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December 19, 2019 – The Secular Side of Jesus

This Week

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

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

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

Starting with the ‘New Testament’

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

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

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

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

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

The New Testament introduced some new dualities, such as

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesus and Evolution

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

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

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

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

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

“may be trusted to govern themselves without a master”

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

The Next Post

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

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

December 12 – Psychology as Secular Meditation

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Today’s Post

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

We noted that such an approach might sound ‘overly religious’, and perhaps out of place in a ‘secular’ approach to this ‘ground of being’. Even though, as we noted, it requires no religious mindset, it is also true that such religious perspective, warts and all, has seeped into Western secular culture with its increasing focus on the importance of the ‘person’ as well as the idea of ‘connection’ to both ourselves and our ‘mileu’.

In this general approach of looking at this search from the secular point of view, this week we will take a look at how a form of “secular meditation” can be seen in the secular empirical practice of ‘psychology’. We’ll look at psychology from the two major approaches of Freud and the ‘Existentialists’, and compare these approaches in light of Teilhard’s context of evolution.

This segment of the summary of the blog, “The Secular Side of God” can be found in the posts from November 10, 2016 to January 5, 2017

The Emergence of Psychology

Beginning with the rising tide of humanity’s awareness of itself as ‘personal’, summarized in Karen Armstrong’s book, “The Great Transformation”, humans began to apply empirical tactics to their understanding of the world about them. This new approach to reality inevitably led to the human person itself as a subject of this enquiry.

Even the most casual study of human history, however, reveals a ‘dark side’ to humanity. All of the great books of ancient religions recognize it and warn against it. It’s not surprising that the first approaches to making secular sense of human behavior would have focused on this ‘dark side’

One of the first thinkers to attempt a systematic empirical approach to the human ‘psyche’ was Sigmund Freud, applying the new, empirical and objective methods of science to the making and testing of hypotheses of human growth and relationships. His hermeneutic, however, was more in line with an understanding derived more from the negative interpretations of Lucretius and Hobbes than the positive approaches of Plato, Plotinus and Augustine. While Freud wove a phenomenal cloth of hypotheses about the makeup of human nature, his assumption of the danger of the core of humanity colored his entire approach. In his view, the human person was, at its core, very dangerous indeed.

Freud was the first to systematically apply the emerging practices of science to study of the human person, and assembled a magnificent edifice of concepts, terminology and theory which was applicable to diagnosis and treatment of human emotional problems. Unfortunately, his premise of the dangerous nature of the basic human, combined with his disdain of organized religion, colored this remarkable undertaking with a deep-seated pessimism that was to permeate his ‘school’ of psychology.

Freud’s view of human ontology was surely influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, in which the human evolved from a non-human (animal) ancestor. He held that this evolution explained the source of our ‘dark’ side, and hence had to be overcome if we were to rid ourselves of our ‘psychoses’. In his words:

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

While Teilhard could say of the voice that flows from our most inner core

“It is I, be not afraid”

Freud would say

“It is Ego, be very afraid”

Freud’s negative assumption of human nature can be seen in that bastion of European Christianity, Martin Luther. Luther himself, echoing Calvin’s assessment o “total depravity”, expressed his opinion of the basic nature of the human person when he said

“Men are like piles of manure covered by Christ”.

This approach permeated many expressions of Western Christianity, and no doubt highly influenced Freud.

So Freud, while pioneering the application of the objective secularism of science to the study of the human person, nonetheless arrives at a position at odds with Teilhard’s proposition that the kernel at the core of the person is a trustworthy manifestation of the same agent of rising complexity afoot in the evolution of the universe. However, 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 manifested in the reciprocal exchange of this energy between individual persons.

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

The ‘Positive’ Schools of Thought

Even though Freud correctly recognized the ‘Dark Side’, his assumption that the kernel of the person is dangerous does not take into account that it is through engagement with this kernel that the human evolves from emotional immaturity toward personal wholeness. It’s not that the child’s essence is negative, but that his growth towards maturity is incomplete.

After the Second World War, a second, decidedly non-Freudian approach to psychology began to emerge. While agreeing with Freud that it is possible to have a ‘science of the human’, it is not necessary to ‘fragmentize’ him as was done by Freud. This ‘Existential’ approach, as it came to be known, focused less on understanding behavior by reference to a predetermined Freudian structure and more on understanding how persons themselves subjectively experience reality. Psychology began to move from analysis and diagnosis to guided inner search.

Thinkers such as Rollo May, Abraham Maslow and Ashley Mongatu were among the first to focus on the development of human potential and placing humans in an evolutionary context, believing that the negative and antisocial aspects of behavior discovered by Freud were more evidence of immaturity than as proof of an unredeemable core.

A more recent example of this approach can be seen in Carl Rogers, who summarized his approach to psychology:

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

instead of,

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

The goal of both approaches is betterment of the individual, but the methods are clearly different.

Rogers takes a view of our personal evolution that is quite different from Freud. He assumes that each human person comes into the world with a quantum of potency, and that instead of being broken, he is incomplete and capable of personal evolution –growth– towards increased being (or as Karen Armstrong would put it, “more completely possession of one’s self”).

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

In Rogers’ therapeutic relationship between therapist and patient, concepts such as belief, faith and love, commonly associated with religion, take on a new, secular, and much more relevant meaning.

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

Freud, Rogers and Teilhard in a Nutshell

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

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

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

As Teilhard affirms, finding ourselves is finding the universal thread of evolution that rises in us. As Rogers discovers, the legacy that we receive as human persons can be trusted to power our growth towards more complete being. From this insight, God can not only be found but, the ‘ground of being’ can be embraced.

Teilhard and Rogers offer an approach for such a process:

After identifying God as the agent of evolution,

by which things increase in complexity over time,

through which the process of evolution is possible,

from the big bang to the human,

as products of evolution, even in our lives,

to which we can come in contact

by searching for the kernel of ourselves

using the emerging insights of science

The Twelve-Step program of Alcoholics Anonymous is another example of ‘secular meditation’. In creating this program in 1935, Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, with typical American pragmatism, designed a truly practical and deliberately secular program based on the Existentialist’s premise that humans, at their core, were redeemable. Several decades of practice of this approach has established significant objective evidence that the assumptions of ‘The Twelve Steps’ program are indeed valid.

The Next Post

This week we took a look at how the basic Western understanding of the value of the human person has developed into a hermeneutic for a secular approach to a ‘science of the person’. Granted that many scientists take a reductive approach to such science, seeing the human person as the organized activity of aggregated molecules, nonetheless those seeking to apply the methods of science to the improvement of human lives have adopted many of the core values of Christianity without being shackled by its belief in the ‘supernatural’.

Next week we will begin to apply our ‘principles of reinterpretation’ to some of the subjects of religion In our search for “The Secular Side of God’. The first such subject will be the “person of Jesus’.

November 28 Relating to God

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Today’s Post

Last week, in moving on with summarizing the blog, “The Secular Side of God” we made a first cut at applying our ‘principles of reinterpretation’ to the basic idea of ‘God’ as the ‘Ground of Being’, which belief underpins all religions. But we noted that by taking Teilhard’s approach to understanding God in the context of universal evolution, we see the objection raised by Carl Sagan, reinforced by Richard Dawkins:

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

While setting aside, for a moment, that all of the ‘laws’ which ‘govern the universe’ would in fact include the human person, the question is nonetheless valid. This week we will summarize the segments of the Blog from 15 September2016 to 2 February 2017, which address relating to the ‘Ground of Being’.

Why Should It Be Difficult?

If, as Teilhard asserts, the human is simply the latest branch of the ‘axis of Evolution’, itself alive and well throughout the whole of the universe for some fourteen billion years so far, then becoming aware of the existence and the agency of this upwelling of complexity in each of us, and establishing enough of a relationship with it to assure our further evolution would not seem difficult. Powered by the accumulation of evolved instincts, our pre-human ancestors were able to reliably get us to the most recent four or so hundred thousand years .

But, alas, as our human history shows too clearly, it’s not that easy. History is filled with examples of, for example, the conflict among the reptilian brain’s stimuli of ‘fight or flight’, the limbic brain’s need for relationship and our neo cortex brain’s desire to ‘sort things out’ before acting.
Christianity is frequently cited as a ‘leveling’ agent which addresses this age-old tension, and indeed many examples of this agency can be seen (such as Jefferson’s adoption of Jesus’ belief in human equality into successful Western governments), but even it is rife with ‘dualisms’ that pull us in one way or another. Its idea of God, on the surface a unifying concept, becomes rife with such dualisms.

Jonathan Sacks notes that much more so than Judaism, 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 in these either/or dichotomies a departure from the typically Jewish perspective of either/and.

This increasing dualism is contrasted with what Blondel insisted as fundamental to an understanding of the intimacy of God. Rephrased:

“It is impossible to think of ourselves as ‘over here’, and then of God, as ‘over against us’. This is impossible because we have come to be who we are through a process in which God is involved.”

This is, of course, a logical conclusion from the essential message of John:

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

Blondel, Teilhard, Sacks and the contemporary theologian Richard Rohr all decry how this message of John, itself a logical conclusion from the teachings of Jesus, is frequently minimized in the subsequent evolution of the Greek-influenced Church. Thus, it’s not difficult to understand the difficulty of returning to the sense of belonging that our ‘pre anxiety’ animal ancestors enjoyed. While Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’ might have a single trunk, we, lost among the branches, have to work to find it.

Finding the Way

A first step to such a search is to recognize that there is indeed a way. Teilhard’s postulation that the basic element of universal evolution, in which all things, including ourselves, are enmeshed, requires belief that the energy of this evolution having existed in all things for the fourteen or so billion years of universal ‘becoming’, is still active in its most recent product.

This is not a religious assertion. As we saw last week, even an atheist of such renown as Richard Dawkins can acknowledge it. While he fails to recognize its importance to human life, once understood the logical consequences of it lead unerringly to a positive and ‘future affirming’ grasp of human life.

Thus a starting place for ‘relating’ to a ‘ground of being’ (or, in Dawkins-speak, ‘the fundamental principle of existence’) is to begin to recognize how this universal agency of complexification manifests itself in the human person. Again, taking a cue from Teilhard,

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

we can see that our search for God, therefore, begins with a search for ourselves.

This is, of course, an idea that first rises during the Axial Age (900-200 BCE). As Karen Armstrong, in her book on this period sees it:

”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.”

Given the tangle of practices that emerge from this simple recognition, however, points to its difficulty. One of these, however, resonates across nearly expression of religion.

Meditation

This term can evoke many negative reactions, especially in the minds of nonbelievers or those who highly value empirical thought over intuitional insight. While its basis is simply concentrating on finding and experiencing this ‘cosmic spark’, this ‘sap of the tree of evolution’ which lies in every human, the practices most commonly associated with it evoke pictures of self-abasement, withdrawal from relationships, other-worldliness and a general distancing from and disdaining of life as lived. Teilhard himself, comfortable in both empirical and intuitional worlds, summarized an approach for this search for the ‘cosmic spark’ in a completely secular way. From his book, ‘The Divine Milieu’, he writes:

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 unlikelyhood 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.”

The Next Post

This week we moved from applying our ‘principles of reinterpretation’ to the basic idea of ‘God’ to addressing a path to relationship with ‘the ground of being’. Agreeing with Blondel that “Every statement about God is effectively a statement about man”, we can see that every step toward God is a step towards ourselves.

Having seen this, the next question that can be asked is, what’s involved in ‘finding ourselves’?

Next week we will move on to looking at this activity through secular lens. What is there at our core, and how do we move towards it?

November 14 Interpreting Religion

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Today’s Post

Continuing our look at the role of religion in human evolution, last week we saw six examples of the parts that religion plays. In keeping with the perspective of secularity that we have taken in this blog, while they are not based on the traditional teachings of any religion, they are agencies common to all.

This week we go one step further into such a secular perspective, and that is the idea of God. Is it possible to approach the many and diverse ideas of the ‘ground of being’ for some level of commonality? Further, is there any way that a concept such as ’the ground of being’ can be compatible with the deliberations of science?

This subject is discussed in the five posts from May 25, (Reinterpretation) to July 7 2016 (Reinterpretation Principles).

Reinterpretation

Maurice Blondel was one of the first theologians to suggest that in order to survive in an age which saw the increasing influence of science, religion must become more meaningful, immediate and relevant. He saw it as necessary for religion to emerge from the hierarchical, supernatural and autocratic form that it had taken by the late eighteen hundreds. He suggested that to make this happen, religion must be ‘reinterpreted’.

While Blondel may have opened the door to rethinking the traditional understanding of God and the universe, others, such as Teilhard de Chardin expanded this concept by reinterpreting the tenets of science as well. Today, thinkers such as Jonathan Sacks, Karen Armstrong, John Haight and Richard Rohr continue this expansion.

As Michael Dowd observes, such ‘reinterpretation’ isn’t new to Western thinking::

“Just as Augustine reinterpreted Christianity in light of Plato in the 4th century, and Aquinas integrated Aristotle in the 13th, today there are dozens of theologians across the spectrum re-envisioning the Christian faith. Whose ideas are they integrating now? Darwin, Einstein, Hubble, Wilson and all those who have corrected, and continually contribute to, an evidence-based understanding of biological, cosmic, and cultural evolution.”

Principles of Reinterpretation

To many, however, the precepts of religion are too deeply rooted in the idea of God as completely supernatural to allow for such interpretation. God is understood as above nature but so powerful as to break through to the level of nature. To others, the traditional view of God, with its elements of magic and superstition, simply are not worthy of consideration.

Somewhere closer to the center of these two poles is the observation from Richard Dawkins, prominent atheist, in his book, “The God Delusion”:

“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.”

The opening of atheism to concepts such as a ‘first cause’ which ‘raises the world’ in a process of ‘increasing complexity’ is simply another way of understanding God as ‘secular’.

And, coming at it from the opposite pole, we can see how the thinkers listed above, Blondel, Teilhard, Sacks, Armstrong, Haight and Rohr offer discrete principles for mining the ore of traditional religious lore for the gold that lies within.

Blondel, writing late in the nineteenth century, suggested several ‘principles’ which could offer clarity in understanding the ‘ground of being’ from a secular perspectives. His principles are outlined in Gregory Baum’s book, “Man Becoming”.

‘There is no human standpoint from which God is simply man’s ‘over-against’ “. It is impossible to think of ourselves over here, and then of God, as over against us. This is impossible because we have come to be who we are through a process in which God is involved.
“Every sentence about God can be translated into a declaration about human life”. An example of this principle: To say that “God Exists” means that “We are alive by a principle that transcends us, over which we have no power, which summons us to surpass ourselves and frees us to be creative”.
“That God is person means that man’s relationship to the deepest dimension of his life is personal”, not that God is a person (which based on the definition above would limit God).
“That God is Father means that human life is oriented towards a future freely given”. God is ‘on our side’.

Teilhard and others expanded upon Blondel’s early insights into the recognition of religion (properly reinterpreted) as a valid hermeneutic for understanding the human person embedded in the universal process of evolution. From these expansions, seven ‘principles’ can be seen:

– Evolution occurs because of a fundamental characteristic of matter and energy which over time organizes the ‘stuff of the universe’ from very simple entities into ever more complex forms. This principle continues to be active in the appearance and continued evolution of the human person.

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

– All things evolve, and the fundamental thread of evolution is that of increasing complexity

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

– The basic process of physics by which evolution occurs consists of elements of matter pulled into ever more complex arrangements through elemental forces. When recognized as part of the elements and forces described in the Standard Model of Physics, the phenomenon of increasing complexity completes the Standard Model by adding the characteristic which makes evolution possible. This process continues to manifest itself today in the evolutionary products of human persons and the unitive forces of love which connect us in such a way in which we become more human.

The Principle: Just as atoms unite to become molecules, and cells to become neural systems, so do our personal connections enhance our personal growth which enhances our societies and assures our evolution.

Adding the effect of increasing complexity to the basic theories of Physics also unites the three eras of evolution (pre-life, life, conscious life) as it provides a thread leading from the elemental mechanics of matter through the development of neural systems in Natural Selection to the ‘awareness of awareness’ as seen in humans.

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

– This addition points the way to understanding how evolution continues to proceed through the human person and his society. The neurological advancement in living things evolves the central neural system (the brain) in three stages: the reptilian brain, with its instinctive fight/flight reactions; the limbic brain, which incorporates emotional care of the young; and the neo-cortex brain, which is capable dealing with these instinctual stimuli.

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.

– This ‘skill’ is the subject of nearly every religious and philosophical thought system in human history. Understanding the nature of the reality which surrounds us is a critical step, which must be followed by decisions of how to react to it if we are to fulfill our true human potential.

The Principle: Finding the core of a religious teaching involves understanding how the teaching can lead to increasing the skill of using the neo cortex brain to modulate the instinctive stimuli of the ‘lower’ brains’.

– “We must first understand, and then we must act.” (Teilhard). If our understanding is correct, then an action appropriate to the understanding can be chosen. If we act in accordance with what is real, our actions will contribute to both our personal evolution (our process of becoming more whole, more mature) as well as the evolution of our society. As Richard Rohr puts it, “Our lives must be grounded in awareness of the patterns of the universe.”

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

The Next Post

This week we continued an overview of the eleven posts on the evolution of religion, looking at specific principles that help to see the underlying value of religious teachings among the many teachings that Richard Dawkins sees as ‘baggage’.

Having seen this, next week we will move on applying these principles to the core concept of all religions: that of the ‘Ground of Being’, better known as “God”. What does understanding God from the secular viewpoint do to the idea of relating to ‘Him”?

October 24 The Evolution of Religion

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Today’s Post

This week we continue the recap of the blog, “The Secular Side of God” with an overview of the posts which address the evolution of religion.

We left off last week with an overview of evolution itself, seeing through Teilhard’s eyes how the unfolding of the universe can be seen in the increase of complexity over time. Therefore this universal context, since it includes both the infinitesimally small at one end and the consciously personal at the other end, it seamlessly encompasses humans as well as atoms.

Our treatment of this subject can be seen in the posts from 6 August 2015 (Isn’t This Just Deism?) to 26 November 2015 (Part 7- The Rise of Christianity)

Looking at Religion From the Vantage Point of Evolution

This blog assumes Teilhard’s basic hermeneutic that most things can be better understood when put in the context of religion, and his context included the entire universe over the entire span of time to the present. Therefore it is appropriate to approach the complex and multifaceted subject of religion as one of the products of evolution if we are to make better sense of it.

We took a look at such evolution from three perspectives:

From the vantage point of history
As the evolution of thinking
As influenced by human neurology

As history

From the perspective of history, we noted how Matthew Kneale, An Atheist’s History of Belief, saw it: we have evidence of religious belief in the very first stirrings of human thought, addressing healing, controlling the environment, enhancing relationships and coordinating group activities. These four values, articulated in the many diverse and manifold beliefs, were understood as contributing to the quality of early human life.

He traces the evolution of these intuitions at the tribal level to the formation of regulations seen as necessary for the social order of the emerging civilizations. The earliest of such formal guidelines seems to have appeared as early as the 24^th century BCE. The first ‘laws’ to address a relation between humans and deities appears later, and includes prescriptions for rituals, behavior and worship (Judaism).

As The evolution of thinking

It was not until the fourth century BCE that laws begin to appear which addressed relations among different societal groupings that took the place of distinct tribes. The first comprehensive example of which can be found in the Roman laws, which begin to appear as early versions of what we know today as ‘constitutions’.

During this same period, however, a new way of thinking emerged in the East which addressed both human nature and relationships separately from regulating society. The ‘Axial Age’, summarized eloquently by Karen Armstrong in her book by the same name, introduced such concepts as ‘person’, ‘love’, and ‘human potential’. Such intellectual stirring can be seen in Chinese Confucianism, Indian Buddhism, Israeli Monotheism and Greek Rationalism, all of which addressed the basic nature of the human person and explored ‘his’ potential for a fuller life.

All the great concepts of contemporary religion were born during this period, such as the importance of charity, the danger of egoism, the existence of the transcendent and the importance of the human person in the scheme of things. With such new ideas, humans were becoming ‘self conscious’, aware of their consciousness, and therefore planting seeds in the garden of collective consciousness that would flower a few centuries later in societies which treated all members as ‘equal’.

Other seeds were planted at this time, such as the Greek break from Eastern modes of thinking, as seen in the rise of objectivity and rationality, and the Jewish understanding of the ‘ground of being’ as not only ‘one’ but ‘personal’.

As Influenced by human neurology

Jonathan Sacks, in his book, “The Great Partnership” goes beyond seeing such evolution simply as the development of ideas. He notes that the human brain is made up of two hemispheres, referred to as the ‘right’ and ‘left’ brains. While a neurological fact, it is common to impute human thinking to one or the other, resulting is a general association of ‘emotion’ to the left brain, and ‘reason’ to the right. While he correctly identifies the necessity of the whole brain working cohesively to achieve ‘rationality’, he does acknowledge each hemisphere’s contribution as distinct.

With this approach to human thinking in mind, he sees the historical record prior to the ‘Axial Age’ as more influenced by the ‘right’ brain, and hence more ‘intuitional’. This can be seen in the preponderance of the religious beliefs, which themselves were the basis for what was understood to be the norms of society.

With the Greeks, he theorizes, a movement to thinking with the ‘left’ brain can be seen. As an example of this, he proposes that the shift in writing of the Greek alphabet from ‘left-to-right’ to ‘right- t- left’ was caused by this shift in brain hemisphere thinking.

He further takes note that as a result of this shift, by the third century BCE, Greek and Hebrew (still ‘left-to-right) were not just different languages with different alphabets, they represented orthogonal civilizations, very unlike in their most basic understanding of reality. Departing from the prevalent mode of ‘right brained’ thinking to one more influenced by the ‘left brain’, he sees

“Athens evolved to a ‘literate’ from an ‘oral’ culture”, and in doing so “it became the birthplace of science and philosophy, supremely left-brain, conceptual and analytical ways of thinking”.

The Rise of Christianity

Having established a pathway of the evolution of human thought from the ancient ‘right-brained’ mode to the branching of the ‘left-brain’ mode about six thousand years ago, Sacks goes on to look at how these two great branches continue to evolve. In particular, he notes how, in five steps, these two branches demonstrate their potential for eventually becoming a single branch.

First he notes how in the passages from ‘the stories of Jesus’ seen in the first three gospels (the synoptic gospels), the teachings of Jesus are expressed in typical Jewish lexicon: Jesus makes points by telling stories, as had the many ‘authors’ of the Old Testament.

Then we find Paul restating them into Greek formats: lists, analysis, and most importantly, philosophy. He summarizes Jesus’ teachings into such things as ‘Theological Virtues’ (faith, hope love) and the eight aspects of the ‘Fruit of the Spirit’. He goes on to develop the nascent gospel concept of ‘Jesus as the Son of God’ into his concept of ‘The Universal Christ’. Then, we find that under the Hellenistic influences of Paul, the first ‘New Testament’ emerges in Greek, not Hebrew. Finally, the continued development of Christian theology occurs at the hands of the ‘Fathers’ and the ‘Doctors’ of the Church, all classically trained in Greek philosophy.

Thus, Sacks notes,

“Christianity combined left-hand brain rationality with right-brain spirituality in a single, glorious overarching structure.”

However, he goes on to see several problems with this attempt to remerge the two branches. He finds that as Christianity develops, while it might carry the evolving insight of human personal and societal potential for continued evolution, its burdensome hierarchy, insistence on its exclusive understanding of truth and creation of many dualities weakens it. He sees these as

“Much more so than Judaism, Christianity divides: body/soul, physical/spiritual, heaven/earth, this life/next life, evil/good, with the emphasis on the second of each. “

As a result, he sees modern Christianity as having effected an increased loss of relevancy as well as an increase in the perceived distance between the human person and the ‘ground of being’. These problems also contribute to the well-known contention between science and religion today.

We will explore this division and the potential for overcoming it later in the blog, but at this stage, how can we take one step back to establish a clearer picture of how these two major currents of thinking are active in human life? How can they be better understood in Teilhard’s hermeneutic of using the context of universal evolution to make sense of things?.

The Next Post

This week we overviewed the six posts on the evolution of religion in which Jonathan Sacks’ understanding of how the evolution of human thinking can be seen in the evolution of religion from its earliest beginnings to the emergence of Christianity.

Having established this look into religion’s evolution, next week we will apply Teilhard’s unique perspective on universal evolution to Sacks’ insights.

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

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Today’s Post

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

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

The Three Virtues Model

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Today’s Post

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

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

This week we will explore this a bit further.

The Spiritual Ground of Happiness and the Terrain of Synergy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happiness and the Terrain of Synergy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

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

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Today’s Post

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

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

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

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

What is Spirituality?

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

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

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

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

As we have seen many times in this blog, Teilhard would have agreed at this level. His take on spirituality also eschewed terms like ‘supernatural’, as he understood Dawkins’ ‘process’ to lie in the plane of natural existence.“…spirit is neither super-imposed nor accessory to the cosmos, but that it quite simply represents the higher state assumed in and around us by the primal and indefinable thing that we call, for want of a better name, the ‘stuff of the universe’. Nothing more; and also nothing less. Spirit is neither a meta- nor an epi- phenomenon, it is the phenomenon.”

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

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

“Spirituality is not a recent accident, arbitrarily or fortuitously imposed on the edifice of the world around us, it is a deeply rooted phenomenon, the traces of which we can follow with certainty backwards as far as the eye can reach. The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self-conscious.”

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

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

August 8, 2019 – The Material Ground of Happiness

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Today’s Post

Last week we continued our exploration of the ‘middle ground’ of the ‘terrain of synergy’ in which the efforts of science and religion overlap as they continue to address human life. We saw how the aspect of ‘happiness’ in the human person, while much to be desired, is both difficult to quantify, and if common belief would have it, difficult to attain.

This week we will take a closer look at this slippery subject, to see if Teilhard’s hermeneutic of placing a subject in the context of universal evolution will help us to see it more clearly.

What Is Happiness

The long string of human thinking in our literature, philosophy and religions presents us with a wide spectrum of stances that we can take in response to Shakespeare’s “slings and outrages” as inflicted by life. At one end of this wide spectrum lies simple acceptance of endless rounds of ‘fate’ and ‘fortune’, as the Easterners would have it. At the far other end the ‘joyous embrace’ of cycles, which may well recur, but also rise over time, as envisioned in the West . Not surprisingly, most of us (and our literature, philosophy and religion) occupy the terrain closer to the center. Most approaches to happiness contain both some level of acceptance of those things over which we have no power mixed with some level of confidence that whatever our lot, it is capable of some improvement.

Happiness, to some extent, is the name we apply to the degree of acceptance with which we respond to these cycles.

Thus, happiness is difficult to pin down. Circumstances which might depress one person might be shrugged off by another. Personal welfare that might cause satisfaction in one might not be enough to satisfy others. Our news is filled daily with stories of people unconsoled by their good fortune, as well as those that manage some degree of life satisfaction without significant material welfare.

Where do we get the information that underpins these stories? The answer is that states of happiness are reported by those who experience them. Their subjective stories are reported, with no small measure of bias on the part of the reporter, and interpreted according to the mindset of the receiver.

In other words, not only is the concept of happiness slippery, its basis in reality is highly subjective.

Still, the search for its dimensions continue. Psychologists conduct surveys, biologists explore chemicals, and religionists look to faith. Does this level of contradictory activities mean that there’s nothing that can be said? Let’s look at a few aspects:

Surveys: For decades, psychologists have been searching for a process of conducting surveys free of cultural, economic, religious and racial bias. Not only do the continuing waves of surveys show a wider range of reported states of happiness than statistics suggest, but many of them are contradictory.
Biology: Many biologists suggest that happiness results directly from our chemistry. They state that chemicals such as dopamine and serotonin are direct causes of the sensation of happiness, and minimize those things that lead to their secretion in the brain. Thus, in the ‘nature vs nurture’ spectrum, in their view, nurture doesn’t have a chance.
Genetics: All of us know persons who are generally cheerful, even under difficult circumstances. We also know those whose glass is always ‘half empty’. From this view, we are all predisposed towards some level of happiness or unhappiness.
Religion: The religions of the world all aim at some level of accommodation with reality, from (as above) acceptance to embrace. Their hermeneutics and practices are clearly myriad, and often very contradictory.

For all this, science doesn’t have a good handle on happiness, contentment, or any of the ‘states’ of well-being.

A more subtle approach to happiness falls into the realm of relative measures. For example, if a very poor person comes into a large sum of money, the impact on their happiness is directly related to the improvement in their situation. They can be safely said to have increased the level of their happiness by a large amount.

For a rich person, even a large amount of money will not have anywhere near the impact as did the poor person. In the case of the person less well off, the impact will likely be longer lasting, as the money can also be put to use in caring for family and assuring a comfortable future. In the other case, the money will most likely not affect the person’s well-being, much less that of his family.

A curious take on this subject involves generally happy people who are nonetheless report that they are unhappy, a phenomenon which is relatively new in human evolution. This ‘dualism’ occurs when individuals are relatively well-off and well-educated, known as ‘the middle class’. As referred to in a recent article (July 11) of the Economist, this ‘satisfaction paradox’ can be seen when seemingly contented people vote for angry political parties.

This paradox can be seen in the dissociation between longtime political partners: personal well-being and incumbent political parties. As the Economist relates, the common election of an incumbent party has historically been the result of a general feeling of ‘well off’ among the population. Today, we are seeing a surge in angry ‘Populist’ and ‘Nationalist’ parties elected by populations who consider themselves as ‘well off’.

The Economist traces one possible cause of this phenomena, prevalent in the ‘developed’ world, as the result of aging populations. Certainly, this demographic feels uncomfortable being caught up in rapid changes. As an example, many of us ‘old folks’ were taught, as we taught our children, how to use a dial phone. This same group, in many cases, are being taught how to use ‘smartphones’ by their grandchildren.

The reliance on ‘habit’, those learned since birth to enable us to smoothly function, is becoming a liability, as the necessity for a rapid learning curve seems to be more prevalent. The ‘fruits of our labor’, pensions, investments and assets built up over a lifetime of cultivating productive ‘habits’, may well have provided us with much quality of life, but do not necessarily constitute a comfortable intellectual nest for today’s turbuolence.

This certainly leads to an increase of indignation, a level of personal life satisfaction which is nonetheless deeply critical of others. We have seen how indignation can induce pleasant feelings, but this phenomenon also brings us back to the insights of Yuval concerning the ‘fit’ between the human person and his environment.

Consciousness aware of itself speeds up evolution in an environment highly subject to our influence. This ‘upset,’ not unlike weather (static air mass becomes unstable, leading to the emergence of patterns: a complexification/change to a new organization with new attributes). Can the tension between a changing environment caused by humans who themselves are rapidly changing have such a future? Is it possible that the process of harmony-disharmony-change of state that we see today result in a new harmony?

And, on top of this, what is the forecast for a level of accommodation, even happiness, for the human person caught up in such a dynamic mileu?

If Teilhard understood it correctly, and the energy by which human persons unite is no more (but no less, as he would say) than the current manifestation of the fourteen billion year upwelling of the cosmos, then how can we not recognize the potential for fulfillment, both at the personal and the level of society?

More specific to the topic of happiness, how can Teilhard’s perspective be applied to each of us?

The Next Post

This week saw a broad overview of the subject of ‘happiness’, its vagueness, and began to place it in Teilhard’s context of universal evolution. If the energy of increasing complexity and emerging consciousness can be seen in human relationships (love, in its most universal appearance) and consciousness aware of itself, how can we better understand how we fit into it?

Next week we will begin to explore such ‘universal accommodation’ and attempt to locate the appropriate niche for the human person is this grand process of universal evolution.

August 1, 2019 – Human Life: Dealing With the Pain of Convergence

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Today’s Post

Over the past few weeks we have been exploring the ‘terrain of synergy’, the area of fruitful coherence between science and religion. In the past two weeks we have seen how Jonathan Sacks looks at this terrain from the middle ground, the terrain in which we live our daily lives.

As Sacks, Davies and Teilhard all avow, both our personal and collective evolution requires us to both better understand this phenomenon in which we are enmeshed, and our need for this understanding to guide us in cooperating with it.

This week we will take another step into looking at this phenomenon as we address it from its influence on our inner, personal life. It’s time to address the slippery phenomenon of ‘happiness’.

If We’re So Evolved, Why Ain’t We Happy?

It’s not difficult to find references to ‘existential anxiety’ in the current press. In spite of the recent increase in global human welfare reported by Johan Norberg, the persistence of pessimism and even depression among our contemporaries seems to be increasing. The causes underlying this phenomenon are certainly not clear, but the effect seems universal.

In his bestselling book, “Sapiens”. Yuval Noah Harari takes a unique position on this. He sees the cause of our ‘existential anxiety’ rooted in the speed of human evolution. In his view, the speed of our human unique evolution has a considerable impact on how we feel.

Yuval notes that, distinct from our pre-human ancestors, we have evolved much faster than our skills of accommodation with the environment could develop.

From his perspective, in the (relatively) glacial speed of pre-human evolution, species could ‘grow up’ with their environment, changing no faster than their environment changes. As a result, ‘Natural Selection’ in turn could ‘select for accommodation’, insuring that each species evolved in concert with its environment. In keeping with his Darwinist perspective, such an ‘evolutionary coherent pace’ insures not only better coherence between these ancestors and their environment but insures their ‘survival’. He cites science’s study of the past as showing ‘life cycles’ of our immediate ‘homo’ genus ancestors (egaster, rudalfensis, and others) to be in millions of years, and believes that these lengthy spans are the result of the more harmonious relationship between them and their environments. It’s not that their environments didn’t change, but rather that when they did change, such as in global warming and cooling cycles, the groups simply migrated, like the other animals, to different areas.

Yuval believes that with our subspecies, sapiens, our rapid population growth changed this dynamic, forcing the need for agriculture, with its corollaries such as towns, governments and laws, and interrupting the migratory instincts developed by Natural Selection. Thus the speedup of sapiens drove a wedge between us and our environment from which we have never recovered. We are, in effect, ‘longing for the good old days’.

In addition, he notes that humans have had a larger impact on the environment than our ancestors, and impose this impact much quicker as well. This is causing an additional disconnect as both our evolution and these environmental impacts change faster than we, as a species, can become comfortable with it.

Harari goes to great length in his book to call out the significant disconnect between humans and their environment, identifying the point in our history which occurred with the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, in which humans ceased to be nomadic and became sedentary, as a pivot point in human evolution. Prior to this point, while the human evolutionary ‘rate’ was slower, its impact on the environment was much less, and as he theorizes, our ancestors were ‘happier’.
After this point, he notes the rapid rise of human population (in which humans had a more reliable food source), which had the downside of introducing a reduction in the human’s sense of ‘belonging’ to the environment. He cites many ills of post-agrarian society, such as the need for intensive, benumbing labor (to tend the fields), the crowding and ugly by-products of overpopulation in cities resulting in diseases and other ills. He sees this turning point as a ‘decision’ and a huge ‘evolutionary mistake’ resulting in what he sees as the root of widespread unease in human civilization today. In his telling, with the Agricultural Revolution, humans, enabled populations to explode, negatively affect their environment and ‘ruining’ a satisfactory accommodation between humans and their environment which persists to this day.

He sees in this an underlying paradox in human evolution. Our ability to impact our environment impedes our accommodation of it. We are more ready, he asserts, to change it rather than (as our ancestors) live with its perceived problems. Each change that we make produces yet another problem that we believe we have to fix, and so on to the present day. Each of these changes creates yet another degree of alienation from nature, and contributes to an additional degree of anxiety. He extrapolates this tendency to a future in which our negative impact on our environment, our increasing discomfort with it and the incessant necessity for new technology to ‘fix’ it, leads inevitably to a future in which we quickly become totally dependent on automation, resulting in our untimely extinction. Unlike the reign of our Homo ancestors, in the millions of years, he gives us only a few thousand or so.

This dystopian view of human evolution (not the first, as Malthus showed us) provides one answer to the question of ‘if we’re so evolved why ain’t we happy?’

So, Why Ain’t We?

Setting aside the fact that not all of us are unhappy, the issue of happiness shows a long trail of evolution in itself, and can be seen in the immense spectrum of attitudes that represents total fatalism at one end and joyful acceptance at the other.

Teilhard also saw the rise of anxiety as resulting from the rapid rise of human evolution:

“Surely the basic cause of our distress must be sought precisely in the change of curve which is suddenly obliging us to move from a universe in which the divergence, and hence the spacing out, of the containing lines still seemed the most important feature, into another type of universe which, in pace with time, is rapidly folding-in upon itself.”

So, we are brought to the point of considering the ‘terrain of synergy’ from the perspective of human happiness as well as that of the continuation of our species. Are we, as Harari predicts, doomed to a future in which we, unlike the millions of species which preceded us, doomed to carry our increased evolution as a burden in which our survival must be paid for by our unhappiness. Is there a perspective, grounded in both material and spiritual tangibility, in which we can see our future otherwise?

In this blog we have consistently followed the thoughts of Teilhard de Chardin , supplemented by those of other writers whose vision of the future suggest the answer to this question is an unqualified ‘yes’. Admitting, however, that the general issue of human happiness is very slippery, I’d like to take a perspective on the ‘terrain of synergy’ that continues, as Jonathan Sacks has opened the door, to the ‘middle ground’ of it. Harari is certainly insightful in his look backwards in history, but does this retrospective necessarily lead to the dismal future he predicts? Turning Teilhard’s succinct perspective of evolution, “Everything which rises must converge”, might it be true that “Everything which converges must rise?”

The Next Post

This week we followed up on Jonathan Sacks insights on the middle ground of the ‘terrain of synergy’ in which the different but complementary methods and insights of science and religion might overlap. In spite of the optimistic tone of Sacks, as well as that of Teilhard and Paul Davies, we saw how Yuval Noah Harari offers a highly negative prognostication.

Next week we will continue our exploration of this ‘middle ground’ from the slippery perspective of human happiness. Not only is it difficult to quantify, but even more difficult to establish causes and effects. We will see if our long journey towards seeing the ‘Secular Side of God’ can offer any insights into seeing this phenomenon more clearly.

Science, Religion and Reality

Uncovering the confluence between science and religion

Tag Archives: evolution in human life

December 19, 2019 – The Secular Side of Jesus

December 12 – Psychology as Secular Meditation

November 28 Relating to God

November 14 Interpreting Religion

October 24 The Evolution of Religion

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

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

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

August 8, 2019 – The Material Ground of Happiness

August 1, 2019 – Human Life: Dealing With the Pain of Convergence