Tag Archives: evolution in human life

October 15, 2020 – Seeing Religion from the Perspective of ‘Anticipation’

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At The Root Of Everything

Today’s Post

In the last several weeks we have approached the idea of a secular side to God, identifying a ‘ground of being’ without recourse to the traditional precepts of Western religion.  At the same time, we have seen how reinterpreting traditional Christian concepts in the light of Teilhard’s insights into universal evolution have brought the kernels of belief in these venerable concepts to the fore.  Finally, we looked at how Science and Religion, humanity’s two major belief systems, could extend their distinctive insights into a collaborative approach to the single reality in which we live.

And last week we saw how John Haught outlined a path for these two belief systems to become more harmonious, and hence more helpful to our search, in the approach which he termed, “anticipation”.

This week we will move to the next step of this ‘reinterpretation’ by addressing the ‘Root of Everything’

What’s At The Bottom of It All?

Our approach to the ‘ground of being’ has assumed the perspective of Teilhard with his highly comprehensive understanding of the process of evolution in the coming-to-be of the universe.  This perspective simply recognizes evolution as proceeding along an axis of increasing complexity over time.  Teilhard was one of the few thinkers to see how this process, essential to the fourteen or so billion years which precedes us, still continues in us: in our personal development as well as the development of our species.

He, as well as other thinkers such as Jonathan Sacks, Maurice Blonde and Karen Armstrong, saw the history of religion as the evolving search for the basis of this cosmic agency as it is manifest in personal human life.   As we have seen, this basis of personal life manifests itself as a branch of the cosmic ‘axis of evolution’ as its sap rises through living things.

The Common Threads of Religion

All of the evolving threads of religious thought emerged across the multifaceted evolution of cultures and societies as they evolved their understanding of the roots of reality from a coarse animism and a necessary adjunct of the state.  Karen Armstrong, in her book, “The Axial Age” sees this evolution reaching a tipping point with the paradigm shift seen in the period of human history from 900-200 BCE.  As she puts it,

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

“…they all concluded that if people made a disciplined effort to reeducate themselves, they would experience an enhancement of their humanity.”

Effectively, to paraphrase Armstrong and reflecting Teilhard and Sacks, evolution was becoming aware of itself.  Humanity was moving from its evolutionary critical point of ‘awareness of its awareness’ to its ontological critical point of ‘awareness of the principles of awareness’.  This step of “plumbing the mysteries of their own nature” was effectively a step toward understanding the ‘ground of being’ as the principle of what would later be understood by science as ‘evolution’.  While the theory of evolution as we know it today was still thousands of years in the future, nonetheless in the ‘Axial Age’ human persons embarked on a path that recognized the role that human choice played in both personal maturity and the evolution of society.

The fact that the stream of human inquiry has since bifurcated into the manifold strands found in religion and science only illustrates the value of recognizing, understanding and cooperating with the underlying mechanisms which propel our evolution.  But at the root of it all, such understanding is necessary if we are going to continue to (paraphrasing Dawkins) “raise the world to an increasing level of complexity”.

Teilhard labels this effort as ‘articulation of the noosphere’.  He saw this articulation as requiring two basic insights:

–  the ‘noosphere’ (the milieu of organized human thought) is structured by ‘laws’ by which evolution proceeds in the human species

–  such evolution cannot proceed unless we understand and cooperate with these ‘laws’ in the same way that we are learning to understand and cooperate with the laws of physics, chemistry and biology.

   We can see religion, therefore, as the long, rambling, frequently contradictory and many-faceted attempt by the human species to identify these laws and attempt to apply them to human life.  Or, as Karen Armstrong puts it, “…to experience (growth) by plumbing the mysteries of (our) own nature”.  Just as we have come to see evolution as proceeding along the axis of rising complexity, we can now begin to see religion as the attempt to articulate the dimensions and continuation of this axis, marked by the success of its statements in continuing the rise of evolution through the human.

To understand religion, therefore, is to identify among the diverse threads which can be found among its manifold and often contradictory forms those statements of belief that, when practiced, move us onto a more complete “enhancement of our humanity”.  This in turn will lead to a society which better fosters such a grasp.

If we’re going to understand religion as an approach to ‘making sense of things’ in a way that helps us to understand things from the integrated perspective of Teilhard and Haught, and hence as a ‘signpost’ to a future in which we activate our potential, we must learn to see in it those insights which aid in such an understanding.

The Next Post

Next week we will continue our process of reinterpretation of religion by looking at religion as an ‘articulation of the noosphere’.  How can religious thought help us to better understand reality so that we can better negotiate our passage to the future?

September 24, 2020 – ‘Love’ And The Ground of Being

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What does it mean to ‘love God?’

Today’s Post             

We have spent the past few weeks following Teilhard’s use of meditation from the finding of God to the use of ‘secular meditation’ (psychology) in finding ourselves.  We have followed this thread as it appears in the science of psychology, noting its evolution as ‘assisted secular meditation’, and saw how it can lead us to an understanding of the person that Kierkegaard believed “to be that self that one truly is” and in so doing, move toward ‘fuller being’.

This week we will address how relating to this universal ‘principle of being’ that manifests itself in us can be seen as ‘love’.  Now that we have identified how God, the principle of existence, can be understood as the principle of life within us, we can explore what it can mean to say that such a ‘ground of being’ can be ‘loved’.

A Relook at Love

In today’s culture, it would seem that few things are less tangible but more ubiquitous than ‘love’.  Our culture is rife with references to it: it is used to sell things, explain behavior, understood as a prompt to procreation, as fodder for poems and music, as themes to movies and books.  Nearly all these perceptions understand love primarily as an emotional, sentimental feeling.  Articulated thusly, it seems to offer a poor mechanism for connecting to the ‘ground of being’ that is active at the basis of our lives.

Even our Western religion has problems with it.  For many Christians, the emotional aspect of love far outweighs the ontological aspect: Love is more a sentimental ‘feeling good’ about God, Jesus, Mary and the saints than the facet of the universal energy which effects our growth as it unites us.

Teilhard notes that in the systematic and ever-recursive action of evolution, from the big bang to the human person, the same phenomenon can be seen:

Two entities of like complexity unite, and the product is an entity of higher complexity, and thus  greater in potential for union.

Teilhard’s ontological insight to this evolutionary phenomenon can be summarized as

“Fuller being from closer union, and closer union from fuller being.”

   Science observes this phenomenon as active in the evolution of simple matter from the first bosons to the very complex molecules which constitute the building blocks of life.  The theory of Natural Selection assumes but fails to explain the continuation of this rise of complexity in living things.  Not only does complexity continue to rise in living things, it does so at a much higher rate.  This can be objectively traced in the evolution from simple cells to the neurons which underpin the human characteristic which we call ‘consciousness’.  Without such a fundamental principle of existence, evolution as we know it would not be possible, and the ‘stuff of the universe’ would remain forever at its initial featureless state.

Love As The Energy Of Evolution In The Human

Science documents an example of this upwelling of complexity in the ‘K-T’ event, some 65M years ago.  In this event, the fossil record shows the most evolved species on the planet as reptilian.   This record shows an increase in brain capacity in the later reptiles.  After their extinction, the flow of increased complexity, active in the reptiles for millions of years, began to rise anew in the increasing evolution of mammals.  This phenomenon is echoed in the assertion by Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science, that

“If the tape of evolution were rewound, it would result species different from those seen today.”

    As we have seen, we can hardly expect such a powerful and inexorable upwelling of complexity, acting and increasing for over fourteen billion years, to stop with the human person.  There is every reason to see this agency of evolution as just as active in humans today as it has been throughout the history of the universe.  If we concur with Teilhard that humans are “evolution become aware of itself”, the question remains: how can we see it as active in our lives?

Teilhard observes that evolution proceeds via the ‘activation of energy’.  The unions of evolutionary products that raise the level of complexity do not occur in isolation: they are influenced and effected by the wash of energy which pervades the universe.  Atoms are unified by the strong and weak atomic forces, complex atoms by the fusion of simple atoms by gravity, atoms evolve into molecules under the play of chemical forces.

These energies are manifold, and different types of energy come into play at different rungs of complexity.  For example, gravity was unable to have an effect on evolution until particles acquired mass.  This effect precipitated the gravitational compaction of Helium and Hydrogen atoms into stars which in turn effected complex atoms and enabled molecules.  The forces of chemistry were mute until the arrival of molecules.  And the forces of love could not play their unifying role until the entities of evolution became conscious.  Love, therefore is “the latest manifestation of this energy which effects human ‘complexification”.

Seen through Teilhard’s eyes, the increasing complexity of living things results in the phenomenon of consciousness.  This subjects entities to the influence of energies so subtle as to be immeasurable yet so powerful as to energize the ascent of complexity to a level which is ‘consciousness aware of itself’.

The Action of Love

Teilhard addresses how this new manifestation of cosmic energy plays out in human relationships

In a nutshell, he saw that our personal evolution, our personal growth, is the manifestation of the continuation of ‘complexification’ in the human species.  Teilhard sees this complexification as occurring in two basic recursive steps as we engage in the process of ‘become persons’.

He refers to the first step as ‘ex-centration’, in which we become more aware of our environment, and of other persons, and begin to lose the self-centeredness that framed our infancy.  As we become more adept at this, we become more open to others, and are able to allow our relationships to mature

We saw three weeks ago how Carl Rogers observes the evolving characteristics of maturation in therapy.     Rogers echoes Teilhard’s ‘ontological’ insight into love when he states that

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

   As our relationships deepen, we can become aware of the regard which others hold for us, which in turn offers us a clearer, more objective and more holistic vision of ourselves.

This results in the second step of ‘centration’, in which we become more ‘the person that we are’, and less ‘the person that we thought we were’.  And as we saw with the clinical observations of Dr. Rogers, we can become the more authentic and less centered person that we are capable of becoming.  As we become more adept at self-management, the more we are able to engage in deep, personal relationships.  Thus the cycle continues in a convergent spiral, increasingly focused on deeper maturity through closer relationships by which we enable deeper maturity.

Teilhard sees this convergent spiral acting within us as

“Fuller being from closer union.  Closer union from fuller being.”

 This spiral of ex-centration and centration has another effect as well.  Even as we are changed in a love relationship, this same evolving union changes those who we love even as it is changing us.  Each cycle has the potential of raising the ‘abundance of life’ (as described by Rogers) of the individuals involved.

Thus love, understood now as more ontological than emotional, is indeed a powerful force for our continued evolution.  As we grow, we become more able to love and thus more complete as persons.  As we become more complete, we are able to love more deeply.  As in the case of every step of evolution from the big bang to the present, we as entities unite to effect an entity which is more capable of uniting and in doing so thus becomes more ‘complex’.

Loving God

So how does this approach to human love and evolution lead to a relationship with this universal force, which is active in us?  What does it mean to say that we ‘love’ the ‘ground of being’?  How does Teilhard’s recursive dynamic of love play out in our relationship with God?

In the past few weeks we have been exploring how our recognition of this inner agent of evolution is only the first step.  In order to flourish and grow, to evolve, we must learn not only to be aware of it but how to cooperate with it.  We must learn to trust it.

If we take Teilhard’s two-step process as basic to the activation of the energy of love, the answer is simple.  As Rogers points out, and nearly all religions teach, all personal growth requires a loss of ego, the ‘false self’.  It is always necessary for us to understand what beliefs, practices, and fears are part of the scaffolding, the shell, that we have erected in ourselves to protect us.  The act of trusting that we can survive the disassembly of this scaffolding requires our belief that the person who will emerge will not need them.

This inner trust is not something that another person can give us, it can only be accepted, and then only if we can acknowledge that it is innate, granted to us as our birthright, unearned and inextinguishable.  This inner realization is our connection with ourselves.  It can only be described as our love for ourselves, and hence is a love for the source of ourselves.  Such love isn’t necessarily an emotional state, but is more the recognition, the confident belief that the energy of the universe flows through us, trustworthy, gratuitous and ever-present and the decision to trust and cooperate with it.  It is the energy of the universe made manifest in human life, patiently awaiting our participation. .

To love God therefore is to love ourselves, not in the vernacular of western culture as a superficial emotional or sentimental state, but to recognize, value and eventually learn to trust the principle of life as it is allowed to change our lives.

Thusly seen, God isn’t a supernatural person who requires our adoration, but the recognition of the action of such a universal force in each of us is clearly expressed by Teilhard as he tells of

 “…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.”

Even more to his point, he tells of what can happen such recognition arrives 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 he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.”

The Next Post

Having seen how God can be understood, even recognized, even ‘loved’, as the sum total of all the forces of the universe brought to bear on that which effects us as beings which are conscious of our consciousness, we can go on to take a look at how such an understanding of God can be found in a reinterpreted version of the most basic precepts of the Western systems of science and religion.

September 10 – Psychology as Secular Meditation- Part 4:

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The Self That is Found  

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Last week we saw in some detail how the approach developed by Carl Rogers was applied in his ‘guided inner search’ (our ‘secular meditation’) and how it resonated with Teilhard’s insistence that the personal core within us was an individual manifestation of the cosmic uplifting of all things, the energy of the ‘first cause’ working within us as within all things.  This week we will see in more detail how Rogers observed the finding of this inner core as he participated in the client’s emerging ability to cooperate with it.

What Rogers Found in His Clinical Experience

In Rogers’ clinical experience, he conducted many psychological surveys in which he observed the following changes taking place in his “clients” as they undergo therapy:

– The individual becomes more integrated, more effective

– Fewer of the characteristics are shown which are usually termed neurotic or psychotic, and more of the healthy, well-functioning person

– The perception of self changes, becoming more realistic

– They become more like the person they wish to be, and value themselves more highly

– They are more self-confident and self-directing

– They have a better understanding of themselves, become open to experience, deny or represses less of their experience

– They become more accepting in their attitudes towards others, seeing others as more similar to themselves

Rogers saw the role of the therapist as “facilitating” these changes, fostering them by way of offering the client a relationship in which the client can feel safe enough to discover the value of the person that Kierkegaard believed “to be that self that one truly is”.

Rogers used the results seen in his clinical experience to delineate the steps which clients undergo as they become more aware of themselves and increasingly ready to cooperate with the energies of their lives.  He saw the following things happening in such a person:

– Feelings evolve from being remote and un-owned to fearlessly experienced in the immediate present

– Experiences evolve from very remote and meaningless to immediate, and as an acceptable referent for accurate meaning

– Congruence between experience and awareness becomes more complete as experience becomes safer

– Communication becomes clearer as the internal connection between feelings, experiences and awareness improves

– Problems become recognized, understood and owned

– As experiences are perceived as a trustworthy guide to behavior in relationships, the danger perceived in relationships is lessened

The Person that Emerges From Such  Assisted ‘Secular Meditation’

In general, Rogers saw the maturing person as

– Increasingly open to experience, which permits less defensiveness

– Increasingly “existential”; living more fully in each moment, in touch with experiences and feelings

– Increasingly trusting of his own organism, able to trust feelings and experiences

– Increasingly able to function more completely

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

The relationship that Rogers sees as necessary between the client and therapist is very like that seen in the mature love between human persons.  As Rogers asserts, echoing Teilhard,

“There seems every reason to hypothesize that the therapeutic relationship is only one instance of interpersonal relations, and that the same lawfulness governs all such relationships.”

Every human relationship touches on some aspect of the characteristics that Rogers identifies in the process of “becoming a person”.  In all relationships, from the most intimate to the most fraternal, such skills as management and expression of feelings, owning of experience, congruence between experience and awareness, clarity of communication, responsibility for behavior and honesty manifest themselves in patience, empathy and tolerance.  In all relationships, when we are welcomed into an accepting environment, we are able to move a little closer to “being that person that we are”, and when we welcome another in the same way, their own “becoming” is invited.

Existentialists and Teilhard

The new perspective pioneered by the existentialists can be seen in the light of Teilhard’s insight into

the human person as a product of evolution.   This insight itself comes from the emerging concept of general evolution in human thinking precipitated by the scientific discoveries of Cosmic “size”, “duration” and “unfolding”.  To begin to understand everything as “in the process of evolving” can be interpreted as seeing everything “in the process of becoming”, since each step in evolution comes from ‘something’ becoming ‘something new’, and the new something which results is more complex than its precedent.

Since the human person can be seen as simply the latest manifestation of this fundamental cosmic process, Teilhard asserts that we can expect the same dynamic to be working in our lives as well.  Every day offers us the opportunity to grow from the ‘someone’ that we are to a ‘new someone’ that we can become.  The new aspects of our person which emerge, if this growth is authentic, are consistent and congruent with the forces of the universe.  They are well articulated by Rogers and consistent with the positive expectations of the existentialists.

The Next Post

Next week we will recap where we have got to in our ‘Secular Search for the Core of Personness’ o,  In our vernacular, ’ Secular Meditation’.

August 27, 2020 – Psychology as Secular Meditation- Part 2

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The Transition

 Today’s Post

Last week we opened the subject of psychology as offering a secular approach to what the mystics have been practicing for millennia: finding God by finding ourselves.

  • Recognizing God as the agent of the upwelling of complexity in Cosmic evolution
  • Becoming aware of the presence of this upwelling in our own personal evolution
  • Finding God in our search for our fundamental selves.

We saw how Freud pioneered this undertaking in his objective, secular and empirical manner (as opposed to that of the religious intuitive and scriptural-based approach).  We also saw how, while offering a magnificent array of new concepts, and working empirically, Freud’s psychology nonetheless seemed predicated on a very negative assumption of our basic selves.  To him, meditation, even via psychology, can be very dangerous indeed, since it shows our basic selves to be highly unreliable, even untrustworthy.

This week we will address an orthogonal approach to psychology which emerged in the last century.  This different approach, while also consistent with the empirical perspectives and methods of science, assumed a core of the human person which was radically different from Freud. 

From Freud to Existentialism

As we saw in the previous post, Freud was successful in developing an integrated system of thought which objectively addressed the whole of human activity.  He pioneered the understanding of the human in terms of inner energies, motivations, stimuli and even “economies” that determine his development from birth to death, and did this while adopting the objective approach of science.  His treatment of human irrationality and sexuality is unmatched. However, his underlying materialism, misogyny and overall pessimism left him with a definitely pessimistic outlook on the human person’s potential for satisfying relationships and personal maturity.

But we can find agreement between Freud and Teilhard on several things, such as the existence of a personal core of energy which underlies human growth and relationships, and understanding love as manifest in the reciprocal exchange of this energy between individual persons.

They sharply disagree, however, on the nature and source of this energy, and the role that this reciprocal exchange could have in positive growth, maturity, and even creation of the person involved in its exchange.  The difference between these two perspectives sharpens further when they are applied to human relationships at the social level.

Freud’s thinking began to be reevaluated and modified as the increasing number of Western psychologists created a large body of empirical data which could be analyzed to support or challenge the propositions which originally formed the basis for Freud’s thinking.  The relationship between the analyst and the analyzed evolved as well, due to the increasing educational level of the middle class, the growing acceptability of psychology by religion, and the emergence of expectations on the part of those undergoing analysis.

The Pioneers of Existentialism

In the mid twentieth century, several psychologists emerged with a distinctively different and  more positive understanding of the human person and the dynamics of personal growth and relationships with others.  This approach generally became known as “existential”.  Their general methods became known as ‘counselling’, and adopted by religion as “pastoral counselling”.

   Rollo May understood the basic tenet of existential psychotherapy as “that which stands with scientific analysis as expressed in the genius of Freud”.  However, he saw the empirical data that science also brings into the picture as unfolding the understanding of the human person on a deeper and broader level than Freud.  This deeper understanding assumes with Freud that it is possible to have an objective ‘science of man’.  It does not, however, ‘fragmentize’ him by breaking him down, as did Freud, into compartments, and thus lose the grasp of the ‘whole’ in the tangled archipelago of the ‘parts’.  Unlike therapeutic interpretation as practiced in Freudian psychoanalysis (which consists of referring a person’s experience to a pre-established theoretical framework) ‘existential’ interpretation seeks to understand how the person himself subjectively experiences reality, then works with him toward actualizing his potential to become whole.

With May, psychology began to progress from analysis and diagnosis to guided inner search.  In doing so, it was emerging as assisted secular meditation.

Instead of focusing on psychopathology and what goes wrong with people, Abraham Maslow formulated a more positive account of human behavior which focused on what goes right. He was interested in human potential, and how it could be actualized.  He believed that each person has a desire for self-fulfillment; namely, the tendency for him to “become actualized in what he is potentially”.

As we have seen, this requires us to first find ourselves, and then cooperate with the primal force which rises within us and in which lie our potentialities.

   Ashley Montagu believed that as a consequence of humanity’s unique evolutionary history, in which

We are required to be highly cooperative to survive, human drives are oriented in the direction of growth and development in relationship and cooperation.  He believed that what we are born for is “to live as if life and love were one”.  Like Teilhard, he subscribed to the belief that evolution rises along an axis, and that we are located, both as individuals and society, on that axis.

These pioneers believed that the core of human personality is positive, not irrational and weighted toward destruction as Freud believed.  Their clinical experience led them to recognize that the innermost core of man’s nature, at the deepest layers of his personality, the base of his “animal nature” is actually positive, basically socialized, forward-moving, rational and realistic.  They saw the goal of psychology as first helping us find this inner self, then helping us learn to cooperate with it.

In scientific circles, however, this was a difficult concept to accept.  In psychology, science’s first foray into the human psyche, Freud and his followers presented convincing arguments that the id, man’s basic and unconscious nature, is primarily composed of instincts which would, if permitted expression, result in incest, murder and other crimes.

In religious expressions as well, especially in the Luther-influenced conservative Christian traditions, our culture has been permeated with the concept that the human person is basically sinful (Luther’s “piles of manure covered by Christ”), and only by something approaching a miracle can this sinful nature be negated.  The whole problem of therapy, as seen by these groups, is how to successfully hold these untamed forces in check, rather than have them emerge in the costly fashion of the neurotic.

In contrast, the existentialists believed that the reason for this negative belief, held by many psychologists even today, lay in the fact that since therapy uncovers hostile and anti-social feelings, one must assume that this proves the deeper and therefore basic nature of the human person to be unrelentingly negative.  Only slowly has it become evident that these untamed and unsocial feelings are neither the deepest nor the strongest, and that the inner core of human personality is the organism itself which is, in addition to self-preserving, also highly social and capable of perfection.

The Next Post

This week we saw how the basic tenets of psychology began to evolve in the twentieth century from seeing the personal core as ‘dangerous’ to seeing it as a positive and trustworthy basis for human personal growth and successful relationships.  Next week we will look in more detail at how one of the most pivotal Existentialists applied this approach and the results he recorded.

August 13, 2020 – Connecting to God

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Opening the Door

Today’s Post

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

Teilhard’s Seven Steps of Meditation

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

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

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

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

Step 1: Recognizing the Facets of our Person

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

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

Step 2: Moving past the Safety of the Scaffolding

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

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

Step 3: Encountering the Font of Our Consciousness

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

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

Step 4: Facing The Intangibility of the Font

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 6: Recognizing our Entwinement in the Fabric of Existence

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

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

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

Step 7: Recognizing the Face of the Ground of Being

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

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

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

                         It is I, be not afraid.”

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

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

Secular Meditation

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

A universe without increasing complexity would not evolve.

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

The Next Post

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

 

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

August 6, 2020 – How Can God Be Located?

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Looking For God

 Today’s Post

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

The History of Looking For God

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

We can start with Teilhard’s assertion that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Search for the ‘Cosmic Spark’

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

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

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

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

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

Armstrong saw this emerging realization as

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

 

July 25, 2020 –God and the Phenomenon of Person

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How Can God Be Considered as ‘Personal’?

 Today’s Post

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

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

Is God a ‘person’?

This week we will address this question.

 ‘Personization’ in Universal Evolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 ‘Personization’ In The Human

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To which we add:

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

 

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

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What Is a ‘Person”?

Today’s Post

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

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

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

‘Person-ness”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 ‘Person-ness’ and God

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

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

A Starting Place

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Science can purify religion from error and superstition.”

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

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

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

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

A Preliminary Definition of God

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

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

Today’s Post

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

Reinterpretation Principles From Maurice Blondel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Reinterpretation Principles From Karen Armstrong (The Great Transformation)

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

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

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

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

Reinterpretation Principles From Jonathan Sacks (The Great Partnership)

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

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

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

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

Reinterpretation Principle from Richard Rohr

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

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

Reinterpretation Principle from John Haight (The New Cosmic Story)

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

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

An Overarching Principle

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

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

The Next Post

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

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