” also molded the form that this thinking was taking. In doing so, human evolution has moved from attributing the vagaries of life to supernatural agencies to attempts to understand them as natural phenomena. This movement gave rise to the empirical approaches of science. Initially constrained to the ‘material’ world, this approach eventually began to apply itself to the human person itself, based on clinical observation instead of religious doctrine and biblical interpretation.

Sigmund Freud pioneered this new scientific approach to understanding the human person. He applied the new methods of science to the making and testing of hypotheses of human growth and relationships. He was virtually the first major thinker to address the aspect of human nature which underlay sexuality (and therefore relationships) in objective, secular terms.

In Irving Singer’s comprehensive analysis of human relationships, “The Nature of Love”, he comments,

“Like other thinkers of the time, Freud sought to explain the human condition in terms of the rationalistic concepts that science was uncovering. He proposed a completely new lexicon and analytic approach to understand the nature of “affect”, which includes all of what we normally call feelings, emotions, sensations, “intuitive” and “instinctive” dispositions, erotic attachments, hatred as well as love, and also kinesthetic impressions of any kind. For that job we require a totally different type of methodology.”

Historically, some thinkers, such as Plato, Plotinus and Augustine, had generally proposed a positive interpretation of reality, believing that what is ultimate in reality sustains, even conforms to, human ideals; while others, such as Lucretius, and Hobbes came to see the universe as neutral, even hostile, to such optimistic assumptions. Freud falls into this second, pessimistic, category.

Singer contrasts these two perspectives, showing the duality of thinking which results from this dichotomy:

”Philosophers have often tried to reduce the different senses of the word “love” to a single meaning that best suited their doctrinal position. To the Platonists, “real love”, being a search for absolute beauty or goodness, must be good itself; to the Freudians love is “really” amoral sexuality, though usually sublimated and deflected from its coital aim. The Platonist argues that even sexuality belongs to a search for the ideal, and otherwise would not be called love in any sense. The Freudian derives all ideals from attempts to satisfy organic needs, so that whatever Plato recommends must also be reducible to love as sexuality.”

Freud In An Oversimplified Nutshell

Freud’s thinking provided a monumental, unprecedented and unified approach to understanding the human person and the relationship between persons. Like Teilhard’s finding of the ‘personal core’ in last week’s post, Freud understood the person as an entity possessing a certain “life force” which empowers survival and procreation, and is at the center of personal being. He saw this force, identified as ‘libido’, based on sexual instinct, as the ultimate agent of human growth.

In Freud’s thinking, the libido therefore is a manifestation of the energy that nourishes the self, and he identified the object of the libido as sexual union. Therefore relationships that do not lead to sexual union interrupt the flow and replenishment of libido and lead to impoverishment of the self. As Freud saw the self as initially focused on itself, the “narcissism” at birth represents a state to which the self always seeks returning. “Nourishing the libido” therefore requires us to maintain our narcissism which is essential to our sense of self.

Freud believed that relationships required the person to “idealize” others; it was necessary for the lover to transfer to his beloved an ideal that he has difficulty achieving within himself. To Freud, we love that in the other person which we feel will compensate for our inadequacies, and thus we will recover the security of primal narcissism and by doing so maintain our libido. The dependence upon relationships, in Freud’s approach, was therefore risky. Failed relationships would undermine our libido and therefore diminish our self.

Further, Freud saw the force of libido as possessing an undercurrent of hate. He therefore saw love as the mixture of ‘eros’ with “man’s natural aggressive instinct (the’ death drive’)”, which is inseparable from it. In his words,

“Eros and destructiveness are intertwined within all erotic relationships. Love is not at the basis of everything unless you add hate to it”.

While Freud definitely saw love as energy, and one which effects the uniting of human persons, the resulting relationships were potentially harmful to the person because they are predicated on a personal core which is not to be trusted.

Love is dangerous, as he saw it, because we at our core selves are dangerous.

While Teilhard heard a voice from the bottomless abyss from which flowed his life: “It is I, be not afraid”, Freud would have heard a different voice: “It is ego, be very afraid”.

While Freud definitely understood the human kernel as energy, and one which effects the uniting of human persons, its complex love/hate constitution leads to relationships which could harm the person. Due to this underlying flaw in our basic core, he asserts, not only does love fail to solve human problems, but causes them as well.

So Freud, while pioneering the objective secular application of science to the study of the human person, nonetheless arrives at a position orthogonal to Teilhard’s proposition that the kernel at the core of the person is a trustworthy manifestation of the same agent of rising complexity afoot in the evolution of the universe.

The Next Post

Freud’s approach to psychiatry, like Luther’s earlier approach to Christianity, burst upon emerging Western society and immediately began to ramify into parallel but radically different expressions. As can be seen in today’s versions of psychotherapy, American positivism has muted much of Freud’s pessimism, materialism and misogyny. Many of these newer approaches to psychology focus equally on the relation between therapist and patient as well as the therapist’s skill in plumbing, analyzing and articulating the labyrinthine depths of the patient.

Next week we will examine such different approaches, and explore how they can be seen as a ‘secular’ version of meditation’.

August 13, 2020 – Connecting to God

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Opening the Door

Today’s Post

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

Teilhard’s Seven Steps of Meditation

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

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

We’ll start with the insight of Teilhard de Chardin, who closely followed Maurice Blondel in understanding God as the ‘ground of being’. Teilhard described his own experience of meditation in his book, “The Divine Milieu”. This description is independent (“divested of the baggage”) of most traditional religious assumptions, and demonstrates a framework for a ‘personal contact’ with God as we are exploring.

While overtones of Christian belief obviously color this description, we’ll accompany it with the secular basis of the steps that he describes.

Step 1: Recognizing the Facets of our Person

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

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

Step 2: Moving past the Safety of the Scaffolding

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

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

Step 3: Encountering the Font of Our Consciousness

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

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

Step 4: Facing The Intangibility of the Font

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 6: Recognizing our Entwinement in the Fabric of Existence

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

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

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

Step 7: Recognizing the Face of the Ground of Being

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

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

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

It is I, be not afraid.”

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

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

Secular Meditation

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

A universe without increasing complexity would not evolve.

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

The Next Post

This week we explored Teilhard’s approach to meditation as a skill through which we can make contact with our ‘core of being’, and through this with God, and identified his seven basic steps which emerge in our general search for the “Secular Side of God”.

Next week we will take a look at how psychology can be seen as a form of “secular meditation”.

July 30 – Is God a Person?

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Relating to the agency of personness

Today’s Post

Last week we addressed the phenomenon of ‘personization’ in evolution, recognizing Teilhard’s insight that evolution of the person is a natural manifestation of the increase in complexity that can be seen in, and indeed is necessary to the unfolding of evolution in the universe.

Last week we extended 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.”

with the missing piece by which the personal nature of these forces become clear:

“In the recognition of the comprehensive forces by which the universe unfolds, the one which causes evolutionary products 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.”

But we recognized that this definition does not answer the question, “how can we relate to this additional facet of the forces of evolution?”

Personization and God

Although we began our inquiry on God with a statement from Richard Dawkins three weeks ago, he doesn’t go too much further before he states the basis of his belief that while such a god as he proposes might be reconcilable to the unfolding insights of science, the God that we posit here cannot possibly be reconciled with traditional religion. He quotes Carl Sagan:

“If by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying…it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”

Of course, Sagan is right. Once we limit the laws governing evolution to those found in the Standard Model of Physics and Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection, both Sagan and Dawkins are spot on.

However neither of them acknowledge that limiting evolution to those influences found in Physics and Biology prohibits the very phenomenon of evolution. It is only through inclusion of the agent of increasing complexity that the forces identified by Physics and Biology begin to account for this observed phenomenon of evolution. As we have pointed out previously, a universe without complexification would not evolve.

However, Dawkins is correct in one respect: the definition we are considering and the six characteristics of our outline in the post of July 9, as stated, do not yet point to a God suitable for our personal relationship. It is indeed ‘emotionally unsatisfying’. To find this missing piece we must return to the characteristic of personness.

From the point of view that we have presented thus far, God is not understood as a person, but as the ground of person-ness. Just as the forces of gravity and biology in the theories of Physics and Biology address the principles of matter, energy and life, the additional force of ‘increasing complexity’ is required to address the essential energy which powers evolution to higher levels of complexity and thus leads to the appearance of the person.

Teilhard offers an insight on this issue

“I doubt that whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized (becomes human) in him.”

So, from Teilhard’s vantage point, the starting place for a personal approach to God, a ‘relationship’, is the recognition that this ‘axis of evolution’ which has contained the agent of ‘complexification’ for some 14 billion years is not only still active in the human, but is the same axis that accounts for our individual ‘personization’. Humans are not only products of evolution who have become ‘aware of their consciousness’, but specific products, persons, who are capable of not only recognizing but more importantly cooperating with this inner font of energy that can carry them into a more complete possession of themselves.

This unique human capability of being aware of the energy of the unfolding of the cosmos as it courses through our person, empowering our growth and assuring our potential for completeness, is neither earned nor deserved. It has the same ‘gratuitous’ nature as gravity and electromagnetism: it is woven into the fabric of our being. We can neither summon nor deny it. Our only appropriate response to it is to recognize it and explore the appropriate response to it.

Teilhard commented on both our cosmic connection and our cooperation with it:

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

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

So, For All This Is God A Person?

We have seen how Teilhard understands the concept of ‘person’ from both the concept of God as evident in the agency of complexity and the concept of the human person as an evolutionary product.

But to answer the question, “Is God a person?”, we return to Maurice Blondel. As part of his objective to reinterpret Western theology, he posits that:

“Every sentence about God can be translated into a declaration about human life.”

Resonating with Teilhard, Gregory Baum paraphrases Blondel:

“The statement that “God Exists” can therefore be reinterpreted to say that “Man is alive by a principle that transcends him, over which he has no power, which summons him to surpass himself and frees him to be creative. That God is person means that man’s relationship to the deepest dimension of his life is personal”. (Italics mine)

So, in answer to the question, Baum goes on to state:

“God is not a super-person, not even three super-persons; he is in no way a being, however supreme, of which man can aspire to have a spectator knowledge. That God is person reveals that man is related to the deepest dimension of his life in a personal and never-to-be reified way.”

That said, how can we go about discovering this universal presence in our finite and individual lives?

The Next Post

This week we have seen how our working definition of God, while totally consistent with that of Dawkins, is still open to the concept of God found in traditional Western theology, once it has been (as Dawkins suggests) “stripped of its baggage”. We have also seen how the element of ‘person’ is not compromised by our working definition once the potential for increasing complexity is understood as the process of personness.

But this does not answer the second part of our question: what’s involved in 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 how such a relationship can be achieved.

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.

May 14, 2020 – Religion as a Tool for Understanding the Noosphere

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a second look at Teilhard’s first step of managing the Noospheric Risks to human evolution by better understanding it. We saw how a deeper understanding of the structure of the Noosphere, the milieu of human enterprise, involves recognition of and cooperation with the universal agent that for fourteen billion years has invested itself in the continuing rise of complexity that has eventually given rise to humans.

As we have seen over the past several weeks, this rise is no longer solely based on biological and instinctual processes, it must now be consciously grasped and capitalized upon if it is to continue in the human species. The ‘noospheric risks’ which we have identified must be consciously overcome if human evolution is to continue.

A major step in understanding the noosphere so that those risks can be managed, as Teilhard suggests, is to ‘articulate’ it, to understand how it works to effect our continued evolution, both in ourselves as well in our societies.

One such tool is, properly understood, religion. This week we will take a first look at religion to understand how it can be seen as a tool to achieve such a goal.

Why Religion?

One of the foundational concepts of the great Western awakening known as “The Enlightenment” was the diminishment of religion’s role in society and government. One of the results of this diminishment was the rise of atheism, which placed many of the world’s ills (eg ‘Noospheric risks’) at the doorstep of organized religion. Both the leading Enlightenment thinkers, and the atheists which foll0wed them, valued objective, empirical thinking over the subjective and intuitive intellectual processes that had informed medieval Western thinkers. As we have discussed many times, the rise in ‘left brain’ thinking began to surpass that of the ‘right brain’ as a method of ‘articulating the noosphere’.

Given the many ills stemming from religious teachings that can be seen today in the Mideast governments, infused with radical and fundamentalist expressions of Islam, as well as Western religions weighted down by fundamentalism, dogmatism, and excessive hierarchical structures, It would seem that these post-Enlightenment perspectives are indeed superior to traditional religion in helping us make sense of what’s happening in the noosphere, and how to navigate our way through it.

Can there be a way that religion can be seen as a tool for helping us ‘articulate the noosphere’ or is it destined to end up in the dust bin of history: a perspective that has ‘seen its day’ but is no longer relevant in this new and technical milieu?

One way to look at this question is to see it as evidence of yet another, very fundamental ‘duality’. We have looked at the concept of ‘dualities’ from the perspective of evolution previously in this blog. Jonathan Sacks, like Teilhard, saw such dualities as a way of seeing things as opposites, such as ‘this world’ vs ‘the next’, or ‘natural’ vs ‘supernatural’. In Teilhard’s insight, most dualities simply reflect an inadequate understanding of such concepts, resulting in ‘cognitive dissonance’, and can be overcome with the application of an appropriate context.

From the traditional perspective, science and religion are often seen in terms of such a duality. Dualities often reflect a mode of seeing in which ‘right brained’ and ‘left brain’ perspectives, empiricism and intuition, are understood as ‘opposites’. To see them thusly is to overlook the fact that there is only a single brain, although it may have many modes of operation.

Teilhard’s method of resolving ‘dualities’ is simply to put them into a single context, as he does with ‘evolution’. In such a context, the ‘opposites’ now appear as ‘different points in a single integrated spectrum’. By this method, the underlying coherence that exists in the two ‘opposites’ can now be understood.

So, applying this insight to the question above can now reframe it: “How can the legitimate ‘right brained’ perspective offered by religion be seen to help us make sense of things, in the same way that the ‘left brained’ perspectives of the Enlightenment helped us to understand the cosmos.”

As we saw in our series on Norberg’s ‘Progress’, the human actions of innovation and invention, obviously the fruit of ‘left brain’ activity, nonetheless turn on the pivot points of personal freedom and human relationships, which are much more the domain of the ‘right brain’. So, on the surface, it would seem essential for these two modes of human thought to operate less like the commonly understood ‘opposites’ than as the two facets of the single thing that biology shows us that they are.

Earlier in this blog, I have suggested that one measure of increasing human evolution is the skill of using the neocortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of the lower (reptilian and limbic) brains. Just as important is the corollary of using the whole neocortex, both left and right lobes, intuition and empiricism, in making sense of things.

As the above example from Norberg shows, the skill of articulating the ‘right brained’ concepts of personal freedom and relationships, while essential to our continued evolution, is not something we can learn from science. Religion, as religion is commonly understood, is not up to the task either. Traditional Western religion has only slightly evolved from its medieval perspectives, and as such would seem to offer little to a partnership with science in the enterprise of ‘articulating the noosphere’. For religion to be relevant to the task of extending Teilhard’s approach of understanding difficult questions by putting them into an evolutionary context, it must itself evolve. A similar challenge to science also exists: for science to expand its reach to the human person, it must recognize the ‘spirit’.

Note that I am using this term ‘spirit’ in Teilhard’s context. ‘Spirit’ is simply the term we use to address the agency by which matter combines in evolution to effect products which are increasingly complex. As Teilhard puts it

“…spirit is neither super-imposed nor accessory to the cosmos, but that it quite simply represents the higher state assumed in and around us by the primal and indefinable thing that we call, for want of a better name, the ‘stuff of the universe’. Nothing more, and also nothing less. Spirit is neither a meta- nor an epi- phenomenon, it is the phenomenon.

Spirituality is not a recent accident, arbitrarily or fortuitously imposed on the edifice of the world around us; it is a deeply rooted phenomenon, the traces of which we can follow with certainty backwards as far as the eye can reach, in the wake of the movement that is drawing us forward.”

The Evolutionary Roots of Western Religion

Re-reading the Christian New Testament with Teilhard’s evolutionary context in mind offers a starting place for such evolution. There are many unprecedented concepts in the ‘New Testament’ that have been poorly carried forward in the evolution of Christian theology, such as:

Understanding the presence of God in all created things (Paul) ,and particularly in the human person (John), which is contrary to a God eventually taught as ‘external’ to both the universe at large and to the individual person as well.
Understanding that we are bound together by a force which fosters our personal growth and assures the viability of our society. (Paul)
Recognizing that this growth enhances our uniqueness while it deepens our relationships.
Recognizing that this uniqueness gives rise to the characteristic of human equality (Paul)), as opposed to the preeminence of hierarchy

So a first step toward maturing religion would be a return to its evolutionary roots, many of which have sprouted anew in secular organizations, as so brilliantly seen in Thomas Jefferson’s reinterpretation of these evolutionary roots in purely secular terms. We must be able to rethink religion.

Rethinking Religion

As we have seen, one of Teilhard’s key insights was that to be able to manage our journey through the noosphere, we must first understand it. The entire history of religion shows it to be our first attempt to do so. Born in an era which depended on intuitive insights and instinctive reactions, the early religions were simply extensions of the clan lore which formed the base for the societal structures that came into being. They all reflected the need to stabilize the ever-increasing size, density, and diversity of human society. All of the early myths and stories reflected the common understanding that the world had always existed, and that it had existed in manifestations that had only superficially changed over the years.

As we have seen elsewhere in this blog, these early noospheric insights held sway for thousands of years until the “Axial Age”, some 700 years BCE. These new perspectives, with their tendrils of early Greek thinking, did not begin to compete with the traditional mode of thinking until the eleventh centrur, when more empirical and objective perspectives began to appear in the West.

When this happened, the highly metaphorical insights into the composition of the noosphere began to change into an increasingly empirical and therefore secular understanding of first the noosphere itself and then the universe which surrounds it At the same time, the universe began to be seen less as static and more as dynamic.

The clash between the neo-think offered by the nascent scientific evidence and the prevalent static and intuitive beliefs which still reflected medieval scholasticism is well documented, and to some extent still goes on today. These beliefs offer profoundly opposed insights into the composition of the noosphere, and reflect the significant dualism that underpins modern attempts to understand it. So it comes as no surprise that today we find it difficult to unravel these two threads to find a way to re-spin them into a single strand.

In such a single strand, the concept of morality moves beyond the dualistic religious basis for a secure society and a roadmap to successful entry into the next life, and into a set of guidelines which ‘articulate the noosphere’ in such a way that we insure our continued evolution into states of greater complexity.

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at religion as a tool for helping us understand the structure of the noosphere as a step to managing its risks. Next week we’ll continue this theme, taking a look at how religion has traditionally ‘articulated the noosphere’, and how Teilhard sees a shift needed in the religious concept of ‘morality’ to be able to provide ‘seeds’ for a more evolved, and hence increasingly fruitful, articulation.

March 12, 2020 – Norberg and Teilhard: The Case for Optimism; The Danger of Pessimism

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Today’s Post

Last week, we did a brief overview of the fourth of Johan Norberg’s nine metrics, ‘Poverty’, in which he quantifies the increasing evolutionary progress of the human species. We also saw, once again, how the actual, measured data that he painstakingly accumulates resonates so clearly with the vision of the future that Teilhard de Chardin presents in his final book, “Man’s Place in Nature”.

We also saw how, as in Teilhard, the clear-eyed optimism that the data provides is not reflected in the ‘conventional wisdom’ prevalent in the West today.

This week, we take a last look at Norberg’s data which substantiates Teilhard’s audacious optimism but seems to b3e so poorly reflected in today’s society.

Taking Poverty As An Example…

Norberg’s four examples highlight the single, inescapable fact that while ‘conventional wisdom’ suggests that we are ‘going to the dogs’, the data of human evolution shows advancement on nearly every front. We have not only seen the exponential improvement in critical facets of human welfare as painted with significant detail on Norbergs’s nine ‘fronts’ of progress, we have also seen the ongoing failure of forecasts which use past data to predict a future filled with doom.

In the characteristic of human evolution that we examined last week, “Poverty”, for example, we come across a recent such forecast, made by the Chief Economist of the World Bank in 1997. He asserted that

“Divergence in living standards is the dominant feature of modern economic history. Periods when poor countries rapidly approach the rich were historically rare.”

He is saying that the wealth gap between nations is not only a ‘fact of life’, but that it can be expected to grow, and that the resulting gap will increase poverty in poorer countries.

Norberg notes the fallacy of this forecast:

“But since then, that (the gap) is exactly what has happened. Between 2000 and 2011, ninety percent of developing countries have grown faster than the US, and they have done it on average by three percent annually. In just a decade, per capita income in the world’s low and middle income countries has doubled.”

He goes on to note the significance of the day of March 28, 2012:

“It was the first day in modern history that developing countries were responsible for more than half of the global GDP. Up from thirty-eight percent ten years earlier.”

And the reason?

“If people have freedom and access to knowledge, technology and capital, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be able to produce as much as people anywhere else. A country with a fifth of the world’s population should produce a fifth of its wealth. That has not been the case for centuries, because many parts of the world were held back by oppression, colonialism, socialism and protectionism.”

And what’s changing?

“But these have now diminished, and a revolution in transport and communication technology makes it easier to take advantage of a global division of labour, and use technologies and knowledge that it took other countries generations and vast sums of money to develop.”

As Norberg sums it up:

“This has resulted in the greatest poverty reduction the world has ever seen.”

…What can we see?

Teilhard has been accused of having a Western bias in his treatment of human evolution, even to the extent of being accused of racism, because he has simply recognized that

“…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.”

With Norberg’s extensive documentation of just how quickly the world is now “formulating the hopes and problems of the modern world” in Western terms, we can see how this is less a statement that the West is ‘superior’ to the East, than a testament to what happens when a seed falls upon a ground prepared to take it. In human evolution, ideas have to start somewhere; they don’t pop up simultaneously everywhere. The nature of the ‘noosphere’, as Teilhard sees it and Norberg reports it, is that ideas propagate naturally when allowed. The fact that these Western tactics and strategies have taken hold and prospered quicker in the East than they developed in the West is evidence that human potential is equal everywhere.

But the caveat must be stressed: “when allowed”. As we have seen in Norberg’s examples, in those parts of the world, such as North Korea, where individuals are “not allowed”, progress has been slow, even negative in some cases. For example, the anatomic stature of North Koreans has diminished in the past sixty years, compared to South Koreans, in which it has grown to nearly par with the West in the same time frame. To a lesser extent, this phenomena can be seen in the resultant loss of human stature of East Germany following the Wall.

…And Why Can’t We See it?

Norberg notes in several places, and concludes his book with, the observation that this optimistic history of recent trends in human evolution goes significantly against the grain of ‘conventional wisdom’.

He cites a survey by the Gapminder Foundation which illustrates this:

“In the United States, only five percent answered correctly that world poverty had been almost halved in the last twenty years. Sixty-six percent thought it had almost doubled. Since they could also answer that poverty had remained the same, a random guess would have yielded a third correct answers, so the responders performed significantly worse than a chimpanzee.”

What can be the cause of such pessimistic opinions, now clearly seen to be contrary to objective data? More significantly, how can such pessimism impede, or can even derail, the future of human evolution?

The Next Post

This week we unpacked Norberg’s data package of statistics on ‘Poverty’ to review the characteristics of human evolution that he saw underpinning the rapid progress, ‘knees in the curve’, that have been seen to occur in the past two of the estimated eight thousand human generations.

But we also noticed that such an optimistic perception of the human capacity for continued evolution is not shared by a large majority of those in the West that have benefited from it the most. Why should this be true? More to the point, how can such prevalent pessimism undermine the continuation of human evolution?

Next week we will take a look at this phenomena and its roots in today’s Western culture.

Science, Religion and Reality

Uncovering the confluence between science and religion

Tag Archives: Reinterpretation of Religion

October 1, 2020 Where Do Science and Religion Fall Short?

September 17, 2020 – The Search for The Core of self

September 3, 2020 – Psychology as Secular Meditation- Part 3

August 20, 2020 –Psychology as ‘Secular Meditation’- Part 1

August 13, 2020 – Connecting to God

July 30 – Is God a Person?

June 18, 2020 – How Can We Rethink Religion?

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

May 14, 2020 – Religion as a Tool for Understanding the Noosphere

March 12, 2020 – Norberg and Teilhard: The Case for Optimism; The Danger of Pessimism