Tag Archives: Teilhard de Chardin

February 13, 2020 – How Can We Tell We’re Evolving?

Today’s Post

Over the past several weeks we have been looking into Teilhard’s assessment of the future of human evolution . We have also seen how conventional wisdom, well harvested from the weedy fields of daily news, suggests that things are going downhill.

As we have seen over the course of this blog, Teilhard, in spite of writing in a time at which our future was anything but rosy, managed a world view which was quite opposite from that prevalent at the time. Having looking into how his audaciously optimistic (and counter-intuitive) conclusions have been formed, we can now look into how they are being played out today in human evolution..

Last week we boiled down Teilhard’s observations and projections of the noosphere, into several characteristics that he believed to constitute the ‘structure of the noosphere’.

This week we will begin a survey of this noosphere as it appears today to see how contemporary objective data can be brought to bear on his insights. As we will see over the next few weeks, by looking at quantifiable data from reliable sources his case for optimism is stronger today than at any time in the whole of human history

Human Evolution Metrics

With all that said, how do we go about quantifying human evolution? One very relevant approach can be found in “Progress”, a book by Johan Norberg, which seeks to show:

“..the amazing accomplishments that resulted from the slow, steady, spontaneous development of millions of people who were given the freedom to improve their own lives, and in doing so improved the world.”

In doing so he alludes to the existence of an ‘energy of evolution’:

“It is a kind of progress that no leader or institution or government can impose from the top down.”

Norberg doesn’t reference Teilhard or cite religious beliefs. Instead he refers to findings from public surveys, Government data, International media and global institutions.

His approach is to parse the ‘metrics of human evolution’ into nine categories. They are:

Food Sanitation

Life Expectancy Poverty

Violence The Environment

Literacy Freedom

Equality

For each of these categories he provides, as the noted international news magazine The Economist notes, “a tornado of evidence” for the “slow, steady, spontaneous development” of the human species. He compares these statistics across the planet, from Western societies, to near- and mid- Eastern Asia, to China and India, and to super-and sub-Saharan Africa. And, to the extent possible, he extends trends from antiquity to the current day.

Norberg is well aware that his findings, all showing improvements in the areas of human life listed above, are profoundly contrary to conventional wisdom, and he acknowledges the human tendency toward pessimism. He quotes Franklin Pierce Adams on one source of this skepticism:

“Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”

His prodigious statistics clearly, and to considerable depth, offer a look quite different from the nostalgic, sepia-tinged memories the ‘good old days’.

As Jeanette Walworth wrote:

“My grandpa notes the world’s worn cogs
And says we are going to the dogs!
…

The cave man in his queer skin togs
Said things were going to the dogs.
But this is what I wish to state
The dogs have had an awful wait.”

Our Approach

Over the next few weeks, we will address some of Norberg’s categories, summarize his key statistics, and show how Teilhard’s insights on and projections for human evolution are borne out by Norberg’s data.

This look at objective and verifiable historical data will serve to put Teilhard’s highly optimistic vision of the future to the test. Does the data show that we humans are continuing to evolve? If so, in what ways, how fast, and is the trend positive or negative?

This week we will take a simple example, one not listed by Norberg but simple enough to illustrate the process that we will use: that of ‘fuel’

A Brief History of Fuel

Few issues are closer to our everyday lives than that of fuel. Every person on the planet uses fuel every day for such things as heating or cooling their homes, cooking their meals, transporting themselves and communicating. As the issue of fuel is so ubiquitous, its history provides a great metric for putting our evolution in an objective perspective.

The discovery of fire a few hundred thousand years ago was a monumental moment in human history. The availability of cooked, rather than raw, food led to improved health, and the ability to heat habitats led to an increase in habitable area. It is obvious that both led to general improvements in human life.

Following the many thousands of years in which wood was the only fuel, coal began to take its place, increasing in use as the Bronze age led to the Iron age, and continuing a key role to this day.

Today other types of fuel, principally gas but including nuclear, wind and solar extraction, provide fuel for the many applications of the modern era.

While fuel offers an example of how human evolution can be seen to continue, how can it be seen to support Teilhard’s many assertions?

From Teilhard’s Perspective

The first is that of Human Invention. The history of fuel offers an articulation of the steps of human evolution: first ‘discovery’, then ‘extraction’, then ‘application’ and finally ‘dissemination’. Some early humans discovered that certain stones would burn, and over time developed methods of extraction and dissemination that made it possible to use coal as an improved method of heat (more BTU per volume). This required improved methods of extraction and dissemination, such as mining coal vs gathering wood.

The second is that of the Human Psychism. Each of these steps required an increase in complexity not only of the technology but more importantly an increasing development of what Teilhard refers to as ‘human psychisms’. By this he is referring to the aspects of human society which are the core of the Inner Pull addressed last week. By psychism Teilhard refers to the human groups which effect the

“increase in mental interiority and hence of inventive power”

required to find and employ

“new ways of arranging its elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space.”

This does not only pertain to the management of fuel, but to the exponential rise in the uses of fuel: from cooking and heating, to such things as the smelting of ores and the powering of engines. Each such step required yet another ‘new way’ of thinking, an increase in the organization and the depth of knowledge of the ‘psychism’ and the need to draw on external resources (such as education) for their success.

The third example can be seen in the proliferation of the resulting “new ways” over the face of planet. While coal, for example, was ‘discovered’ in China approximately in 4000 BC, it wasn’t until the advent of expanding empires before, for example, the discoveries of the Romans could spread far and wide, hence the third example of Globalization.

The fourth of Teilhard’s insights is his observation that compression of the noosphere not only results in globalization, but also in the increase in the speed of the spread of invention. Hundreds of thousands of years of wood burning, followed by a few thousand years of coal dependency followed by a few hundred years of transition to other sources of fuel. Not only can evolution be seen to rise, but to converge, and the increasing convergence can be seen to stimulate its increasing speed.

The fifth Teilhard insight is the Timeliness of Invention, the recognition that humans invent as necessary to insure their continuing evolution. Had humans not discovered the advantages of coal, the dependency upon wood would have left our planet by now denuded and bereft of oxygen. We would be extinct. Had not new sources of fuel come available in the Eighteenth century, the exclusive use of coal would have doomed us to asphyxiation, choking on the effluvia of civilization. (A poignant example can be seen in the ‘Great Smog’ of London which killed over twelve thousand people in 1952.)

The sixth Teilhard insight is the recognition of the failure of forecasts that do not take into account the six above phenomena. Such an example is Thomas Malthus, whose dire predictions from the early 1800’s are still read today. Malthus depended on historical data for his end-of-times predictions (increase in population outstripping production of resources) but failed to recognize the basic human capability of invention, by which production would rise exponentially and unwanted side effects mitigated. Malthus provides an example of the failure of any forecast which uses past history to predict the future without taking human invention into account.

The seventh insight is that of Change of State. As Teilhard notes, the journey of evolution from the big bang is not a linear one. At key points, not only does the “stuff of the universe” change, but it changes radically. The transition from energy to matter, from simple to complex atoms, from molecules to cells and from neurons to conscious entities, are profound. Further, the energies through which they continue to the next step are profoundly different as well. In our simple example of ‘fuel’, this can be seen to be happening literally before our eyes. The result of each step from wood to coal to gas and onto future sources could not have been be predicted from evidence of the past. The changes are highly nonlinear.

The eighth and last Teilhard insight is that of Risk. Human evolution is not guaranteed to continue. Continued innovation and invention, deepening insight into the structure of the noosphere provided by new human ‘psychisms’ and improvements in globalization which tighten communications all require closer cooperation. None of these will happen unless humans continue to have faith in their future.

The Next Post

This week we began a two-pronged look at how evolution can be seen to continue through the human species: The first of which is to look objectively at what we know about our history so far, and the second to see how in this view such data bears out Teilhard’s insights into human evolution. This week we looked at a rather simple example, ‘fuel’ to illustrate this approach.

Next week we will begin a much more detailed look at the data from Norberg’s book, “Progress” to see how it, too, supports Teilhard’s optimistic worldview.

February 6, 2020 – Navigating Human Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week we moved from seeing Teilhard’s reinterpretation of the traditional Western theological concepts of God, Trinity and Spirituality into addressing how these concepts actually can be seen to play out in human evolution as it moves from its expansion into what appeared as limitless space, to its compression as the ‘sphericity’ of the earth increasingly limits available space.
We saw how as we move further into this era of human evolution, the tactics common to human expansion begin to morph into those which will accommodate such ‘compression’ without diminishment of the human person.

This week we will begin to look at navigating the ‘Northern hemisphere’ of Teilhard’s imaginary sphere in a way in which the continuation of the human species is assured while accommodating the individual evolution of the human person.

Compression, Evolution and the Human Person

There’s plenty to worry about in this new phase, and the anxiety which seems so prevalent in our society is surely not misplaced as we cautiously tread upon the bridge to the future while we are building it. Teilhard acknowledges the anxiety that arises as we move from expansion to compression:

“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 … divergence… still seemed the most important feature, into another type of universe which.. is rapidly folding-in upon itself.”

At the same time, Teilhard asserts, if we know how to see it the very compression that causes such concern can be seen as an agency necessary to our continued evolution.

Teilhard can make this seeming counterintuitive assertion based on his six observations of the ‘noosphere’, the layer of human influence on our planet:

We are the latest products of evolution, and as subject of the same rise of complexity seen by our precedents, can expect to see the continuation of the energy of evolution that we saw at work in the previous products. Put simply: the agency of evolution as increased ‘complexification’ will continue to assert itself in us as it had in our evolutionary precedents.
Just as the ‘laws’ that worked so well for these precedents for each stage were not replaced, but expanded in each new stage, this trend can be expected to continue in the ‘human stage’.
Therefore the inevitable compression in the human stage must contain some means of moving us forward. These ‘new laws’ must be discovered in order for us to move forward. As Teilhard puts it, humanity is

“…vitally forced to find continually new ways of arranging its elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space.”

Thus the ‘outer push’ of compression must somehow be accompanied by an ‘inner pull’ which occurs if the human elements can find new ways to connect so as to expand their ‘personness’, to become more of what they are capable of becoming. This transition from an external force which pushes us ever closer, to an internal force which pulls us together by freeing us from our limited possession of ourselves, allows compression to effect complexification. Thus Teilhard understands Love as the latest manifestation of the basic force of evolution: the only energy capable of not only uniting us by what is most unique in us but in doing so increasing our uniqueness
Human ‘invention’ is a manifestation of ‘finding new laws’ (# 3 above). John McHale, in his book, The Future of the Future, echoes Teilhard when he notes

“At this point, then, where man’s affairs reach the scale of potential disruption of the global ecosystem, he invents precisely those conceptual and physical technologies that may enable him to deal with the magnitude of a complex planetary society.”

Teilhard does not underestimate the risk, stressing the importance of choice, which requires the existence of faith:

“At this decisive moment when for the first time man… is becoming scientifically aware of the general pattern of his future on earth, what he needs before anything else, perhaps, is to be quite certain, on cogent experimental grounds, that the sort of temporo-spatial dome into which his destiny is leading is not a blind alley where the earth’s life flow will shatter and stifle itself.”

“Cogent experimental grounds”? Neither science nor religion offer a clear picture of how evolution proceeds through the human, often questioning the concept that it may at all.

It’s been some eighty years since Teilhard made his case for being optimistic about the evolutionary future of the human species.. Since then human society has become ever more proficient at gathering data; we are drowning in it today. With all the facts at our hand, is it possible to make some objective sense of, find some ‘cogent experimental grounds’ in this data to see whether Teilhard’s projections are proving true?

The Next Post

This week we turned from seeing Teilhard’s model of human evolution as moving from expansion to compression to a more detailed look at how this transition manifests itself in the ‘noosphere’, the layer of human induced changes to our world. We noted the risks that are present in this transition, as well as the need for faith in the thirteen billion year rising tide of evolution that will usher in a new phase in which compression brings personization. We noted that with all the data generated in today’s ‘dataorcacy’, is it possible to see examples of such a counterintuitive process occurring?

Next week we will begin to overview how examples of such ‘personization’ can be seen in today’s events.

January 30, 2020 – Evolution in Human Life

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Today’s Post

Last week we concluded our look at the secular side of such concepts as God, Jesus and the Trinity by seeing the concept of ‘spirituality’ through Teilhard’s eyes as “ neither a meta- nor an epi- phenomenon, it is the phenomenon” which underlies the steady progression of ‘complexification’ as it rises from inter-atom forces to those forces by which we ourselves continue the process of universal evolution.

This week we go to the other end (at least so far) of evolution as we explore how it manifests itself in our personal lives and in the progression of our societies toward further complexity.

This week’s post summarizes those from June 28 to August 23, 2018.

The Three ‘Vectors” of Evolution in Human Life

Earlier this month we saw Teilhard’s insight of the progression of evolution in the universe as occurring in the form of a ‘convergent spiral’, and how the three ‘vectors’ of this spiral (union, increased complexity, and increased potential for future union and complexity) manifest themselves in different forms at each stage of evolution.

This post also saw how Teilhard mapped these three ‘vectors’ of human life into the three insights of the Apostle Paul: Faith, Hope and Love.

In Teilhard’s reinterpretation of these three vectors, Paul’s ‘Theological Virtues’:

Faith can be seen as an interpolation of the past. From our experience, we begin to better understand our potential, and in doing so we begin to increase our confidence in our capability to live it out.

Hope can be seen as an extrapolation from this experience to an anticipation of what can be accomplished in the future if we but trust in our potential. Hence Faith and Hope can be seen in the two ever-repeating stages of our lives: our pasts becoming our futures in the evanescent moment of the present.

As Paul asserts, “the greatest of these is Love”.

Love as the Primary ‘Virtue’

Teilhard agrees that Love is the greatest of these three virtues, seeing it as the human manifestation of the energy by which the universe increases in complexity over time.

First, he notes the common perception of Love as a strong emotion, designed by evolution to insure procreation and therefore the continuation of all species in which elements are drawn together by instinct to unite and therefore insure their future. In this light it is an instinct present in the reptilian brain, strengthened by the limbic brain of warm blooded animals whose increased complexity requires increasingly lengthy periods of familial care- an instinct which all humans share. Just as he compares the newly emerged cell to its molecular predecessor by seeing it as “dripping in molecularity”, in the same way the new human can be seen as emerging from the pre-human as “dripping in animality”.

Recognizing that the two layers of ‘lower brain’ in the human provide strong instinctual stimuli, he sees the element of choice, one requiring knowledge of its knowledge, as based in the human neocortex, unique to the human. This new brain capability affords a new dimension to the phenomenon of ‘Love’, one which transcends a ‘simple’ energy of procreation.

Secondly, as such, Teilhard recognizes this new brain capability as the current manifestation of the third ‘vector’ of the universal spiral as it acts in the human person. While not denying its obvious emotional importance in our lives, Teilhard understands love to evolve from relating to becoming, from emotional to óntological.

He sees this perspective as that asserted by John when he asserts:

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

In Teilhard’s insight, to love is to cooperate with the energies of creation in the ongoing increase of energy.

Love in Human Evolution

Considering that, as Teilhard sees it, Love is the human manifestation of the energy that rises in the human species and causes it to continue to evolve, how can we understand this in secular evolutionary terms?

First, a simple look at the history of humans on our planet shows that a key attribute of humans to expand into every possible nook and cranny of the biosphere. In his graphic example of the development of human society, humanity starts out from a pole of an imaginery sphere, and ramifies into many threads: races, tribes, nations. In its march away from the starting pole, it spreads into nearly infinite space: it is possible for many centuries that one arm of the ramification can still be unaware of the other

Second, it is obvious from this simple graphic that eventually the threads will reach the midpoint, the ‘equator’ of Teilhard’s imaginary sphere, and begin to come in contact with each other. The echo of this imaginary sphere with our own very real planet is all too obvious. When we expand eventually into space occupied by others, we cross the imaginary equator where expansion is replaced by compression.

As is obvious from history, the tactics of contact, conflict and conquest that served humanity so well in the expansion phase, work less well in the compression phase, even though they do not phase out very quickly. New paradigms of societal evolution begin to emerge as early as the ‘Axial Age’, (800 BC), during which Karen Armstrong (in her book, “The Great Transformation) sees civilizations across the globe beginning to rethink ‘what it means to be human’. (This evolution in thinking was also accompanied by a shift from ‘right’ to ‘left’ brained thinking, as seen by Jonathan Sacks.)

The adaptation of Christianity by Constantine was an example of this shift. While certainly less religious than practical, it nonetheless reflected the same shift, seeing the integrative potential of Christianity as a political mechanism for insuring the smooth integration of the new Northern European Celts and Franks into his empire.

Third, that this new paradigm was slow to take hold is obvious, considering the ensuing two thousand or so years of human conflict, particularly in the West, frequently among those espousing the new religion. The success of the new paradigm, however, could be seen in the emergence of the new paradigm of democracy, with the belief in human equality first envisaged in the Axial Age.

In this three millennia of world history we can see the ‘crossing of the equator’ and the gradual transition from ‘expansion’ to ‘compression’. This transition from one to another also maps the evolution of human relationships from ones in which the individual is reduced by the contact to one in which the individual is potentially enriched by it.

This is truly an astounding paradigm shift, first asserted by Confucius, and necessary for human survival as it compresses itself:

“If you would enlarge yourself, you must first enlarge others. When you enlarge others, you are enlarging yourself.”

Teilhard recognizes that as humanity enters the compression stage, the historical relationship between conqueror and conquered, common in the expansion stage, will no longer satisfy the need to continue evolution. The historical human enrichment of the conqueror by diminishment of the conquered requires a different paradigm in the compression stage.

Teilhard sees an expansion of the traditional concept of love as the answer: one in which human relationship enriches both sides. In his words

“Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them”.

In such an enhanced interaction, it’s not that the emotional facet of love is lost, but that its lower brained instincts are modulated by the neocortex in a nondual, whole-brained exercise. In Teilhard’s grand scheme, Love becomes a facet of creation.

The Next Post

This week we turned from Teilhard’s reinterpretation of conventional Western religious concepts to the subject of how these reinterpreted concepts are present as they appear in human evolution.

Next week we will address the question, “How can we see such evolution as it unfolds in our lives?”

January 23, 2020 – Moving Evolution Forward

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Today’s Post

Last week we added the concept of ‘spirituality ’to our look at the secular side of such concepts as God, Jesus and the Trinity. We saw this concept through Teilhard’s eyes as “ neither a meta- nor an epi- phenomenon’ but instead as ‘the phenomenon” which underlies the steady progression of ‘complexification’ as it rises from inter-atomic forces to those forces by which we ourselves continue the process of universal evolution.

Given these insights into the scaffolding of evolution, this week we go to the other end (at least so far) of evolution as it manifests itself in our personal complexification and in the progression of our species toward yet further complexity. What are the ‘nuts and bolts’ that hold this scaffolding together so that it can continue to progress through the human species?

This week’s post summarizes several posts that address what Teilhard referred to ‘Articulating the noosphere’ as the development of guidelines for forging our evolution.

‘Articulating the Noosphere’

As Teilhard sees it, the evolution of our planet can be seen in the appearance of five ‘spheres’, layers of evolutionary products, which have appeared in succession on our planet. He sees these spheres as:

The ‘lithosphere’, the grouping of matter which form the base of our planet
The ‘atmosphere,’ which consists of the gasses which emerge to surround it
The ‘hydrosphere, which forms as the atmosphere produces water
The ‘biosphere,’ the layers of living things which cover it
And finally, the ‘noosphere’, indicative of the layer of human activity which pervades it

Today’s controversies over such subjects as ecology, global economy and global warming are evidence of the emerging awareness of just how significantly the noosphere has become in the evolution of our planet and how important it is to understand it..

Teilhard notes that all religions attempt to identify ‘how we should be if we would be what we can be’. With religion’s strong infusion of myths, superstitions, dualities, and entanglements with the state that are inevitable over such long periods of development (arising in the prescientific world of thousands of years ago), its accumulated guidelines for continuing our evolution are problematic. Thus we are left today with inconsistent and even contradictory guidelines for our continued development.

Science does not offer much help in this area. Its exclusion of the ‘spiritual’ (see last post) nature of the person offer little support for the faith and insight needed to deal with the daily burden of human life.

Putting this into perspective, Teilhard notes that we are moving as a species from passive experience of evolution to actively affecting it. It is becoming more necessary to use our neocortex brain to modulate the instinctive impulses of our lower brains, impulses which were successful in raising the complexity of our pre-human ancestors, but which now must be channeled to insure our evolutionary continuation.

As Teilhard sees it, to be effective, human life requires us to ‘set our sails to the winds of life’, but the skills of reading the wind and tending the tiller are first necessary to be learned. As he sees it:

“And, conventional and impermanent as they may seem on the surface, what are the intricacies of our social forms, if not an effort to isolate little by little what are one day to become the structural laws of the noosphere.

In their essence, and provided they keep their vital connection with the current that wells up from the depths of the past, are not the artificial, the moral and the juridical simply the hominized versions of the natural, the physical and the organic?”

Teilhard refers to identifying these skills, those necessary for evolution to continue through us, as ‘articulating the noosphere’. These skills are reflected in examples of behavior that are passed from generation to generation via the cultural ‘DNA’ of religion.

Religion is not the only place that such ‘noospheric articulations’ can be found. As we saw in the post of September 14 on the ‘secular basis of spirituality’, a secular example of spirituality can be found in a fundamental axiom of our government. It is at the basis of the idea of a ‘representative government’, and often described as the ‘will of the people’ so essential to democratic institutions. Thomas Jefferson was very clear in his concept of the validity of ‘the power of the people ‘and ‘consensus in government’ as ‘articulations of the noosphere’:

“I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be other that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master. I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves.”

This exercise of ‘trust of the people to govern themselves” is a secular example of an ‘articulation of the noosphere’. When we engage in such activity as the process of voting, we are implicitly connecting with one of the threads of evolution as it runs through human evolution. This activity is effectively a ‘secular sacrament’.

Some Specific Articulations

As we saw last week, ‘spirituality’ is the underpinning of ‘matter’. In order to better understand ourselves and our role in evolution we must understand how this dyadic energy works. Following Teilhard’s insight that

“..the artificial, the moral and the juridical (are) simply the hominized versions of the natural, the physical and the organic”

any ‘articulation’ of the structure of the noosphere that we undertake must first identify the places in our lives in which such ‘spirituality’ (or as Davies would have it, ‘software’) manifests itself so that we can better cooperate with it and thus strengthen our own journey toward fuller being.

Almost all religions attempt to articulate the noosphere by traditional rituals which help address

such things as funerals, pilgrimages, social work and meditation. The Western ‘sacraments’ are but one example.

The Western church made an early effort to identify this ‘articulation’ in its concept of ‘grace’. Using the term, grace to indicate the manifestation of spirituality in human life, this early effort identifies those human activities where it is believed to be most active. These activities are known as ‘sacraments’.

Thanks to the-all-too human Catholic attempts to control (and profit from) these activities and to Luther for recognizing the evil in doing so, the ‘sacraments’ have little attraction today outside the Catholic church. Their reinterpretation in secular terms might seem forced, but in terms of Teilhard’s context of evolution, they can be seen as highlighting where the agency of spirituality, Davies’ ‘software’, is most active in critical human life events. They identify the human activity that is most likely to move us forward in our quest for both personal and cultural complexity.

Such reinterpretation sees the seven sacraments of baptism, confirmation, eucharist, matrimony, penance, ‘holy orders’ and the ‘last rites’ taking on new relevancy as the recognition of the ‘sanctity’ (proximity to the ‘tree of evolution’) of the human person, human maturity, human society, human relationships, human reconciliation, human focus on spirituality and the end of human life. New, more secular, sacraments are still appearing in the West, such as the well-being of nature (ecology).

Sacraments simply point the way to the critical points necessary to continuation of the evolution of our species. They are not divine intrusion into nature, but signposts to those activities most important to our continued evolution. Such signposts aid the navigation our lives by the compass of, and in cooperation with, the energy of evolution as it flows through our lives.

The Next Post

Having seen how spirituality is a phenomenon essential to the process of evolution as it lifts the universe to ‘its current level of complexity’., this week we looked at how such spirituality can be found in human life.

Next week we will continue our summary of the blog, “The Secular Side of God” taking another look at religion from Teilhard’s vantage point of seeing religion not as ‘anti science’ but as, at its core, valuable not only of sharpening our sense of evolutionary direction, but providing science with a new hermeneutic which opens its study of the human person to wider and more relevant vistas.

January 16, 2020 – TheSecular Side of Spirituality

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Today’s Post

For the last few weeks we have been summarizing the part of the blog, “The Secular Side of God, in which we have seen how from Teilhard’s perspective, the traditional concepts of God and the Trinity can be reinterpreted into facets of universal evolution. Last week we saw how they play together in Teilhard’s convergent spiral, manifested in the ‘hominized’ vectors of Faith, Hope and Love, the human version of the universal agencies of unity, convergence and complexification, and thus continue the rise of complexity through the human person.

Throughout this journey, we have touched on the idea of ‘spirituality’, assuming that at every rung of evolution some sort of underlying agency moves the universe, and ourselves, from less to more complexity.

This week we will look at this commonly used term in more depth as we address the ‘secular side of spirituality’. The posts of September 14 through 26 October, 2017 are summarized this week.

The Evolution of ‘Spirituality’

In opposition to the traditional Western concept of spirituality as a quality of ‘supernature’, in which reality is dualistically divided into ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’. Teilhard sees only one reality, not two, and things traditionally relegated to the ‘supernatural’ are simply things that we have not yet recognized as ‘natural’

Teilhard takes the key underlying metric of ‘complexification of the universe’ as his starting point. As many have objected, how can we make this assumption? Teilhard’s answer is that if the universe did not evolve in the direction of increasing complexity, it would have been ‘dead on arrival’, and we would not be here to debate it. In his words, “complexification is not a phenomenon of the universe, it is the phenomenon”

Hence if we follow this thread of increasing complexity, we can better understand ‘how things come to be what they are’ and in doing so, better understand how we fit in.

In Teilhard’s day, this concept had yet to take root in traditional Physics. Science restricted evolution to the biological era, via the Darwinistic principle of ‘Natural Selection’. Teilhard was one of the few thinkers to question what happened in the preceding ten billion or so years that prepared the inanimate ‘stuff of the universe’ for integrating in such a way as to produce living cells.
Teilhard’s insight was that each particle of the universe somehow had the innate capability of joining with other ‘like’ particles to effect an increase in complexity in the resulting new particle. It wasn’t until the late 1960’s before empirical scientists, such as Ilya Prigogine, began to address the mystifying capability of natural things to ‘self-organize’, such as weather patterns (tornadoes), crystals, in their intricate patterns, and many other phenomena.

In the next few decades, scientists began to build an approach to physics which saw inanimate particles as inclusive of ‘information’. An example of this ‘information’ is how the complex DNA molecule provides ‘instructions’ for the conversion of nucleic acids into proteins, which would ultimately provide energy to the cell.

Paul Davies, who elaborates on this implicit factor in his book, “The 5^th Miracle”, asks the question,

“How can mindless molecules, capable only of pushing and pulling their intermediate neighbors, cooperate and sustain something as ingenious as a living organism?”

He answers his question:

“If I am right that the key to biogenesis lies, not with chemistry but with the formation of a particular logical and informational architecture, then the crucial step involved the creation of an information processing, system, employing software control.”

Thus empirical science is being led to consider that there is something in material particles which contains what Davies analogically refers to as ‘software’. This ‘software’ is precisely what Teilhard understood as the underlying principle which guides things to unite in such a way as to increase their complexity.
Davies is quick to point out that science does not yet have an empirical understanding of exactly how this ‘software’ is embedded in the ‘hardware’ of matter, but like Richard Dawkins, he believes that it will one day be discovered.

The Spiritual Basis of Evolution

We have seen in our secular perspective of God how the principle metric of evolution is the increasing of complexity over time, and how this increasing complexity has yet to be quantified by science but yet is critical to science’s understanding of how the universe unfolds. We have also seen how this increase in complexity underpins the principle by which entities of a given order of complexity can unite in such a way that the ensuing entities are of a higher order.

Teilhard sees an energy at work by which this happens at every rung of evolution. At the rung of fundamental particles, it can be seen in the effecting of electrons from quarks, then atoms from electrons, protons and neutrons, then molecules from atoms. At the rung of the human person, it is the energy which unites us in such a way that we become more complete. At the human level this energy manifests itself as ‘love’.

It is at work, therefore, to an increasingly lesser extent as we look backward in time at all previous steps of evolution. While science does not yet have a term for this energy, the religious term is spirit.

As Teilhard points out, in the collection of his thoughts, “Human Energy”, the roots of this essential ‘complexifying’ energy of evolution are deeply embedded in the ‘axis of evolution’.

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

As Teilhard sees it, this ‘secular’ approach to spirituality overcomes yet another dualism that is common to religion: spirit vs matter.

“Spirit and matter are (only) contradictory if isolated and symbolized in the form of abstract, fixed notions of pure plurality and pure simplicity, which can in any case never be realized. (In reality) one is inseparable from the other; one is never without the other; and this for the good reason that one appears essentially as a sequel to the synthesis of the other. The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals (itself in) a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self-conscious.”

Teilhard is making an essential point about spirit and matter here. He sees matter evolving to higher levels of complexity (‘synthesizing’) under the influence of the energy of complexification (‘spirit’), and the increased complexity which results from such synthesis is therefore capable of more complex interaction, which itself is capable of closer union (See last week’s post on the convergent spiral of evolution). This increased material level of complexity is a manifestation of an increased level of spirit. To Teilhard, spirit is “Nothing more; and also nothing less” than the energy of evolution, or in Davie’s analogy, “The ‘software’ which drives the ‘hardware’ to more complexity”.

In Teilhard’s perspective, therefore, the basic process of evolution can now be seen as a process of matter “changing its spiritual state”. ‘Spirit’ can now be seen as that which underlies the very axis of evolution, finally becoming fully tangible in the human person and his society.

The Next Post

This week we summarized the posts which addressed the concept of spirituality from Teilhard’s secular perspective, and saw how spirituality is a phenomenon essential to the process of evolution as it lifts the universe to ‘its current level of complexity’.

Next week we will continue our summary of the blog, “The Secular Side of God” by addressing the specific aspects of evolution as it is appears in human life. We have seen how evolution can be understood both by science and a reinterpreted religion as an increase in complexity leading up to the era of biologic life, but what happens when we introduce the concept of “Natural Selection”? Does Natural Selection replace ‘complexification’ as the key agency in evolution once the cell arrives? How do these two phenomena play out in human life? How can we become aware of evolution as it occurs in our lives?

January 9, 2020 – The Trinity and the Convergent Spiral of Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week we completed a look at how the concept of the ‘Trinity’ addresses three facets of the ‘ground of being’ that underlays the entire universe and has, as Richard Dawkins suggests, “raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence”.

This week we will look a little deeper into this agency, seeing it through a model proposed by Teilhard which illustrates how these three facets work together to effect this ‘raising’ over time.

This post is a summary of those posted from September 2 May to 16 May 2019.

The Universal Spiral of Evolution

Teilhard’s insight into evolution moves the subject from a biological process on a single planet which moves life toward manifestations that survive over time (Natural Selection) to one which increases the complexity of its products beginning at the ‘big bang’ and continues to this day, not only on this planet but at every place in the universe. As we have seen, he sees three factors are at work at each step of the the elements of ‘the stuff of the universe’ to effect this increase. He proposes this model as a way of viewing this process

In this simple figure, each element of evolution is acted on by three ‘vectors’ of evolutionary energy.

In the first vector, a, the element engages in union with other elements of the same rank, This unifying force produces a new product whose measure of complexity is slightly increased from the ‘parent’ elements, such as the atom which is a product of the union among electrons, protons, and neutrons. Teilhard refers to this vector as ‘tangential’.

The second vector, b, is an indication of the force which increases the potential for further union and complexity of the new product. Teilhard’ term for this is ‘radial’.

The resulting magnitude of complexity of the new product is indicated in the third vector, c,

By which the elements move forward and upward on the spiral as they increase their complexity.

Teilhard sees this convergent spiral as illustrating the process of evolution at every stage of every component of evolution in the entire cosmos. All components are acted upon by these three forces.

He notes, however, that every stage of evolution, while these three forces apply they appear in different ways to effect the outcomes of closer union, increased capacity for union and as a result, increased complexity. The forces of evolution by which atoms result from unifications of electrons, protons and neutrons, for example, while conforming in general to his model, are manifested quite differently from those which effect the evolution from atoms to molecules, and radically different from the appearance of the cell, the neuron, consciousness, and finally consciousness aware of itself: the human person. As the level of complexity increases, articulating and understanding how the three vectors play out becomes increasingly difficult.

This model, while explanatory of the underlying process of complexification as it rises throughout the entire universe, is not universally accepted by science. The complaint is that it can be seen as ‘teleological’, and hence a ‘back door’ intrusion of religion into the field of science.

There are, however, scientists who empirically inquire into such tangible complexification, such as Paul Davies, who, in his book, “The Cosmic Blueprint”, says

“I have been at great pains to argue that the steady unfolding of organized complexity in the universe is a fundamental property of nature”. (underline mine.)

And, as we have seen, even the more clear-headed atheists, while dismissing religion as a valid school of thought, can refer to a process which

“…eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence. “

The Spiral of Evolution in the Human Person

If, as Teilhard asserts, the basic three vectors of the fundamental forces of evolution apply as well to humans as to atoms, how can they be seen as active in our lives?

If the three facets or ‘vectors’ identified above are still active in the human species, how do they manifest themselves in our lives?

We saw in the last post how the concept of a ‘triune God’ can be understood as the basic forces of evolution working in three interconnected ways, identified by Teilhard as ‘tangential’, ‘radial’ and resulting ‘vertical’, the increase of complexity. Teilhard refers these three ‘facets’, or ‘vectors’ as that seen in one of Paul’s great summaries of the teaching of Jesus: the ‘theological virtues’.

The first of Paul’s three human components of this converging spiral is ‘Love’, the component of unity. Love is the ‘hominized’ (Teilhard’s term) characteristic of the vector labelled ‘a’ in the diagram. In doing so, Teilhard frees the concept of ‘love’ from its popular understanding as a strong emotion and allows it to flower as the energy of the power of evolution to unite its products in ways that increase their complexity. To Teilhard, 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. From this perspective, love is ‘ontological’: to love is to become. It is the energy which unites in such a way as to move us forward on the spiral.

Paul’s second component is that of ‘Faith’, the hominized appearance of ‘b’ in the figure above. 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 sounds like religious terminology, imagine if Newton had not first believed that there was some objective, measurable and most of all ‘comprehensible’ force by which objects moved from ‘static’ to ‘dynamic states. Faith 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’, ‘c’ in the figure. Hope is the result of engaging in Love and Faith which results in the opening our eyes to a future now seen as pregnant with possibility. It encourages us on our journey toward our potential for increased complexity as we move forward (and therefore upward) 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. If our look into the future is pessimistic and without hope, such negativity inhibits our movement up the spiral, toward a future in which the results of our growth are bleak, the fruit of our love is rejection, and we see ourselves 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.

The Next Post

For the past several weeks we have been tracing the traditional approach to God, Jesus and the Trinity. Fundamentals of Western religion, through the eyes of Teilhard to their secular sides. This week we looked at the whole picture in terms of Teilhard’s ‘spiral of evolution, showing how these concepts emerge as manifestations of the forces of universal evolution, and further how they can be seen to work in our individual lives.

Throughout this journey, we have touched on the idea of ‘spirituality’, assuming some sort of underlying agency which moves the universe, and ourselves, from less to more complexity.

Next week we will look at this commonly used term in more depth as we address the ‘secular side of spirituality’.

December 26, 2019 – The Secular Side of The Trinity

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw Jesus from our secular perspective, and noted how quickly the highly integrated understanding found in John became a victim of the endless human trend toward ‘dualism’. From our secular perspective, we saw how John’s vision strengthened the immediacy (immanence) of ‘the ground of being’ in human life and how Jesus was the ‘signpost’ for this spark of universal becoming which could be found in all the products of evolution, but only capable of being recognized as such by the human person.

This week we’ll take a look at the third stage of this unique evolution of the concept of God: the Trinity.

Today’s post is a summary of the posts from August 3 to August 17, 2017.

The History of the Trinity

As Bart Ehrman notes in his book, “How Jesus Became God”, unlike God and Jesus the Trinity isn’t addressed as such in any of the books of the Old or New Testament. As we have seen, the understanding of God and Jesus in these books has evolved over time, but the concept of a ‘third person’ wasn’t developed until late in the first three hundred years of the new Christian church.

It wasn’t until this point in the evolution of the early church’s theology that this agent began to be considered divine in somehow the same way that Jesus was being considered.

In a nutshell, the new church began to consider God as being ‘triune’, somehow composed of three distinct but unified ‘persons’ whose agency in universal evolution was reflected in three separate ways. The most commonly used terms ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Spirit’, however, are of little help in achieving an integrated understanding of this complex concept. Thus in the same way that the church required belief without understanding as an ‘act of faith’ necessary for salvation (as in the belief that Jesus was both God and Man), it was soon to follow with the statement that God was also ‘three divine persons in one divine nature’.

And, in the same way that the controversy over the nature of Jesus was debated before the Nicene council, that of the Trinity continued to be debated. After the Arian controversy was resolved by the Nicean council, the debate moved from the deity of Jesus to the equality of the ‘Spirit’ with the ‘Father’ and ‘Son’. Was this new person, the ‘Spirit’, equal or inferior to the other two? How could it be integrated when it was absent from scripture?

This controversy was brought to a head at the Council of Constantinople (381) which affirmed that the Spirit was indeed of the same ‘substance and nature’ of God, but like Jesus, a separate ‘person’. While perhaps theologically acceptable, Karen Armstrong concludes in her book, “A History of God”,

“For many Western Christians . . . the Trinity is simply baffling”.

Richard Rohr agrees with Armstrong that of all the Christian statements of belief, that of the Trinity seems furthest removed from human life.

So, what secular sense can we make of this? Can the ‘secular’ sense make ‘common’ sense?

The Secular Side of the Trinity

From our secular viewpoint, when put into Teilhard’s context of universal evolution, the concept of the Trinity becomes not only much simpler but more relevant to human life. Looking through Teilhard’s (and before him, Blondel’s) eyes, we have seen how God can be reinterpreted from a supernatural being which is the ‘over and against of man’ who creates, rewards and punishes, to the ‘ground of being’, the basis for the universe’s potential for evolution via increase in complexity. And applying this perspective to Jesus, we saw last week how he can be reinterpreted from a sacrifice necessary to satisfy such a distant God, to the personification of this increase in complexity as it rises through cosmic evolution to eventually manifest itself as the human person: the ‘signpost to God’.

In the same way we can see a third facet of this ‘axis of evolution’, the ‘Spirit’, as the energy which unites the products of evolution in such a way as to effect their increase in complexity. From this perspective, the ‘Spirit’ is simply the “the agent of complexification in evolution.”

More specifically, we can begin to see how this ‘triune God’ can be seen to be ‘personal’. The synthesized collaboration of these three principles of evolution effects what we know as the product of evolution that we refer to as ‘the person’.

Christianity puts names to these three aspects of the ground of being:

‘Father’ as the underlying principle of the unfolding of the universe in general, but as the principle of this becoming as it emerges after long periods of time as the ‘person’.
‘Son’ as the manifestation of the product of evolution that has become ‘person’
‘Spirit’ as the energy by which this ‘becoming’ takes the form of increasing complexity which leads to the ‘person’

Or, more succinctly

The ‘Father’ acts to move the universe along its evolutionary path.
Jesus is the blueprint for this action.
Spirit is the agency by which such action results in increased complexity

As we have noted frequently in this blog, Teilhard describes the human manifestation of this third ‘person’, this third facet of the ground of being, as love:

“Love is the only energy capable of uniting entities in such a way that they become more distinct.”

There’s something very revolutionary about this assertion. Before the advent of the human, universal ‘complexification’ rose through the outcome of such unification: increased complexity only occurred in the antecedent to the union, the precedents are left unchanged.

This can be seen in the early stages of universal evolution where more complex atoms result from the unification of less complex electrons and more complex molecules from less complex atoms. In the human person, the act of love increases the level of complexity in the uniters themselves. It is in this latest manifestation of the energies of the universe that we ourselves grow when we participate in love. So much more than the emotion which we experience when we unite, this unification effects our personal coming to be of what we are capable of. The point that Teilhard makes many times in his writing is that love is more ontological than it is emotional.

And in addressing this last agent of becoming, the ‘Spirit’, we can now see more clearly how John’s astounding statement begins to make secular sense:

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

Thus, Teilhard locates the ’Spirit’ squarely in the axis of evolution, as the manifestation of the energy which powers evolution through its rising levels of complexity. We can see in Science’s “Standard Model’ how this energy is manifest in forces such as the atomic forces, electricity and magnetism, gravity and chemistry as they all collaborate in raising the universe from the level of pure energy to that of matter sufficiently complex to provide the building blocks of life. We can also see how this energy continues to manifest itself in raising the complexity of living matter through the process of Natural Selection. Understanding the ‘Spirit’ is simply recognizing how evolutionary products aware of their consciousness (human persons) can cooperate with this energy to be united in such a way as to advance their individual complexity (their personal growth) and therefore continue to advance the complexity of their species.

Last week we noted that Richard Rohr decried how the increasing structure and dogmatism of the Christian church increased the distance between man and God by decreasing the relevance of its message. With our secular perspective, we can see how it is possible to understand the Trinity in terms which are relevant to life.

The Next Post

This week we saw that how adding the ‘Spirit’ to the ‘Father’ and the ‘Son’ completes an understanding of the ‘the ground of being’, the basis of the universe’s ‘coming to be’ in general. More importantly, we saw how we can begin to understand how this agent of evolution which has “raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence” (Richard Dawkins) works in our individual lives, as our personal dimension of the ‘axis of evolution’.

There is still another aspect of the concept of ‘The Trinity’ to explore. Understanding that the universe ‘is raised..to complexity” by the three-vectored actions of the ‘ground of being’, Teilhard proposes a ‘model’ how they act in concert to effect such raise in complexity. Next week we will look into this model as we address the “Convergent Spiral of Evolution.

December 19, 2019 – The Secular Side of Jesus

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This Week

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

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

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

Starting with the ‘New Testament’

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

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

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

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

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

The New Testament introduced some new dualities, such as

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

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

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

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

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

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

John clearly leads to a concept of God in which we and ‘he’ are intimate, how Jesus illustrates this intimacy in a way that we can imitate, and in the act of imitation we become more aware of ‘him’. With all this, however, it’s not difficult to see how successive theological development in the West has led to the idea of a distant God requiring ‘intermediaries’ to achieve contact (Jesus, Mary, Saints). The emergence of the theory of ‘substitutionary atonement’ in the 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’.

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

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This Week

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

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

The Secular Side of Meditation

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

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

Step 1: Recognizing the facets of our person

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

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

Step 2: Accepting where we are

”At each step of the descent, with the removal of layers of my identity defined from without, a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me.”

What happens when we begin to recognize these facades and scaffoldings, recognizing which ones move us forward, and which hold us back, and try to imagine the consequence of divesting ourselves of them? How can we ultimately trust that which lies beneath is indeed ‘trustworthy’? Upon what can we place our faith in our capacity for the ‘dangerous actions’ that we must undertake each day?

Step 3: Acknowledging our powerlessness

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

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

Step 4: Accepting powerlessness

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

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

Step 5: Trusting the ground of being

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

“It is I, be not afraid.”

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

Secular Meditation

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

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

An example of this voice can be seen in the similarity between these five steps and the very successful but deliberately secular “Ten Steps” of Alcoholics Anonymous. The foundational step of exploring and learning to trust one’s self is at the basis of much of Western secular thinking. Psychology itself, as we will address next week, can therefore be seen as ‘secular meditation’.

The Next Post

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

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

Science, Religion and Reality

Uncovering the confluence between science and religion

Tag Archives: Teilhard de Chardin

February 13, 2020 – How Can We Tell We’re Evolving?

February 6, 2020 – Navigating Human Evolution

January 30, 2020 – Evolution in Human Life

January 23, 2020 – Moving Evolution Forward

January 16, 2020 – TheSecular Side of Spirituality

January 9, 2020 – The Trinity and the Convergent Spiral of Evolution

December 26, 2019 – The Secular Side of The Trinity

December 19, 2019 – The Secular Side of Jesus

December 12 – Psychology as Secular Meditation

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