Tag Archives: Reinterpretation of Religion

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’.

March 14 2019 – How Does the Cosmic Spark Contribute to Quality of Life?

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Today’s Post

    Last week we continued our look at the ‘Cosmic Spark’, that thread of becoming which is at the heart of the universal evolution towards increased complexity as it rises through the human person.  Recognizing that referring to this aspect of ‘cosmic becoming’ as ‘divine’ does not square with the secular aspect of God that we have focused on (thanks, responders), I am now referring to it as the ‘Cosmic Spark’.

This week we shift our focus from the need for discovery of and cooperation with this agent of evolution in the human, to its ‘effects’.  While acknowledgement of it is at the heart of Thomas Jefferson’s assertion of the ‘equality of all men’ and thus necessary to our successful mode of societal government, what happens in our lives as we become more aware of it and adept at cooperating with it?

Quantifying a ‘Good Life’

Our history is rife with prescriptions and proscriptions for human behavior.  All societies contain lists of such acceptable behavior, and the criteria for acceptability is some combination of behavioral norms that most frees the individual to produce for the society without undermining the production itself.  The assumption in all cases is that ‘what’s good for society is good for the individual’, and in some cases, ‘what’s good for the individual is what’s good for society’.

But how can we objectively define ‘what’s good for the individual’ other than that which is good for the society?  We can easily make such generalizations such as ‘freedom is good’ and ‘we must all get along’, but how much freedom, and in what areas?  Is it possible to objectively quantify a ‘good’ life?

As we have seen previously, the Apostle Paul is very adept at summarizing the teachings of Jesus as found in the three ‘synoptic’ gospels available to him.  We have seen how Paul’s organization of Jesus’ concepts into ‘virtues’, for example, can be seen to fall into three categories of ‘stances’ or attitudes we can take for a ‘fuller’ life.

As Jesus says, “I come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.” (John 10:10).  More germane to this week’s subject, Paul does the same for abundance as he did for virtues, summarizing what he sees as Jesus’ insights into ‘what is good’ for the human person.

Paul listed those attributes of life that he saw as deriving from a life informed by the Theological Virtues, and his list is a good start to describing ‘abundancy’ as an underling principle of ‘goodness of life’.  These attributes are summarized in his ‘fruit of the spirit’, which in our secular reinterpretation can be seen as attributes which the human person takes on as he becomes aware of the Cosmic Spark and becomes adept at cooperating with it.

The ‘Fruit’ of the Cosmic Spark

The ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ is Paul’s term that sums up nine attributes of a person or community living ‘in accord with the Holy Spirit’.  Chapter 5 of Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians lists them: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”  Among the many attempts to objectively quantify the attributes of a ‘full’ or complete human life, these seem high on the list.

Love –  We have addressed the attribute of love several times in this blog, noting the significant difference between the traditional understanding of it as the emotion by which we are attracted to each other and Teilhard’s insight that it is a manifestation of the universal evolutive energy by which things become more complex, and hence more united over time in such a way as they become more complete.  By participating in love we become more complete, more whole.

Peace –  It is hard to imagine something more conducive to peacefulness than that the recognition that our efforts to grow more complete are underwritten by a universal energy which rises unbidden and unearned within us.  God, as Blondel understood ‘Him’, is on our side. Life, as it is offered to us as a gift, is guaranteed to be open to our strivings, welcoming to our labors.  As the Ground of Being is uncovered as our own personal ground of existence, it is understood more as father than as fate.

Patience – Patience becomes more than long-suffering teeth gritting endurance necessary for  ‘salvation’, but the natural acceptance of what cannot be changed in light of Teilhard’s “..current to the open sea” on which we are carried when we ‘…set our sails to the winds of life.”

Recognition of the Cosmic Spark within us, the ‘gifted’ nature of it, and confidence in where it is taking us, can instill a patience with the vagaries of life that was would have been previously considered to be naive.

Kindness – As an essential building block of both society and personal relationships, kindness is prescribed by nearly every religion as the ‘Golden Rule’.  Beyond this prescription is the natural emergence of kindness as a recognition that not only are we underpinned by the Cosmic Spark, but others are as well.  Treating others as we would be treated ourselves requires us to be aware of how our own Cosmic Spark is the essence of being by which we all reflect Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’.

Goodness –  Goodness, of course, is that tricky concept which underlays all the ‘fruits’ of Paul.  In Paul, as echoed by Teilhard, that which is ‘good’ is simply that which moves us ahead, both as individuals and members of our societies.  If we are to have ‘abundance’ of life, whatever contributes to such abundance is ‘good’.

Faithfulness – As we saw in our look at the Theological Virtues, faith is much more than intellectual and emotional adherence to doctrines or dogmas as criteria for entry into ‘the next life’.  Faith has an ontological character by which we understand ourselves to be caught up in a ‘process’ which lifts us from the past and prepares us for a future that while it might be unknown is nevertheless fully manageable.

Gentleness – As a mirror to ‘goodness’, ‘gentleness’, once we have become aware of the Cosmic Spark not only in ourselves but in all others, becomes the only authentic way of relating to others.

Self-Control – Self-control acknowledges that while we might be caught up in a process by which we become what it is possible to become, this process is dependent upon our ability and willingness to choose.  Being carried by Teilhard’s ‘current’ (‘Patience’, above) still requires us to develop the skills of ‘sail setting’ and ‘wind reading’.  The instinctual stimuli of the reptilian and limbic brains do not dissipate as we grow, but the skill of our neocortex brains to modulate them must be judiciously developed.

The Next Post

This week we looked a little deeper into how finding and cooperating with the ‘Cosmic Spark’ adds to the abundance of our lives.  .

Next week we will move on looking deeper into how denying the cosmic spark can not only leave us unable to taste Paul’s ‘fruits’, but can undermine our continued evolution.

March 7 2019 – What Part Does the Divine Spark Play At The Personal Level?

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Today’s Post 

   Last week we looked a little deeper into finding and cooperating with the ‘Divine Spark’, and addressed how through history to the current day, there are sociological strands active in our societies which would not only deny it, but actively work against it.

We also took a first look at how recognition and cooperation with the Divine Spark can overcome these negative trends, and thus insure the continuation of the enterprise of human evolution.

This week we will move on to looking deeper into how cooperating with this ‘divine spark’ is not only essential to the continuation of the advance of evolution in the human species, but to our own personal evolution as well.

The Divine Spark As The Principle Of ‘Personness’

    Teilhard strongly asserts what happens when we realize the existence of the divine spark within us:

“..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 the is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.”

   Why should this be such a ‘decisive moment”?  In what way is it indeed ‘decisive’?

To answer we must consider what happens in the normal maturing process of the human person.  We begin as children at the center of our own universe, surrounded by attention and provision of our needs.  One of the first things that must happen as we grow toward adulthood is to become more aware of our environment, particularly in the form of other persons.  The complete human ‘gestation’ process is quite long compared to the ‘lower mammals’, but like them, it is initially more stimulated by the nurturing instincts of the mammalian ‘limbic’ brain. Unlike them, however, the development of intellectual maturity requires development of the skill of using the neocortex brain to modulate these emotional stimuli.  This modulation, the emergence of ‘objectivity’, is essential to ‘learning’ and inevitably incurs an increase in openness to the surrounding world, especially to other persons.

We have seen how, in Teilhard’s view of the world, love is also something that develops in the same way.  For love to be able to energize human growth (instead of just a lubricant to relationship), it must become more open to the other, whose reciprocation stimulates our own growth.  Teilhard refers to this recursive cycle of ‘humanization’ as excentrationfollowed by centration.

To Teilhard, love is the humanized manifestation of the energy of evolution.  It is the unique energy rising from the existence of the divine spark in each of us.  While not denying the limbic-tinged emotion that is undeniably present in human relationships, Teilhard’s grasp goes much deeper, seeing love as the essential energy by which we become what we can be, and how doing so contributes our small increment to the continuation of human evolution.

It is very common among all religions and most philosophies to value ‘selflessness’ over ‘egocentricity’, but in most cases it is valued for the social stability that it provides, or as a qualification for the rewards of the ‘next life’.  The recognition is very revolutionary indeed that when we undertake such an excentration-centration cycle in our life that we are cooperating with  ”a universal will to become and to be” that manifests itself in each of us and which is essential to continued human evolution.   Once realization of the existence of this Divine Spark begins to take place within us, our potential for the fullness of human becoming is increased.

The ‘Fruits’ Of The Divine Spark

How can we quantify such increase in potential?  What difference does it make that we awaken to such a possibility?

At the coarsest level, that of society, we have seen in quite a bit of detail of how human welfare has increased exponentially over the last two hundred fifty years.  In this same overview, we saw how the chronicler of such welfare attributed such explosive development to the rise in human freedom and improvement in human relationships.   We have also seen how the cornerstone of such freedom and relationships was based on Thomas Jefferson’s assertion of the basic ability of “the people themselves” as the “safe depository …of the ultimate powers of the society”.  And in the past few posts, we have seen how such an assertion is only possible if we assume the presence of the ‘Divine Spark’ in every human person.

Richard Rohr writes extensively on how one of the most important concepts of early Christianity, the idea of “God in Us”, has been superseded by Christianity’s rush to codify theology in Greek terms, and organize a structural hierarchy to insure its endurance.  Rohr refers to the many teachings of Jesus which refer to what was later understood as ‘The Christ’.  To be sure, these teachings are sprinkled among the many teachings which were understood as essential elements of the resultant theology and normative to church hierarchy, but Paul, the ‘great summarizer’ of Jesus’ teachings, stressed them.  It was Paul who highlighted Jesus’ teachings on Love, and on the ‘virtues’ (last week), but also Paul that first stressed not only the existence, but the universality of the Divine Spark:

“There is only Christ. He is everything and he is in everything” (Colossians 3:11)

  In spite of his insistence on this intimacy with God, not only the universal nature of the Divine Spark, but of its presence in each of us, came to be second to the more structural basis adopted by the church.  The church came to stress more a remote, judgmental God who required human sacrifice to reconcile himself to his creation than an intimate God of which John could say,

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

And At The Personal Level?

But what about the human person ‘himself’?  Are humans just cogs in the machinery of evolution, whose relationships and freedoms are needed to insure the increase in human welfare?  Or is there some level of ‘payoff’ at the personal level?

The Next Post

This week we looked a little deeper into finding and cooperating with the ‘Divine Spark’, and it is active in each human person.

Next week we will move on looking into how acknowledging and cooperating with this ‘divine spark’ can make a difference in our individual lives.

January 17, 2019 – The Secular Side of God: How Did We Get Here? The Question of God

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the insights of Jonathan Sacks have led us back to the theme of this blog: “The Secular Side of God”.  In offering a secular perspective on religion, as a “philosophical understanding of the human condition and our place within the universe”, Sacks stresses the need for more than the innovation and invention of Norberg in human evolution, but the awareness of meaning.  Like Teilhard, whose ‘evolutionary context’ opens the door to reinterpreting religion, Sacks’ perspective reveals a potential link to science and hence offers a powerful tool for continuing to fabricate the future of human evolution.

As we have seen in this blog, the insights of Sacks, Blondel, Teilhard, Jefferson, Rohr and others all reflect the need for a rethinking of the fundamental concept of ‘God’ before the traditional teachings of religion can be sifted from the chaff which has been accumulated over the many thousands of years, and seen for the core insights by which we can continue our evolution.

This week, we begin a summary of how these thinkers came to understand God as the very core of being from which the entire universe has come to be, including the human person, and how this perspective helps us see the value of synthesized religion and science to the continuation of our journey to Teilhard’s “fuller being”.

The Teilhardian Shift

We began this shift in perspective by seeing how Teilhard applied his scientific evolutionary insights to Christianity, specifically Catholicism, to recast its “philosophical understandings” into not only a universal perspective but one in which the human person fits without recourse to religious ‘miracles’ or scientific ‘accidents’.  In this endeavor, Teilhard was able to place the “human condition” naturally into its “place within the universe”, in keeping with Sacks’ above secular definition.

This shift identifies the beginning point for “The Secular Side of God” by seeing God as the underlying agent by which evolution proceeds as an ‘increase in complexity’.  Teilhard’s identification of this increase in complexity as the basic metric of universal evolution not only elevates the concept of God to a universal agent, but offers an insight into evolution as a continuous process which can be understood as proceeding in succeeding stages, from the ‘big bang’ all the way to its current manifestation in the form of human persons.

Key to his concept of increasing complexity, Teilhard saw each step of this process as the result of the ‘entities of evolution’ uniting at each stage in such a way as to increase not only their ‘complexity’, but their capacity for increased unification resulting in further complexity.  In his words:

“Fuller being from closer union”

   He extrapolates from this by noting that such union also ‘differentiates’, in that the evolutionary products aren’t assimilated into each other with such union, but emerge as not only more capable of future union but more distinct as well.  In his words:

“True union differentiates”

   In Teilhard’s insight, these two actions together constitute the key to universal evolution.  Without either, evolution would not proceed, and the universe, if it existed at all, would be stuck in a static sea of quiescent energy.

In his foundational book, “The Phenomenon of Man”, he carries these two basic actions forward through primordial matter and energy (the realm of physics), through the first phase of life (the realm of biology) to the current phase highlighted by the human person’s ‘awareness of his awareness’, which he refers to as ‘The Noosphere’.  In his sweeping and integrated grasp of universal reality, these are simply phases united by the single evolutionary thread (differentiating unity) in which the pure energy of the ‘big bang’ manifests itself in the increase of complexity leading to (so far) the human person.

Seeing the universe as emerging in ‘cycles of becoming’ leads to the insight that these cycles evolve along a single ‘axis of increasing complexity’ by which all things are connected by their place in the flow, the upwelling, of this basic energy over time.

Teilhard’s understanding of an ‘agent of complexity’ by which evolution proceeds is not restricted to those with a religious background.  One of the foremost atheist thinkers, Professor Richard Dawkins, famously declared:

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

   While Dawkins evidently could not conceive that such a God could still be compatible with religious concepts, he implicitly agreed with Teilhard that something was indeed active in the history of the universe to effect the complexity that we now see.  His insistence that religion is incompatible with science was of course based on the many years of warfare between the two that followed the beginning of “the age of reason”, and strengthened by his many valid criticisms of it.  In the “all or nothing” position he takes in his battle with religion, however, he cannot imagine any aspect of religion which could be compatible in any way with science.

In the last several posts, however, we have seen how Teilhard and Sacks, in their more holistic hermeneutics, show an entirely different approach.

The Next Post

This week we have returned to the subject of “The Secular Side of God’ by summarizing how Teilhard, Sacks and others expand the idea of God from a ‘superior being’ with ‘infinite powers’ to the ‘universal agent of becoming’ by which the universe has evolved (and continues to evolve) to states of greater complexity.

Next week we will review how this reinterpretation, instead of ‘watering down’ the concept of God (such as happened with the Theists) can move us on to a much more comprehensive understanding of God which throws new light on both the composition of the universe and as Sacks puts it, a “philosophical understanding of the human condition and our place within the universe.”

January 3, 2019 – The Confluence of Religion and Science- Part 3

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Today’s Post

Last week we looked at the last four of Teilhard’s seven ways of seeing the natural confluence between religion and science.  As we saw, Teilhard understands them to be natural facets of a central 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.  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 recognizes the West’s 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 development of this unique perspective:

“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 secular 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 often accompany religion, but notes that it does not replace the path to ‘meaning’ that religion offered.  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 ‘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 at the root of human evolution.

However, as we noted in this series, Norberg recognizes the basis 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.  This, as evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has argued, is what religion does more powerfully than any other system.

The unprovable human capability to trust, like many others, underpins human evolution at the level of society.  It contributes to the success of relationships, one of Norberg’s three ‘basics’, as Sacks goes on to observe:

“Therefore, any group in which all the members can trust one another is at a massive advantage to others.  This, as evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has argued, 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 are the perspectives of religion in need of balance from science.

The claims of all forms of religion are based on metaphorical beliefs, many of which are anathema to 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 base 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 more due 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 entirely 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, like Teilhard, in an explicitly evolutionary context, he does envision a more complete manifestation of the human emerging 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 synergy between science and religion if it is to continue.

Next week I will begin to wrap up this blog, “The Secular Side of God” with a review of what we set out to do, the steps we took, and the conclusions to which we came.

December 13 – Religion and Science: Noospheric Tools?

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Today’s Post

In the last several weeks, we have been looking at religion’s concept of morality, ending in a look at how Teilhard’s five insights into morality offer a rethinking of traditional religion’s concept from proscription to prescription as we begin to recognize religion’s potential as a tool for insuring our continued evolution.  We saw how religion must recognize its role as a tool for understanding the noosphere to be able to assist us in living it in such a way that we maximize our potential for being fully and authentically human.

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

Evolution Everywhere

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

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

By the same token, we have noted that these three characteristics are treated poorly by science, and its companion secular ‘disciplines’ such as economics and politics.   Norberg’s three cornerstones of progress initially only occur in the West, as a slowly building consequence of society influenced by its Christian roots in the uniqueness of the person (more on this subject next week).

Jefferson’s claim that

 “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves”

was a claim to such uniqueness, and not derived from any empirical source.  His inspiration for such an unprovable concept was none other than the ‘teachings of Jesus’:

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

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

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

As Norberg quantifies at length, this clearer understanding has given rise to the success of the West in providing a mileu which has effected a degree of stability not only unprecedented in Western history, but which has slowly permeated into the rest of the world.

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

Enter Religion

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

At the basis of these ‘risks’ is the necessity for us to choose to continue to power this tide.  We saw that it is possible for humans to simply allow fear, pessimism and disbelief to weaken their will to continue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

November 22 – Religion’s Seeds of ‘Articulating the Noosphere’ and How to Build Upon Them Part 1: Teilhard’s View of Morality

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Today’s Post

Last week be began a look at religion as a tool for managing the noosphere, particularly in dealing with the risks that arise with evolution of the human.  We acknowledged the traditional ills that can be seen in various expressions of religion over its six or so thousand years of manifesting itself as a way to make sense of things, but opened the door to re-seeing it, at least in its Western manifestation, as simply an attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’.  In this sense, it can be seen as just the ‘right brained’ counterpart to the ‘left brained’ perspectives of science.

The question remains, of course: how can such an approach to religion be developed, with its historical attachment to such things as radical and fundamentalist expressions of Islam in the Mideast, as well as

fundamentalism, excessive hierarchical structures and pedophilia in the West?  Is there a way that the teachings that have led to such obvious ‘noospheric risks’ can be reinterpreted into teachings that will lead away from them?

   This week we will begin to look at the roots of Western religion to begin rediscovery of principles which will move us forward.

Morality

One such starting place for such an undertaking is the idea of morality.  We covered the concept of morality with its companion subjects of spirituality, virtues and sacraments last December, and I’d like to expand upon this brief series of posts by looking more deeply at how Teilhard himself saw it from his evolutionary perspective (From “Human Energy”. Parentheses and italics mine):

The Evolutionary Basis for Morality

“For the old-style spiritualist who regards the spirit as a meta-phenomenon, as for the modern materialist who chooses to see it only as an epi-phenomenon, the world of moral relationships forms a separate department of nature.  For different reasons, forces and connexions of a moral kind are for both less physically real than the energies of matter.  For us who see the development of consciousness as the essential phenomenon of nature (eg from an evolutionary perspective), things appear in a very different light.  If indeed, as we have assumed, the world culminates in a thinking reality, the organization of personal human energies represents the supreme stage of cosmic evolution on earth; and morality is consequently nothing less than the higher development of mechanics and biology.  The world is ultimately constructed by moral forces; and reciprocally, the function of morality is to construct the world.”

 

The Evolution of Morality

“Morality arose largely as an empirical defense of the individual and society.  Ever since intelligent beings began to be in contact, and consequently in friction, they have felt the need to guard themselves against each other’s encroachments.  And once an arrangement was in practice discovered which more or less guaranteed to each one his due, this system itself felt the need to guarantee itself against the changes which would call its accepted solutions into question and disturb the established social order.  Morality has till now been principally understood as a fixed system of rights and duties intended to establish a static equilibrium between individuals and at pains to maintain it by a limitation of energies, that is to say of force.

This conception rested in the last resort on the idea that every human being represented a sort of absolute term in the world, whose existence had to be protected from all encroachment from without.  It is transformed from top to bottom as one recognizes…that man on earth is no more than an element destined to complete himself cosmically in a higher consciousness in process of formation.  Now the problem confronting morality is no longer how to preserve and protect the individual, but how to guide him so effectively in the direction of his anticipated fulfillments that the ‘quantity of personality’ still diffuse in humanity may be released in fullness and security.  The moralist was up to now a jurist, or a tight-rope walker.  He becomes the technician and engineer of the spiritual energies of the world.

 

The Morality of Balance (appropriate to a static universe) vs the Morality of Movement (appropriate to an evolving universe)

(From this perspective) “The morality of balance is replaced by the morality of movement

-The morality of money based on exchange and fairness vs the goodness of riches only if they work for the benefit of the spirit

– The morality of love based on the material founding of a family vs loving in response to a personal creative force

– Individual morality to prevent him from doing harm vs working with the forces of growth to free his autonomy and personality to the uttermost

To the morality of balance (“closed morality”) the moral world might seem a definitely bounded real.  To the morality of movement (‘open morality’) the same world appears as a higher sphere of the universe, much richer than the lower spheres of matter in unknown powers and unsuspected combinations.”

Religion and Morality

“By definition, his religion, if true, can have no other effect than to perfect the humanity in him.”  In that case, if there was, as we have agreed, a deeply humanizing intuition in the idea which unfolded in the 18th century that each of us is a conscious and responsible unit in a universe in progress, it was inevitable that this intuition should sooner or later raise an amplified echo in the heart of Christian consciousness.  At the first stage, Christianity may well have seemed to exclude the humanitarian aspirations of the modern world.  At the second stage its duty was to correct, assimilate and preserve them.”

Morality As A Basis For Dealing With The Noosphere

“So as long as our conceptions of the universe remained static, the basis of duty remained extremely obscure.  To account for this mysterious law (love) which weighs fundamentally on our liberty, man had recourse to all sorts of explanations, from that of an explicit command issued from outside to that of an irrational but categorical instinct.”

The next Post                   

This week we took a second look at morality as a facet of religion which can be seen as a tool for helping us understand the structure of the noosphere as a step to managing its risks.  We did this by looking at Teilhard’s synopsis of the history and the place of ‘morality’ in the unfolding of the noosphere.

Next week we’ll continue this theme, taking a deeper look at each of Teilhard’s (above) insights from his book “Human Energy” to see how the concept of morality can be enriched and more highly focused to enhance both the relevance of religion and offer a tool more finely honed for dealing with the noosphere’s inevitable risks.

October 31 – Managing the Noospheric Risks, Part 4- Understanding the Noosphere – Part 1- The Spiral of Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw that one way to deal with the ‘noospheric’ risks was to better understand the noosphere itself and what part we play in it.  In doing so, we are taking Teilhard’s approach which he explains:

“Evolution is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses which all systems must

submit and satisfy from now on in order to be conceivable and true.”

   Teilhard’s approach, therefore, is to place any subject into the context of universal evolution if we are to better understand it, and the noosphere is no exception.

This week we will continue down this path of looking at the noosphere in an evolutionary context to help situate ourselves in this process of understanding ‘complexification’ as it takes place in human evolution.

The Convergent Spiral of Evolution

Teilhard used the ‘sphere’ as a metaphor for understanding how the expansion of humanity compresses us as it reaches the equator of our metaphorical sphere, and instead of continuing to spread, we begin to press in on ourself.  In the same way, he uses that of the spiral to illustrate how ‘the stuff of the universe’ becomes more complex as its components unite to increase their complexity at the same time that they are drawn ‘upwards to more complexity’ and ‘inwards towards closer union’.  The spiral that Teilhard envisions isn’t just a simple coil, like a bedspring, it’s a spiral which converges as it rises over time.

Teilhard identifies the energy which induces convergence as ‘radial’, and the energy by which the components of the ‘stuff of the universe’ become more complex in their uniting as ‘tangential’.  These two components, work together to increase the complexity  of this ‘stuff’ as the convergence  of the spiral pulls these components not only closer to each other but also closer to the ‘axis’ of the spiral (Teilhards ‘axis of evolution’.  In doing so they become closer to the source of the universal energy by which all things become united in such a way as to differentiate themselves at the same time that they are enriched.

Applying this metaphor to humanity, we can understand ourselves as the most recent manifestation of such ‘stuff of the universe’, produced as the result of these three components of energy which interact to increase the complexity of the universe.  We engage with  ‘tangential’ energy when we relate to others while enhancing and enriching our ‘persons’; we engage with ‘radial’ energy as we become more conscious of, and learn to cooperate with the ‘tangential’ energy which differentiates and enhances us, and in this cooperation both our persons and our ‘psychisms’ become more complete and enriched.

So, to the question of where are we in this universal journey from pure energy to some future state of increased complexity, Teilhard offers a suggestion:  We are early in the process of learning both how relationships and cooperation are essential to our progress.

That said, can we quantify how such process can be seen?

The Empirical Spiral

While an integrated understanding of all the facets of energy acting on us, much less an understanding of how to cooperate with them, might be so far immature in understanding at this point in our evolution,  empirical science can offer some insight.

While the light which science can show on the past may not yet be complete, Physics highlights the many ‘discontinuities’ which appear in the past evolution of ‘the stuff of the universe’, such as:

–          Matter appearing from pure energy

–          Atoms emerging from combinations of the first, simple grains of matter

–          Molecules emerging from an infinitude of combinations of atoms

–          Such molecules evolving to the relatively astonishing organization of cells

–          Cells continuing this unprecedented explosion into the relatively complex groupings found in neurons

–          Neurons find ways to compact themselves into centralized neurosystems, then to  brains

–          Neocortices emerge from limbic brains,  themselves from reptilian brains

–          Conscious brains become aware of their functionality

Each of these transitions can be considered a ‘discontinuity’ because the conditions which preceded each of them, taken out of context, do not suggest the significant change in complexity which ensues.  While science can describe the physical processes which are involved in the transitions, it cannot explain the increasing complexity that results.  There is no current explanation of how the ‘stuff of the universe’ manages its slow but very sure rise in complexity as it moves from the level of the big bang to that of the human which is capable of an awareness aware of itself.

While all these stages and their transitions can be described and to some extent understood by science, their increase in complexity following each discontinuity into human evolution requires a look into how the element of ‘consciousness’ can also be seen to evolve.

Next Week

This week we took a first step toward ‘understanding the noosphere’ by following Teilhard as he situates the noosphere in an evolutive context.   To begin this phase we saw how Teilhard used the metaphor of the ‘spiral’ to map out the manifestations  of energy which power our evolution, and how their manifestations can be seen in the ‘disconuities’ which have occurred in the history of the universe.

Next  week we will look further into the metaphor of the ‘spiral’ as we carry it forward into the realm of consciousness.