Tag Archives: Reinterpretation of Religion

December 19, 2019 – The Secular Side of Jesus

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This Week

Last week we took a look at how the basic Western understanding of the value of the human person has developed into a hermeneutic for a secular approach to a ‘science of the person’. We saw how many seeking to apply the methods of science to the improvement of human lives have adopted many of the core values of Christianity without being shackled by its belief in the ‘supernatural’.

This week we will begin to apply our ‘principles of reinterpretation’ from November 14, 2019, to some of the subjects of religion In our search for “The Secular Side of God’. The first such subject will be the ‘person of Jesus’. From our secular perspective, who or what was Jesus?

This week’s post summarizes the posts from May 11 to July 20, 2017.

Starting with the ‘New Testament’

The obvious starting place for such inquiry is the so-called “New Testament” consisting of the four gospels and other commentaries, the most influential of which is Paul.   Nearly all, if not all, Western religions base their teachings in some way on these documents, with the ‘liturgical’ religions making use of teachings which have evolved from these documents

The actual dates of the life of Jesus are not certain, and the first person to write about him seems to be Paul, some years after Jesus’ death. All the other authors of the ‘New Testament’ seem to have come later, so it seems that no one who wrote of Jesus actually knew him but depended on stories which were prevalent in the many new churches which sprung up after his death.

The ‘basic’ set of scriptures seems to be the three ‘synoptic’ gospels, effectively ‘stories of Jesus’, written some years after Paul, which depict Jesus as a Jewish man whose teachings offered politically dangerous interpretations of the law of Moses (The Torah), and suffered the consequence of death, after which he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. Bart Ehrman, biblical scholar, notes that the ‘miraculous’ content of these scriptures (virgin birth, resurrection, etc) are not uncommon to other such stories which appear during this time, and were probably understood by early Christians as competition.

These teachings, as found in the Synoptic Gospels, can be seen, unsurprisingly, to reflect the legacy of the Torah, and hence carried with them the same ‘dualities’ of the ‘Old’ Testament, such as

    • How is a good God compatible with evil in the world?
    • Was God a ‘loving father’ or a ‘vengeful judge’?
    • Was scripture a ‘law of God’ to be followed literally or a testament to be refined by Jesus’ teachings?

The New Testament introduced some new dualities, such as

    • Was Jesus human or in some way divine?
    • Did God kill him to avenge Adam’s ‘original sin’?

These dualities can be seen to be playing out even to this day.

The three Synoptic gospels are followed in the New Testament by a fourth, that of John, who introduces an entirely new perspective. In John, the ‘divinity’ of Jesus is emphasized, and his relationship with God is depicted as more intimate. From this perspective, John sees Jesus as a manifestation of an undercurrent of divine life in all persons, going so far as to say

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

   In this concept of “the Word made flesh”, John locates Jesus as an aspect of the same ontology in which creation itself was effected, representing the ‘blueprint’ for creation in the same way that God can be seen in the ‘act’ of creation. While Paul first understood ‘the Christ’ as Jesus’ reward for his sacrifice, John more fully understands ‘the Christ’ as an essential thread of creation, become human in the person of Jesus.

So in just a handful of years, a single lifetime, we see the Christian understanding of Jesus evolving from a teacher whose morality seemed grounded in preparation for ‘the coming’, to one who offers a sacrifice to an angry, judgmental God who has withheld his love to humans due to an ancient sin, to one rewarded (“exalted”) with divinity for his sacrifice, to one whose ‘divinity’, whose ‘oneness with God’ was a necessary thread in the creation of the universe.   At the same time, we see an evolution of the understanding of God as well, from a God whose primary characteristic was ‘judgment’ to one whose very nature was ‘love’.; and from being located ‘out there’, over against us, to a presence so intimate in us that our very nature is entwined in it.

John clearly leads to a concept of God in which we and ‘he’ are intimate, how Jesus illustrates this intimacy in a way that we can imitate, and in the act of imitation we become more aware of ‘him’. With all this, however, it’s not difficult to see how successive theological development in the West has led to the idea of a distant God requiring ‘intermediaries’ to achieve contact (Jesus, Mary, Saints). The emergence of the theory of ‘substitutionary atonement’ in the 12th century, for example, saw Jesus as a mere afterthought when God’s first plan did not work out. The ‘cognitive dissonance’ between this theory and John’s assertion of “God in us” persists in many Christian expressions to this day.

Jesus and Evolution

So how does all this play out in our secular approach to God? As we have established, our approach to making sense of things is to place them in an evolutionary context, following the approach of Teilhard de Chardin. Where does Jesus, and ‘the Christ’ fit into this?

To Teilhard, this begins with the identification of ‘complexification’ as the essential metric of evolution. Once we understand this, the rest simply requires recognition of how this increased complexity manifests itself in every evolutionary step. To Teilhard, this can be seen in the increase in consciousness which results from such increase in complexity, a metric that can be seen in all steps of evolution from the big bang to the human person. He posits an ‘axis of evolution’, a tree the sap of which is increased complexity and the fruit of which is increased consciousness.

From this perspective, complexity, and its corollary, consciousness, grows until it manifests itself in the human person as ‘consciousness become aware of itself’. This capacity is unique to the human, and distinguishes ‘the person’ from its evolutionary precedents.

Jesus, to Teilhard, is the first person to seem to have been aware of this uniqueness, as shown in his understanding of ‘love’ as the underlying energy of this agency, the importance of the person, and the potential for intimacy with the sap of the tree from which we came. Paul’s first step to understanding Jesus as ‘the Christ’, followed by John’s step of understanding ‘the Christ’ as that aspect of this sap which produces the fruit of the human person, is evidence of both the significance of Jesus’ teaching to an understanding of evolution and its agency in continuing the rise of evolution toward ever more complex manifestations.

Thomas Jefferson, in surely what was one of the most momentous ‘reinterpretations’ of traditional Christianity, (presaging Richard Dawkins’ ‘divesting traditional religious beliefs’ of their ‘baggage’) boils down the teachings of Jesus to the core assertion that ‘we are all equal’, hence human persons

“may be trusted to govern themselves without a master”

And thus forming the cornerstone for what has evolved into a highly successful society.

The Next Post

This week we began begin to apply our ‘principles of reinterpretation’ to the ‘person of Jesus’, seeing how John’s insight of “The Word made flesh” identifies the person of Jesus as the earliest manifestation of a cosmic upwelling of what was to become ‘the person’.

Next week we will continue our summary of the blog into addressing ‘The Trinity’.

December 5 Secular Meditation: Finding Ourselves, Finding God, Without Religion

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This Week

Last week we made a first cut at seeing how meditation can be understood as a secular approach to finding ‘the ground of being’ in its manifestation as ‘the ground of us’. Following Blondel’s assertion that “Every statement about God is effectively a statement about man”, we can see that every step toward God is therefore a step towards ourselves

This week we will move on to summarizing the blog, “The Secular Side of God” in looking more closely at Teilhard’s secular approach to ‘meditation’.

The Secular Side of Meditation

We noted last week that the very idea of ‘meditation’ conjures much negative association with the more empirical among us- seen as a decidedly right-brained excess of emotion requiring disdain for ‘life as lived’, disconnection from social life and ultimately self-centered. Teilhard’s example from last week, however, shows how the act of meditation can be understood as a clearer look at ourselves, or as he puts it, a “clearer disclosure of God in the world”.

Teilhard’s example can be expanded into a straightforward, secular roadmap for this process:

Step 1: Recognizing the facets of our person

“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 explores 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 constructed as a protective skin to ward off the dangers of life?

Step 2: Accepting where we are

”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.”

What happens when we begin to recognize these facades and scaffoldings, recognizing which ones move us forward, and which hold us back, and try to imagine the consequence of divesting ourselves of them? How can we ultimately trust that which 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: Acknowledging our powerlessness

“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”.

This is a difficult step for most of us. Whatever skills we have learned, tactics that we have developed and beliefs that we have forged, we have no control over the basic person we are or the energy of cosmic becoming that incessantly flows into us.

Step 4: Accepting powerlessness

“My self is given to me far more than it is formed by me.” “In the last resort, the profound life, the fontal life, the new-born life, escapes our life entirely.”

 This step is even more difficult. Beneath the trepidation of the many actions required of us in our daily lives is the fear of their consequences. Will we be able to successfully deal with the consequences of our decisions without the armors of ego, self-centeredness and emotional distance? Are we even able to predict the consequences of our actions, much less survive dealing with them? Ultimately, in spite of our professions, families and friends are we not alone?

Step 5: Trusting the ground of being

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

Secular Meditation

There is nothing religious about the first four steps. The assumptions about the nature of the universe that science and biology assert, once the phenomenon of increasing complexity is added, are all that is necessary to state them. The essential Teilhard insight is that the addition of this phenomenon, while not a specific scientific theory, is not only necessary for inclusion of the human person in the scope of scientific enquiry, it is also necessary for the process of evolution itself. A universe without increasing complexity would not evolve.

Thus this line of thought, that a search for the ground of being of the universe entails an understanding of the ground of our being, while finding a stronger (if somewhat unfocussed) voice in religion, is not mute in the empirical processes of science.

An example of this voice can be seen in the similarity between these five steps and the very successful but deliberately secular “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 secular thinking. Psychology itself, as we will address next week, can therefore be seen as ‘secular meditation’.

The Next Post

This week we expanded Teilhard’s approach to meditation into discrete steps by which we can make contact with our ‘core of being’, and through this with the ‘ground of being’, as moving toward a general search for the “Secular Side of God”.

In this general approach of looking at this search from the secular point of view, next week we will take a look at how psychology can be seen as a form of “secular meditation”.

November 7 What Part Does Religion Play In Human Evolution?

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Today’s Post

Last week we began an overview of the eleven posts on the evolution of religion in which Jonathan Sacks’ understanding of how the evolution of human thinking can be seen in the evolution of religion from its earliest beginnings to the emergence of Christianity.

Having begun this look into religion’s role in human evolution, this week we look at some examples of how this role may be seen.

Our treatment of this subject can be seen in the seven posts from 14 January (Making
Sense of Things) to 14 April, 2016 (Stability).

Human Evolution: Moving Ahead

Last week we closed with an observation from Richard Rohr that offered a succinct summarization of human evolution:

“It was necessary for us to move beyond our early motivations of personal security, reproduction and survival (the fear-based preoccupations of the ‘reptilian brain’) … to proceed beyond the lower stages of human development.”

While this does not obviate other insights into our continued evolution, it does encapsulate the key skill that evolution requires us to learn: to use our neocortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of our ‘lower’ brains; stimuli which served our prehumen ancestors so well. This points to six such ‘skills’, the development of which religion has always fostered.

This does not suggest that the whole of religion bears directly on such skills. The many beliefs and practices of historical religion, in their contradictions, supernatural and dualistic modes can and do indeed work against such skills. As we shall see when we address religion’s relationship to science, religion requires ‘grounding’ to insure its relevance. By the same token, denying religion’s value to human evolution, as the materialists would have it, overlooks the existence of the values themselves.

Religion’s role in human history is notoriously complex, and decluttering history to find the threads of religion that contribute empirically to it is difficult. I think six activities first attributed to religion show the value:

Making Sense

Ian Barbour (“Science and Religion”) offers this definition of religion:

“A set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.”

   As can be seen in this definition, all expressions of religion result from some reflection upon reality and result in beliefs and practices which are felt to insure a beneficial relation to it. At their core, all religions are an attempt to understand reality, how we fit into it and how best to effect this fit.

All expressions of belief, however, having evolved over such great spans of time and including the intuitions of so many thinkers, have accumulated diverse and often bewildering explanations and claims to truth.  The evolution of religion as the human attempt to make sense of his surroundings has gone on for such a long time that every possible belief (attempt to make sense) has evolved along with it.

With all this, however, many valid insights can be seen to have found their way into human expression.

Understanding

Such insights began to surface, As Karen Armstrong sees it, by the time of the ‘Axial Age’ (800 BCE):

“The fact that they (thinkers of the Axial Age) all came up with such profoundly similar solutions by so many different routes suggests that they had indeed discovered something important about the way human beings worked. …they all concluded that if people made a disciplined effort to reeducate themselves, they would experience an enhancement of their humanity. ”

   During this period, the need to make sense and organize society was giving way to the need to ‘become more complete”.

Transcendence

Armstrong goes on to see another insight that arose during this period, which was to play a huge role in the evolution of human thinking:

“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.”

   While this insight evidently first rose in the East, it was quick to find roots in the major Western religion of Christianity. It was not only important for the role it was to play in Western society, but in the general belief in a future into which we are ‘invited’. As Maurice Blondel put it:

“Tomorrow can be better than today. The future is inveighed with potential, and we have the potential to fit into it like a child into a family.”

   In this aspect of religion, we are invited to think past the present, and past the obvious, to see not just the workings of the ‘immortal spark’ in us as persons, but in addition, in the lives of all that we relate to.

Acting

We saw last week how Richard Rohr sees the essential act of human evolution:

“It was necessary for us to move beyond our early motivations of personal security, reproduction and survival (the fear-based preoccupations of the ‘reptilian brain’) … to proceed beyond the lower stages of human development.”

Such ‘movement’, while being essential to ‘becoming’ requires an intense struggle against egoism and an overcoming of instinctual fears.   A ‘transcendence’ is required that sees the future as open, rather than closed, and ourselves as ‘gifted’ with potential as opposed to ‘cursed’ with impotency. To be able to ‘act’ is to understand ourselves just as capable of action as reality is capable of receiving it.

Transcendence is most often understood as a ‘religious’ experience, but at its base it is just recognizing the potential for a better way to see things. For ages, those able to ‘look beyond’ the obvious to the presence of a truth only partially seen, such as Newton looking beyond the apple to the unseen force of gravity, or Einstein grasping that at its roots, matter was just a unique way that energy manifests itself.

One aspect of religion is whatever we believe about reality that gives us the confidence to act, even when, especially when, we’re stepping into the unknown.

Belonging

As we have often addressed in this blog, one of the perennial ailments of the human psyche is the sense of being disconnected, alienated. As Carl Rogers and many other others have observed, Western religion is not clear on the nature of the human person which effects our ‘connections’ to each other. Richard Rohr summarizes the situation:

““…Augustine’s “original sin,” Calvin’s “total depravity,” or Luther’s “humans are like piles of manure, covered over by Christ.”

   Carl Rogers shows how Freud ‘piles on’ to these traditional mindsets with his opinion that

“the id, man’s basic and unconscious nature, is primarily made up of instincts which would, if permitted expression, result in incest, murder and other crimes.”

   Against this undeniable thread of Wester misanthropy, Maurice Blondel returns us to the basic gospel message, clearly articulated by John:

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

   Blondel reinterpreted John when he said

“To say that God is father is to acknowledge that the relationship between us and the ground of being is that of child to parent.  The ground of being is on our side.  We belong to the universe as a child belongs to a family”

   Thus one aspect of religion is to go past that of a bond among believers, as do all religions, to the level of basing our actions on the belief that we ‘belong’.

Stability

The contemporary biblical (and agnostic) author, Bart Ehrman sees yet another characteristic of religion: that of helping to ‘shore up’ the ever more complex edifice of society. In his book, “From Jesus to Christ”, he tracks both the doctrinal development of the new Christian religion and how it contributed to our first truly diverse civilization: that of the Roman Empire. While he acknowledges the role that the emperor Constantine played in adjudicating the first great Christian schism, Ehrman also notes Constantine’s quite secular motive for avoiding a split in this new religion . He points out that Christianity offered two major benefits as a state religion: –

– it was capable of reinterpreting and appropriating facets of the many aspects of popular ‘pagan’ religions

    • Paul’s assertion that “Jesus came for all” insured the spread of the Roman empire into Gaul and Spain.

On a more contemporary note, Jefferson, many years later, was to factor Jesus’s teaching on human equality into his revolutionary concept of a government based on human freedom.

The Next Post

This week we continued an overview of the eleven posts on the evolution of religion, looking at six discrete ways that religion, in spite of its many shortcomings, can be seen to aid in the continuation of evolution of the human species.

Having seen this, next week we will move on to interpreting religion itself. We have noted in many places in this blog how religion includes threads of expression which lend themselves to Armstrong’s “enhancement of (our) humanity”, but how can they be found?

October 10 An Overview of the Blog “The Secular Side of God”

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Today’s Post

For the past five years I have been publishing this blog, “The Secular Side of God”. I embarked on this undertaking as an exploration of a non-religious approach to the ‘ground of being’ (AKA God) and hence human life. This approach appealed to me as a ‘cradle Catholic’ as I found myself finally giving myself the freedom to explore the many aspects of Catholicism which I had greeted with skepticism even as a child.

This, of course, didn’t happen overnight. My education as a physicist and my lifelong experience as an aerospace engineer only deepened the sense that, as stated, many of the teachings of Catholicism became harder to accept.

By the same token, however, many didn’t. I was fortunate to have insightful spiritual mentors who pointed out many expressions of Catholicism which articulated its many beliefs differently than those to which I had been exposed. The most influential of these were those of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French priest and paleontologist who sought to reinterpret the classical foundations of Christianity in terms of the recent and revolutionary scientific awareness of the depth, span, richness and age of the universe.
To him, such awareness could be applied to traditional Christian teachings not only to show how they fundamentally resonate with scientific insight, but as ‘principles of reinterpretation’ that would restore the urgency, immediacy and intimacy of the original gospels.  By such reinterpretation, he felt that a more relevant Christianity could be brought to contemporary life as an antidote to the apathy and anxiety which often accompany us on our ‘road to the future’.

For the next few weeks I would like to recap this long string of posts which mark my own search for such antidotes.

Overviewing the Blog

By way of an overview, I’d like to summarize the key points from the twenty-two part blog.These are, in order of their appearance:

Understanding Evolution This first segment presented the concept of universal evolution as seen from Teilhard’s unique and revolutionary view of evolution, which extends the biological concept of ‘Natural Selection’ to evolution in the eras before life and after the appearance of the human species. Not only is this groundbreaking perspective inclusive of the entire universe, from its history from the ‘big bang’ to the present day, it opens the door to a ‘worldview’ in which the insights of science and religion can be seen as collaborative rather than conflicting.

Biological Evolution  This section applies Teilhard’s expanded view of evolution to integrating Darwin’s ‘Natural Selection’ into the context of ‘universal evolution’. This expanded view also opens the door to placing the human person into the scope of science at the same time that it opens the restricted religious concept of the human person to the insights of science.

Human Evolution   Being able to understand the human person in the context of both universal evolution and an expanded understanding of biological evolution permits human evolution to be understood in terms of what is new with the human: “conscious become aware of itself”.

Universal Evolution With these new insights into how the process of evolution proceeds through its pre-life, life, and human life phases, we returned to another look at the ‘structure of the universe’ and how the understanding of science is expanded by recognizing the process of ‘complexification’

The Evolution of Religion  Since religion is part of reality, it is therefore a product of evolution. Applying the insights of Teilhard and Jonathan Sacks, former chief Rabbi of London, we looked at religion as an evolving ‘universal story’.

Understanding Religion From the Perspective of Evolution We continued our look at religion from the insights of Teilhard to understand how its concepts have unfolded and the part it has played in Western History.

Reinterpreting Religion From Teilhard’s insights we looked at how the traditional teachings of Western Christianity can be ‘reinterpreted’, and how such reinterpretation offers new meaning, relevancy and immediacy to them.

Relating to the ‘Ground of Being’    Having applied Teilhard’s ‘principles of reinterpretation’ to religion we looked at how the resulting concept of ‘God’ is echoed in secular science as well as how our relationship to ‘Him’ can be better understood.

Who or What is God?  With Teilhard’s understanding of God, how it possible to comprehend ‘Him”?

Who or What was Jesus?  How does Teilhard’s ‘reinterpreted’ understanding of God, map into the central Christian person of Jesus? How is Jesus different from ‘the Christ?’

Who or What is Spirituality? Considering Teilhard’s unique grasp of evolution at a universal level, his understanding of how we fit into it, and more importantly, how his ‘Axis of Evolution’ is present in each of us, how does this play out in the concept of ‘spirituality’?

Reinterpreting Christian Teachings   Having offered a ‘reinterpretation’ of the fundamentals of Western religion in the light of Teilhard’s ‘universal evolution’, how can its traditional teachings be understood in a way not tied to traditional religious statements? This segment looks at Sacraments, Morals and Virtues in this light.

Understanding Evolution in the Human Species With Teilhard’s revolutionary understanding of evolution and how religion has attempted to map the terrain of human existence, this section takes a second look at how evolution can be seen to proceed in the human species today, offering several distinct and empirical examples.

Understanding and Managing the Risks of Human Evolution With the clearer understanding of universal evolution and our part in it, this section looks at the ‘downside’: If our evolution, in contrast to the evolution of our nonhuman predecessors, is now dependent on our choices, what are the risks and how can we manage them?

Science and Religion  Long seen as mutually hostile, this section takes a first look at their need for each other as well as the possibility of a productive synergy.

The Cosmic Spark   With Teilhard’s clearer understanding of cosmic evolution and the action of the ‘ground of being’, this section offers a second look at how Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’ is present in all products of evolution, and how understanding its presence in the human person can lead to fuller being.

Pessimism In a second look at what can hold us back from such ‘fuller being’, this section takes a look at how the negativity of pessimism can impede both our personal evolution as well as the evolution of society.

Universal Evolution This second look at Teilhard’s universal concept of evolution shows how his clearer understanding of our place in the universe offers the possibility of not only understanding science and religion as compatible, but discovering the ‘terrain of synergy’ which results when we begin to see ourselves and our universe more holistically.

Happiness With all of the positive aspects of human evolution outlined by Teilhard, human evolution, departing so drastically from the dynamic enjoyed by our evolutionary predecessors, comes with difficulty. This section looks at the idea of human happiness from several perspectives and outlines how science and religion, working from the ‘terrain of synergy’ can offer a path to happiness.

The Next Post

This week we began finalizing the blog, “The Secular Side of God” with an outline of the twenty-two part series in which we looked at universal evolution, and humanity’s part in it, through the eyes of Teilhard de Chardin.

Next week we will begin a summary of each of these topics, beginning with “Understanding Evolution”

October 3 Summing Up Human Happiness

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Today’s Post

For the past nine weeks we have been exploring the phenomenon of ‘human happiness’ from reaction to the ‘pain of convergence’ caused by the facets of our evolution to outlining the eight facets of happiness that occur when we manage to open our lives to it.

This week I’d like to sum up these nine posts.

Why Pain?

We concluded exploration of the preceding subject, the ‘Terrain of Synergy’ by identifying the recognition of such terrain as a step to ‘reconnecting our individual parts to the whole’. Richard Rohr frequently mentions this as a very basic goal of religion, ‘re-ligio’.

The problem arises, however, when such a connection becomes difficult, seemingly impossible, and we are caught up in what is often referred to as ‘existential angst’, pain which is unfocussed and leaves us feeling alienated and lonely. In such a state, ‘better’ is always the enemy of ‘good enough’, “yesterday was the best day of the rest of our life”, and the ability to feel satisfied is denied us.

In addition, we are caught up in the inevitable side effect of human evolution: convergence. With the crowding that we see increasing every day, on our streets, in our schools, in our neighborhoods our personal space increasingly dwindles.   The need for re-connection is countered with the need for isolation.

As Yuri Harari points out, these articulations of our existential angst can be traced to our breaking of the ‘evolutionary covenant’ that ancestors enjoyed in their millions of years on this planet: the evolution of their species proceeded at the same pace as the evolution of their environment. Yuval notes that, distinct from our pre-human ancestors, we have evolved much faster than our skills of accommodation with the environment could develop.

With humans, in contrast to ancestors, our evolution proceeded much faster than that of our environment. To make matters worse, we exacerbated this disconnect by degrading the environment itself.
According to Harari, this has robbed us of the evolutionary balance that our ancestors enjoyed with their environment, and thus opening us up to a future of continued disconnect with not only our environment but to ourselves as well. This ‘evolutionary singularity’, as he sees it, prevents us from experiencing true happiness.

Toward Happiness

We went on to consider this dystopian conclusion in the light of three perspectives on happiness that show a different outcome to our evolution:

  • Happiness from the material perspective

There is much in contemporary society, news, religious lore and scientific theory which address the human experience of ‘happiness’, but as we noted on August 8, very little of it is consistent, and much contradictory. Other than that it is highly subjective, and subject to physiological stimulation, one does not come away with a comprehensive understanding of what it is and how to come by it.

We noted that if Teilhard’s perspective on evolution is applied, and the ‘rise of complexity’ from the big bang to the present is still active, then some optimism in the future can be merited. Therefore, such an insight into the process of evolution is a facet of ‘being happy’. Just ‘belief in the future’ alone contributes to our happiness.  As Patricia Albere, author of “Evolutionary Relationship”, puts it, this long history of rising complexity suggests that we have only to allow ourselves to be “lifted by the evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”. To do this, “we only have to begin to pay attention”.

We noted that Teilhard’s use of this term differs considerably from that of traditional religion, and spent more time on this particular perspective than the other two. Key to this perspective is the ‘terrain of synergy’ in which the insights of science and religion overlap. As we have seen many times in this blog, science and religion have much to offer each other, and the subject of happiness is no exception.

We also noted the insights from John Haught which clearly delineates this terrain from that of traditional religion and science. Such delineation also opens the subject of happiness to understanding it from the perspective of Western religion. This insight provides further articulation to how Albere’s suggestion of ‘paying attention’ can take place.

We ended this segment by proceeding with the process of ‘reinterpretation’ of traditional Christian tenets, first addressed back in May, 2016. Once again, we saw how Teilhard’s ‘principle of evolutionary context’ makes it possible to understand anew how our religious lore can become more relevant to our lives, and hence our continued evolution.

We first looked at how Teilhard’s three ‘vectors’ of universal evolution: ‘forward’, ‘inward’ and ‘upward’, manifested in every step of evolution from the big bang to human persons, can be seen as active in human persons in reinterpreting Paul’s essential actions of ‘faith’, ‘hope’ and ‘love’.

Finally, we continued reinterpreting Paul with his ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ into articulations of eight facets of human life which underlie the dimension of human happiness. While the subject of human happiness might well be a ‘slippery subject’, the nine facets of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control certainly offer a scaffolding for a relationship to life that brings us ‘happiness.

In this search for Harari’s ‘accommodation to evolution’, we have generally taken two approaches to Patricia Albere’s suggestion to ‘pay attention’ so that we can learn to trust evolution, one from Maurice Blondel and the other from John Haught.

From Blondel,

“In the light of evolution, religious tenets can be reinterpreted in terms of human life.”

Then Haught,

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

Therefore we have seen, using Teilhard’s evolutionary hermeneutic, how happiness is not only possible in our species, to a large extent it is both necessary for our continued evolution and the payoff for the finding of our place in it. .

The Next Post

This week we wrapped up our look at the experience of human happiness, tracing it from “The Terrain of Synergy’ to a practical way to relook at our religious lore and reinterpret it in the light of Teilhard’s hermeneutic of cosmic becoming.

Next week we will do another ‘wrapup’, this time of the overall blog, “The Secular Side of God’ over its five year run.

September 19, 2019 – Can Religion Offer a Secular Basis for the Ground of Happiness?

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Today’s Post

Last week we returned to the idea of a ‘Terrain of Synergy’ in our continuing search for the ground of happiness. We looked this time from the perspective of John Haught, who compares and contrasts the legacy religious and scientific ‘Cosmic Stories’, but opens the door for an overlap. In his perspective, what is warranted as we participate in the flow of human evolution, is a spirit of ‘anticipation’: less a hand-wringing, indignant demand for faster progress than a realization of the progress that is being made and a recognition that such progress is in fact underway in our lives as well as our societies.

This week we will begin a search for nuggets of such overlap in our traditional Western religious lore, referred to by Haught as ‘analogy’, to sift its ore for the jewels of insight that it offers.

The Three Virtues Model

In the series of posts ((March, 2018) in which we looked at reinterpreting the concepts of Western theology, we addressed the idea of the ‘Theological Virtues’. Although they were first presented as such by Paul, in Teilhard’s spiral model they can be seen to offer much more relevance.

Just as we addressed the unique quality of the energy of human evolution as ‘spirituality’ in the context of secular phenomenon, we saw these three familiar ‘virtues’ as three ‘stances’ or ‘attitudes’ that we can take as we go about trying to live our lives in cooperation with Teilhard’s “winds of the Earth.”  And in the same way that Teilhard’s model of the convergent spiral can be applied to better understand universal evolution, the so called ‘theological’ virtues can be seen as fitting into this model as a secular guide to applying it to human life

As we have seen, the ‘spiral’ model applies equally throughout the process of universal evolution.  It works at the level of the atom just as it does at the level of the human, and as Teilhard insists, it can be trusted to be active in human evolution as it continues to unfold.

The ‘virtues Model’, however, works uniquely at the level of the human, but is nonetheless an example of how universal processes can be seen to continue to work in the ‘noosphere’.  These three ‘virtues’ are the equivalent of the three universal attributes of the spiral as active in the human person:  unity, response to evolutional energy and the resultant rise in complexity.

The first of the three human components of this converging spiral is ‘Love’, the component of unity.  As we have addressed in many places in this Blog, Teilhard’s assertion that the idea of love must be freed from its popular understanding as a strong emotion and allowed to flower as the energy of evolution which unites its products in ways that increase their complexity and thus completes them.  Love is less an act of emotion or instinct that encourages our relationships and more one of uniting us in such a way that we become more what it is possible for us to become.  To Teilhard, love is ‘ontological’: to love is to become.  It is the energy which unites us in such a way as to move us forward on the spiral.

The second component is that of ‘Faith’.   Faith is the pull of our lives toward the axis of evolution and hence the human response to the universal evolutional principle of complexification.

As we become more adept at ‘articulating the noosphere’, we begin to better understand the structure and the workings of the reality in which we are enmeshed.  Such articulations of the universe will be undermined, however, if they are not preceded by a ‘faith’ that they exist at all.

While this might sound religious, let me offer a secular example. Imagine if Newton had not begun his inquiry into the workings of matter with the belief that there was some objective, measurable and most of all ‘intelligible’ force which moved material objects from their static state before he formulated his theory of gravitational attraction. His extrapolation to the belief that nature itself was ‘intelligible’ was an essential step towards the ‘Prinicpia’.

Faith therefore is the first step toward increasing our grasp of reality and enhancing our response to the energy of evolution.

The third of these three components is ‘Hope’, which encourages us on our journey toward our potential for increased complexity as we move forward on the spiral.  One of the gifts of evolution in the human is the ability to look into the future, as murky and risky as that might be, based on our understanding of the past.  If our look into the future is pessimistic and without hope, such negativity saps our energy and inhibits our movement up the spiral, toward a future in which we perceive the results of our growth as bleak, the fruit of our love as rejection, and sees us as hopelessly inadequate to build a full life.  Without hope, the evolutionary power of love, itself guaranteed over the fourteen or so billion years of universal becoming, is diminished.   Hope is that component of evolution by which we ‘rise’ as we move forward on the spiral.

John Haught’s concept of ‘anticipation’ as the most fruitful ground of belief addresses all three of these ‘virtues’, but Love and Hope resound the clearest. If we are to face the future with ‘anticipation’ we must first have faith that there is something to indeed anticipate and hope that it will live up to our anticipation.

The Next Post

This week we saw how Teilhard’s three ‘vectors’ of evolution: Forward, Inward and Upward, present in every stage of evolution, can be seen to be at work in the human person. Further, we saw how the ‘humanization’ of these three vectors can be seen in Paul’s idea of the “Theological Virtues”. As seen by Paul and stressed by Teilhard, forward, inward and upward manifest themselves in human life as Love, Faith and Hope.

This, of course, is another example of Blondel’s approach to religion: in the light of evolution, religious tenets can be reinterpreted in terms of human life. Or, as John Haught puts it

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

   This permits us to move, as John Haught suggests, from the “nonnatural mode of causation” fostered by traditional religion to one which not only is “linked..to the scientific story” but retains traditional religion’s emphasis on the human person (as understood by Thomas Jefferson). This emphasis can, in turn, soften the vagueness with which the human person is treated by traditional science.

Next week we will continue our search for nuggets of noospheric insight among the teachings of religion.

August 29, 2019 – Exploring the ‘Spiritual’ Ground of Happiness

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Today’s Post

Last week we began a third look at the subject of ‘happiness’, this time from the perspective of ‘spirituality’, but noting that we are using this term to refer to what Teilhard called ‘the axis of evolution’: the thread of increasing complexity over time. This distinguishes his use of the term from traditional religious jargon that includes such things as the ‘supernatural’.

In our use of it, we are referring to that which is active in our lives, here and now.   As Patricia Allerbee, author of Evolutionary Relationships, puts it, the latest evolutionary activity in the long history of rising universal complexity, the recognition of the “evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”.

This week we will explore this a bit further.

The Spiritual Ground of Happiness and the Terrain of Synergy

On July 11, we took a look at this ‘Terrain of Synergy’ as the common ground between science and religion, for centuries quite small but as writers such as Jonathan Sacks, Teilhard, Richard Rohr and Paul Davies insist, can be seen today as much larger than originally thought.

The expansion of this ground is one of the consequences of moving the center of understanding of evolution from the biological, Earth-centric scope of the Darwinists to the universal, all-encompassing vision of both scientists and religionists today. Not only does the current scope of evolution expand, but the insight into how science and religion contribute to a better understanding of the human condition increases. As Brian Swimme, Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, sees the study of ‘cosmology’ as focused on such expansion.

“The sciences will just separate the human off and focus on the physical aspects of the universe and the religious traditions will shy away from the universe because that’s reserved for science. So cosmology is an attempt to deal with the whole and the nature of the human in that.”

   In exploring this ‘terrain of synergy’ we are really exploring the nature of existence, an integrated understanding of the universe, its unfolding, and if it is to be truly ‘cosmological’, our part in it.

Such understanding is the starting place for placing ourselves into the true context of evolution, which is the same thing as understanding how we fit into the fourteen or so billion years of the rise of complexity: Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’.

As we have seen, such placement recognizes the consequence of failing to do so, as was recognized by Yuval Noah Harari in his suggestion that we have ‘broken the bond that our ancestors enjoyed with their environment” and have hence doomed ourselves to a future of unhappiness and quick extinction. While Yuval fails to recognize the recent (by evolutionary standards) trend towards increased human welfare outlined by Johan Norberg (19 July 2018), our current levels of anxiety indicate that at the personal level, we still have a long way to go.

Happiness and the Terrain of Synergy

How can recognition of the ‘terrain of synergy’ be a factor in human happiness?

Consider that understanding the ‘axis of evolution’, the universe’s tendency to increase complexity over time, offers science a way to begin to address the human person on the one hand, and on the other a way for religion to understand the workings of God in universal evolution.

Quantification of complexity, therefore, is a filter through which western religious teachings can be strained to remove their supernatural, magical and otherworldly content. By the same token, defining it can extend the more advanced subjects of science, such quantum physics, into the study of the human person.

The epicenter of the ‘terrain of synergy’ is therefore the common ground between science and religion. It is the recognition that the human person is the latest manifestation of the ‘complexification’ of the ‘stuff of the universe’. This perspective recognizes both the increase in complexity acknowledged (at least tacitly) by science and the importance of the human person in the scheme of things asserted by Western religion.   This perspective emerges when we come at the understanding of the cosmos from science’s recognition that the ‘axis of universal evolution’ is ‘complexification’ and from religion’s intuition that God exists as the underlying agent of such ‘complexification’.

The journey to such an integrated perception is outlined by Teilhard’s description of his own vision of his roots in the ‘axis of evolution’.

Such ‘rootedness’ is essential to our recognition of how we play into the cosmic sweep of evolution. And this recognition is at the core of Patricia Allerbee’s assertion that we must become aware of the “evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”.

Such recognition is echoed by Teilhard as he describes his experience of the two hands of God:

“..the one which holds us so firmly that it is merged, in us, with the sources of life, and the other whose embrace is so wide that, at its slightest pressure, all the spheres of the universe respond harmoniously together.”

   This echoes one of Maurice Blondel’s ‘reinterpretations’ of Western religion’s understanding of God:

“- that God is Father means that human life is oriented towards a gracious future- God is ‘on our side’”

   To a person who believes that they are being held “In God’s hand”, and that the ground of being “is on our side” the possibility of happiness moves from being a possibility to being a probability.

The Next Post

This week we continued our exploration of the ‘spiritual’ ground of happiness, noting that this ‘ground’ can be seen in the idea of the ‘terrain of synergy’. Once we begin to sense that the ‘ground of being’ is ‘on our side’, it becomes possible to build a level of confidence in the process of cosmic evolution as it rises through ourselves.

Having seen a clearer picture of this ‘terrain of synergy’ and its potential for a satisfaction with life that is grounded in a clear-headed, secular perspective, we can take our exploration of it a little further. Next week we will look a little deeper in the structure of this ‘terrain of synergy’ for some signposts to such exploration.

August 22, 2019 – Can There Be a ‘Spiritual’ Ground of Happiness?

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a second look at the slippery subject of happiness, this time from the perspective of universal evolution. We saw how Yuval Noah Harari ‘s book, Sapiens, suggested that we have dug our own grave due to our unique human characteristics, and because of this, true happiness for us was difficult if not impossible.

In looking at this further, we agreed that humans have indeed departed from the evolutionary ‘accommodation’ delivered by ‘Natural Selection’.   Perhaps our current state is a result of this discontinuity, but as we saw, not necessarily destined to continue.

While disagreeing with his dystopic conclusion, we saw the merit in acknowledging that our species has nonetheless broken the bond enjoyed by our evolutionary predecessors and that this breach is indeed a source of the ‘pain of our evolutionary convergence’. But when looking at evolution from Teilhard’s perspective, such pain is not unexpected in the ‘rise of complexity’ embedded in the roots of evolution. Perhaps we need to see it as transitory, or as Patricia Allerbee, author of Evolutionary Relationships, puts it, the long history of rising universal complexity suggests that we have only to allow ourselves to be “lifted by the evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”. To do this, “we only have to begin to pay attention”.

This week we will take a third look at happiness, a look which involves such ‘seeing’. This week we will begin a look at happiness from the perspective of ‘spirituality’

What is Spirituality?

I have deliberately framed the word ‘spirituality’ with apostrophes in recognition of the freight that this term carries with its overtones of ‘the supernatural’ and the eons of religious teaching which seemed to widen the gap between the lives we live and the ‘ideal’ life which lies far above us.

A problem arises when we try to address the underlying agency of evolution, that which causes the universe to become more complex over time. What term do we use to discuss it? Teilhard used the term ‘complexification’, which certainly is accurate, but he prefers the term ‘spiritual’. From his point of view, ‘spiritual’ simply refers to the agent which is present in all matter and causes it, over time, to take on more complex characteristics. Without it, evolution could not proceed. To him, ‘spiritual’ is ‘natural’, but only if the term ‘natural’ is understood in its widest, most universal, context.

We have seen in this blog how this concept can be found outside of religion. We saw on July 11 how Paul Davies understands universal evolution, including its extension into human life, to be underscored by increasing complexity.

But a less likely proponent of this position is Richard Dawkins, famous atheistic scientist. Dawkins, in his anti-religious book, “The God Delusion” nonetheless states that the idea of a “first cause of everything” which was the “basis for a process which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence” was entirely viable. In the next breath, he insists that “we must very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers.” He is suggesting that there’s definitely something afoot in universal evolution, but that we have to address it from a secular perspective if we want to make anything of it.

As we have seen many times in this blog, Teilhard would have agreed at this level. His take on spirituality also eschewed terms like ‘supernatural’, as he understood Dawkins’ ‘process’ to lie in the plane of natural existence.“…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.”

By identifying spirit as the phenomenon, and affirming its existence neither outside (epi) nor above (meta) nature, Teilhard is referring to the observed fact that the universe increases in complexity over the course of its evolution. This fact assumes that there is an agency, folded into matter, which energizes every evolutionary step from energy to matter, simple matter to quarks, quarks to protons, protons to atoms to molecules to complex molecules to cells to neurons to brains to consciousness. As Jonathan Sacks observes, in each step the new evolutionary products display a collective complexity that is a property of new product, not just aggregated properties of the individuals that comprise them.

Thus ‘spirituality’ is simply a word which refers to this tendency of ‘the stuff of the universe’ to ‘complexify’. As Teilhard goes on to say

“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.   The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self-conscious.”

   Therefore, the acknowledgement of the existence of this ‘cosmic spark’ in all things offers us a perspective on how our being fits into the sweep of evolution, even if it is different from the environmental ‘accommodation’ enjoyed by our predecessors. If, as Patricia Allerbee asserts, the ‘forces of evolution’ are such that they can, as they have done for fourteen billions of years, ‘optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity’ if we only begin to ‘listen’, then listening to the ‘voice’ of this ‘cosmic spark’ as it exists in our lives can permit human life to be more harmoniously intertwined with our environment.

Using Teilhard’s definition, spirituality is therefore indeed a third ground of ‘happiness’.

The Next Post

This week we began a third look at the slippery subject of happiness, this time from the perspective of ‘spirituality’, but took Teilhard’s understanding of this equally slippery term from his recognition of the agency of universal ‘complexification’.    Given this understanding of ‘spirituality’ as the term which refers to the universal phenomenon of ‘complexification’, this suggests that some measure of our happiness could be due to how well we listen to the ‘cosmic spark’ as it exists in each of us and hence, as Patricia Allerbee suggests, can open ourselves to the ‘optimization that can happen in our lives’. In simpler terms, we can trust the agency of universal evolution as it is in work in ourselves. But as Allerbee recons, we have to first learn to ‘listen’ to it.

“Easier said than done’, goes the old adage. Humans may well be now at their most advanced stage of evolution so far, but where in this stage can be found first the methods of finding this spark so that we can indeed ‘listen’, and then how it is possible to make sense of what we hear and put it to use in life? Any success in either of these endeavors is certain to bring us into increased ‘accommodation’ with our environment (better aligned with evolution), and hence closer to our goal of ‘thinking with the whole brain’.

Next week we will take another step in this exploration of happiness, this time exploring our accumulated lore of such searching and deciding.

July 11, 2019 – The ‘Terrain of Synergy’- Areas Common to Religion and Science

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Today’s Post

Last week we went a little deeper on the possibility of synergy between science and religion; one which would enhance and enrich both bodies of thought and contribute to the continuation of our evolution.

However, while Davies and Teilhard offer two very clear examples of thinking about synergy between science and religion, the question can be asked, “what areas of focus could be common to science and religion?”  Aren’t they, as claimed by Stephen Jay Gould (and echoed by Richard Dawkins), “two completely different and non-overlapping magisteria?”

Mapping the ‘Terrain of Synergy’

While science’s search for the agency by which the universe becomes more complex will go on for some time, as predicted by Paul Davies, humankind cannot afford the luxury of waiting for an empirical closure on the subject if it’s going to continue its evolution.  Our evolution is not only proceeding ‘under our feet’ whether or not we understand it, the rate rate is increasing.  Each day that passes seems to demand more choices with the mounting of the pressure of our advancement from instinct to volition.

The list of evolutionary threats seems to grow every day, and each individual risk gives rise to the prediction, “if this trend continues… (fill in your favorite evil)”.  Malthus may have been wrong in his prediction, but how do we know that eventually he will be proven right and the curtain of humanity will finally fall?

Therefore it is imperative that we build on those intuitions which have carried us thus far, but with the caveat that they must stay in coherence with the findings of science.  The source of these intuitions is religion, properly divested of Richard Dawkins’ “baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers.”

Jonathan Sacks agrees, and goes a little further by identifying some of the many subjects that when addressed would light the way towards a synthesis suitable for mapping a route to the future.

“There may be, in other words, a new synthesis in the making.  It will be very unlike the Greek thought-world of the medieval scholastics with its emphasis on changelessness and harmony.  Instead it will speak about:

– the emergence of order

– the distribution of intelligence

–  information processing

– the nature of self-organizing complexity

– the way individuals display a collective intelligence that is a property of groups, not just the individuals that comprise them,

– the dynamic of evolving systems and what leads some to equilibrium, others to chaos.

   Out of this will emerge new metaphors of nature and humanity; flourishing and completeness.  Right brain (religious, intuitive) thinking may reappear, even in the world of science, after its eclipse since the seventeenth century.”

   This list is echoed, with much more articulation, by Davies.  Also note that many of these subjects have long been the object of study and debate by religion.  Effectively, Sacks and Davies have begun mapping the territory that, when explored, offer the terrain of ‘synergy’ between science and religion.

Teilhard elaborates on traditional religion as rich ore to be refined into an elixir which enriches human evolution.

   “After allowing itself to be captivated in excess by the charms of analysis to the extent of falling into illusion, modern thought is at last getting used once more to the idea of the creative value of synthesis in evolution.  It is beginning to see that there is definitely more in the molecule than in the atom, more in the cell than in the molecule, more in society than in the individual, and more in mathematical construction than in calculations and theorems.  We are now inclined to admit that at each further degree of combination something which is irreducible to isolated elements emerges in a new order.”

    Davies, from the scientific perspective, echoes the insights of Teilhard and predates those of Sacks toward the need for science to expand its reach to include this underlying principle by which the universe unfolds:

“The general trend towards increasing richness and diversity of form found in evolutionary biology is surely a fact of nature, yet it can only be crudely identified, if at all. There is not the remotest evidence that this trend can be derived from the fundamental laws of mechanics, so it deserves to be called a fundamental law in its own right.

   The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, so it turns out, is not to be understood as a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles. Rather, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of these new pieces of behavior requires research which is as fundamental as, or perhaps more fundamental than, anything undertaken by the elementary particle physicists.”

   Thus both Davies and Teilhard can be clearly seen to “assail the real from different angles and on different planes”.  Such an approach as Davies is suggesting would act as an agent which can help religion to “..divest the word ‘God’ of all the baggage that it carries in the minds of most religious believers” from one angle while Teilhard offers the translation of science’s universal insight to the lives of human persons from another.

The Next Post 

This week we took a deeper look at the skill of using the ‘whole brain’ to assess the ‘noosphere’, focusing on the different thinking modes of science and religion, as represented by Paul Davies and Teilhard, and how they illustrate the potential to envision them as Teilhard did, as global “meridians as they approach the poles…,(which) are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the pole”.

While Davies and Teilhard offer two very clear examples of thinking about synergy between science and religion, there is another voice that contributes to this dialog, and that is Jonathan Sacks.   Next week we will take a look at his insights to move us along in understanding how ‘thinking with the whole brain’ can be understood.

June 6, 2019 – Thinking With the ‘Whole Brain’

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Today’s Post

We have decomposed Teilhard’s convergent spiral model down from its universal configuration to that of the human person, to the three ‘virtues’ by which we make our personal way up the spiral, to the thinking functions that differentiate us from previous products of evolution, and by which we are equipped to make the transition from ‘instinctual’ to ‘volitional’ evolution.

Last week we addressed the model of the ‘whole brain’, by which we perform these thinking functions that power us up the convergent spiral of human evolution.

This week we will look at this model in a little more detail, and see how it manifests itself in our most common concepts.

The Coherent Brain

We have looked at length at ‘dualities’ in human thought, and how most of them can be moved from divergence to coherence once the subject begins to be addressed ‘holisticly’.  This is especially true for the historical approach to ‘right’ vs ‘left’ brain modes of thought.  As we have seen from the perspective of Jonathan Sacks, while these modes are understood as active in the right and left lobes of the brain, they are more psychological than physiological in the way they work.

Further, the popular concept of this dichotomy suggests that those who are left brain dominant are more quantitative, logical, and analytical (eg engineers and mathematicians), while right-brained individuals are more emotional, intuitive, and creative free spirits (eg artists, dancers, musicians).  Thus we have the common concept of left brained individuals more tending to the ‘empirical’ approach to making sense of things and the right brained individuals more ‘intuitional’.

This simplistic treatment overlooks the fact that neither art nor mathematics are firmly set in their ‘brain-ness’.  Even the simplest of mathematical expressions requires an initial conceptualization (intuition) of what is being expressed before the factual (empirical) task of formulation.  And of what value is a melody if it is not subject to be quantified into a series of objective notes?  And if we take both these examples into their ‘life cycle’, they will possibly go through several manifestations as the math model is used or the melody played, with each cycle repeating the intuition-empirical dance that iteratively matures the model.

So, at the very base of our evolution, both at the level of the person and of society, these two modes of thinking come into play not as opposites, but as facets of a single, coherent, uniquely human action.

The ‘Golden Rule’ As the Earliest Example of Thinking with the ‘Whole Brain’

One of the earliest examples of pragmatism in human relations was Confucius’ principle of the ‘Golden Rule’, as recorded in ‘The Analects’:

“Zi gong (a disciple of Confucius) asked: “Is there any one word that could guide a person throughout life?”  The Master replied: “How about ‘shu’ [reciprocity]: never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself?”

   Variations of the golden rule of Confucius appear in nearly every major world religion and in most other belief systems as well, as it is frequently believed that this one rule not only underlies the fullness of personal life, but insures the success of society.

This ‘rule’ is based on ‘reciprocity’, which in turn is based on the sense of our ‘universality’.  In universality, what we believe about ourselves is a valid hermeneutic for what we should believe about others.  Very simply, our desire to be well treated can be understood in others to reflect their own such desire.

In terms of ‘thinking with the whole brain’, this simple principle can be seen to have several facets.

The First step is an employment of the ‘right’ brain mode of thinking.  It is necessary to have the intuition that ‘others’ have the same sort of feelings that we do.  “If I want to be well treated, it is likely that others would as well’.  This is intuitive because there is no way to objectively prove such; it must be believed and acted upon without empirical data.

Secondly, the ‘left’ brain hemisphere kicks in as we look into ourselves to establish what constitutes ‘good treatment’.  What sorts of actions towards ourselves would be described as ‘good treatment’?  Further, if we can quantify these actions, we can come to a decision on how they should be ‘reciprocated’ towards another.

Thirdly, this whole process is done while the lower brains continue their never-ending stimuli.  What sort of risks are being taken by following through with these actions?  Is the ‘other’ deserving of such treatment?  If the situation were reversed, would I receive such good treatment?  Will others consider me ‘weak’ because of my thoughtfulness?

So, ‘whole brain’ thinking requires the intuition that all humans persons are sufficiently alike to warrant the treatment we ourselves prefer, the empiricism to determine what that treatment would consist of and the decision to overcome the fears introduced by the ‘lower’ brains.

(It is not coincidence that these three facets reflect the three ‘virtues’ (16 May) which themselves map our journey ‘up’ the convergent spiral of evolution towards increased complexity.  ‘Faith’ is necessary for belief that others are ‘like us’, ‘Hope’ reflects our expectations for outcome of reciprocity and ‘Love’ is simply the energy which effects the unity that results from reciprocity.)

Note that the ‘Golden Rule’ is itself the result of ‘intuition’.  As Jonathan Sacks notes, ‘empiricism’, as found in ‘left brained thinking’, did not arise in the historical record until the Greek era, and finds its way into Western history via the Greek translation of Christian scripture and its subsequent influence on Western religious thought.  In his terms:

“… Christianity was a right-brain religion … translated into a left-brain language [Greek]. So for many centuries you had this view that science and religion are essentially part of the same thing.”

   Sacks’ assertion that the “view of science and religion as essentially part of the same thing”, however, has never been a mainstay in Western thinking, as the emergence of scientific empirical thinking was initially seen as a threat to Western religious concepts, as well as to the established and strongly entrenched Christian hierarchy of the time.

Nonetheless, Sacks, as Teilhard before him, was adamant that these two classical modes of thought were somehow connected at their root.  Further, they believed that recognition of this connection would lead to a clearer understanding of what it meant to be human as a necessary step toward continuing our evolution.  As Sacks sees it:

“It is not incidental that Homo sapiens has been gifted with a bicameral brain that allows us to experience the world in two fundamentally different ways, as subject and object, ‘I’ and ‘Me’, capable of standing both within and outside our subjective experience.  In that fact lies our moral and intellectual freedom, our ability to mix emotion and reflection, our capacity for both love and justice, attachment and detachment, in short, our humanity.”

The Next Post

This week we took a deeper look at the skill of using the ‘whole brain’ to assess the ‘noosphere’, further understand our place in it and how we can develop the skill necessary to cooperate with the flow of evolutional energy as it rises through the human species.

   Next week we will extend this theme of ‘coherence’ to the great human paradigms of understanding and the ‘hermeneutics’ which we employ in them as we further our attempts to ‘make sense of things’.