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

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Today’s Post

Last week we looked at the last four of Teilhard’s seven ways of seeing the natural confluence between religion and science.  As we saw, Teilhard understands them to be natural facets of a central synthesized understanding of the noosphere, and therefore potentially of benefit to continued relevance to human life.

This week we will take a look at how another thinker sees this potential for a closer and more beneficial relationship.  Jonathan Sacks, former British Chief Rabbi, comes at this subject from a slightly different perspective.  While Teilhard situates traditional dualities into an evolutive context to resolve them, Sacks understands them in the context of the two primary modes of human understanding intuition and empiricism.

Sacks On the Evolution of Religion

Teilhard of course placed religion (as he does all things) into an evolutionary context as one strand of ‘universal becoming’.  His understanding of the mutual benefit of a synthesis between science and religion is focused on their paired value to the continuation human evolution.

Sacks, in his book, “The Great Partnership”, stays closer to home, focusing on religion’s potential to help us to become what we are capable of becoming.  From this perspective, religion, properly understood and applied, is a mechanism for our personal growth.  As discussed previously, Sacks sees the evolution of human thinking in the unfolding of religion and the evolution of language, and thus as a slow movement towards a balance between the ‘left’ and ‘right’ hemispheres of the human brain.  In this way, the cooperation between religion and science can be seen as simply a more balanced and harmonious way of thinking in which the traditional ‘dualities’ (as seen by both Teilhard and Sacks) can be resolved.

Science’s Need for Religion

With this in mind, Sacks recognizes the West’s unique understanding of the person as the cornerstone of its success in improving human welfare.  Like Jefferson, he also recognizes the role that religion has played in the development of this unique perspective:

“Outside religion there is no secure alternative base for the unconditional source of worth that in the West has come from the idea that we are each in God’s image.  Though many have tried to create a secular substitute, none has ultimately succeeded.”

   The ‘none’ to which he refers can of course be seen in those countries which tried to create a “social order based on secular lines”.  These examples can be seen in Stalinist Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and the Kim family’s North Korea.

As he sees it, the problem arises when an alternative to religion’s value of the human person is sought.  Sacks locates the failure of such searches in science’s inability to address human freedom.  As he sees it:

“To the extent that there is a science of human behavior, to that extent there is an implicitly denial of the freedom of human behavior.”

   He sees this duality at work in Spinoza, Marx and Freud, who argued that human freedom is an illusion, but notes that “If freedom is an illusion, so is human dignity”.  Hence when human dignity is denies, the state no longer viable.

Sacks agrees with the success of science in overcoming the superstitions that often accompany religion, but notes that it does not replace the path to ‘meaning’ that religion offered.  He summarizes these two facets of human understanding:

 “Science takes things apart to understand how they work.  Religion puts things together to show what they mean.”

   For science to be effective, its statements must be ‘proved’, and the means of doing so are accepted across the breadth of humanity.  Both the need for such rigor and the success of its application can be seen in the many aspects of increased human welfare (effectively advances in human evolution) as seen in our series on Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress”.   Clearly the ‘scientific method’ is at the root of human evolution.

However, as we noted in this series, Norberg recognizes the basis of human evolution as human freedom, innovation and relationship.  These three facets of the human person are not ‘provable’, and which existence, as we saw above, is even denied by many ‘empiricists’.  Since they are active in the sap of evolution, they also must be in the root.

At the level of the human person, Sacks observes that “Almost none of the things for which people live can be proved.”  He offers the example of ‘trust”:

“A person who manages the virtue of trust will experience a different life than one to whom every human relationship is a potential threat.”

      Therefore, any group in which all the members can trust one another is at a massive advantage to others.  This, as evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has argued, is what religion does more powerfully than any other system.

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

“Therefore, any group in which all the members can trust one another is at a massive advantage to others.  This, as evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has argued, is what religion does more powerfully than any other system. “

Religion’s Need for Science

Just as the left- brained perspectives of science are in need of the right-brained balance of religion, as implicitly recognized by Norberg, so are the perspectives of religion in need of balance from science.

The claims of all forms of religion are based on metaphorical beliefs, many of which are anathema to those who are powering the ‘progress’ curve outlined by Norberg.  As we saw in the case of Thomas Jefferson, he systematically stripped the gospels of such ‘miraculous’ teachings to reveal what he considered to be the bedrock of “The Teachings of Jesus” which he in turn applied to his underlying (and unprovable) assertions of the value and dignity of the individual human person.

Many educated persons believe that scientific insight will eventually replace religion as the base of human action.  It is certainly true that in the past two hundred or so years, many religious teachings have become unacceptable due to the rise of empiricism, such as the formal blaming of the Jewish race for the death of Jesus, the seven literal days of creation, and so on.  The continuing influence of religion in many parts of the world is more due to its ability to push back on state corruption and savagery than its teachings on reincarnation and virgin births.  But with the increasing evolution of state structures more benign to the human person, such as that found in democracies, the underlying importance that religion places on the individual human person plays a larger role.

For religion to continue to play a role in this evolution, it must be seen as relevant.  As Sacks sees it:

“Religion needs science because we cannot apply God’s will to the world if we do not understand the world.  If we try to, the result will be magic or misplaced supernaturalism.”

The Road to Synthesis

So, how do we get to the point where right- and left- brain process are balanced?  Sacks addresses what happens when we don’t:

“Bad things happen when religion ceases to hold itself answerable to empirical reality, when it creates devastation and cruelty on earth for the sake of salvation in heaven.  And bad things happen when science declares itself the last word on the human condition and engages in social or bio-engineering, treating humans as objects rather than as subjects, and substitution of cause and effect for reflection, will and choice.”

   He recognizes that science and religion have their own way of asking questions and searching for answers, but doesn’t see it as a basis for compartmentalization, in which they are seen as entirely separate worlds.  Like Teilhard, he sees the potential for synergy “..because they are about the same world within which we live, breathe and have our being”.

He sees the starting point for such synergy as “conversation”, in hopes that it will lead to “integration”.  From Sacks’ perspective:

“Religion needs science because we cannot apply God’s will to the world if we do not understand the world.  If we try to, the result will be magic or misplaced supernaturalism.”

   By the same token, he goes on:

“Science needs religion, or at the very least some philosophical understanding of the human condition and our place within the universe, for each fresh item of knowledge and each new accession of power raises the question of how it should be used, and for that we need another way of thinking.”

   Even though Sacks doesn’t place his beliefs, like Teilhard, in an explicitly evolutionary context, he does envision a more complete manifestation of the human emerging as a result of a more complete balance between the influence of the ‘right’ and ‘left’ brains (modes of engaging reality).  In this sense, he echoes Teilhard’s belief of ‘fuller being’ resulting from ‘closer union’.

The Next Post

This week we have seen how Jonathan Sacks approaches Teilhard’s call for a fresh approach to the potential synergy between religion and science.  Like Teilhard, he concludes that the success of the West requires a synergy between science and religion if it is to continue.

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

December 6 – Religion’s Seeds of ‘Articulating the Noosphere’ and How to Build Upon Them, Part 2

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Expanding On Teilhard’s View of Morality – Part 2

Today’s Post

Last week took a second look at Teilhard’s five insights into the religious concept of morality, focusing on the first two.  As we saw, putting the idea of morality into the context of evolution brought new depths of meaning into religion’s traditional understanding of morality as proscriptions for stabilizing society and qualifying us for ‘the next life’.

This week we will continue further on this subject, reviewing the last three of his insights for their potential to ‘construct the noosphere’ even as in turn we are ‘constructed’ by it.

Teilhard’s Last Three Insights on Morality

As we saw last week, the first two of these insights from his book, “Human Energy” addressed morality from the perspective of its role in human evolution and showed how the basis of morality is a building block for the noosphere, as well as an articulation which

“guide(s) (us) so effectively in the direction of (our) anticipated fulfillments that the ‘quantity of personality’ still diffuse in humanity may be released in fullness and security.”

   To Teilhard, the essential function of religion is as a tool for unlocking our potential as entities of evolution to continue the evolutionary ‘complexification’ of the universe as we ourselves become more complete.

His last three insights extend the first two into an understanding of how morals can help us ‘release’ our “quantity of personality…in fullness and security”.

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

 “The morality of balance is replaced by the morality of movement.

–  (As an example) The morality of money based on exchange and fairness vs the goodness of riches only if they work for the benefit of the spirit.”

   A secular example of such a shift in perspective can be seen in the examples of human evolution in human affairs today, as enumerated by Norberg.  One of the facets that he identifies is a distinct correlation between the rise of human welfare in developing countries and their increase of GNP.  This is a concrete example of Teilhard’s insight into the potential of secular wealth to improve human welfare as a metric of human evolution.  Norberg echoes Teilhard’s belief that ‘the morality of money’ can evolve from seeing donated money as a measure of morality (charity) to understanding the application of personal freedom and improved relationships as necessary for a society to increase its wealth (GNP) and as a result, increase the welfare of its citizens.

– “Individual morality to prevent him from doing harm vs working with the forces of growth to free his autonomy and personality (person-ness) to the uttermost.”

   This is a direct corollary of the above insight, and reinforces his claim that morality must evolve from proscription to prescription if it is to fulfill its potential in fostering our personal evolution towards more completeness (autonomy and person-ness).  In Teilhard’s new insight, morality must now be recognized as a tool for increasing personal freedom and enhancing relationships, not as a hedge against evil.

Religion, Morality and Complexification

“By definition, his religion, if true, can have no other effect than to perfect the humanity in him.”

   Here Teilhard is delving into the most fundamental role of religion.  As technology certainly can be seen to improve human welfare, it has no expertise at improving the human unique characteristics of personal freedom and personal relationships which are necessary to insure the innovation and invention at the basis of its expertise.  He goes on to say,

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

   The most appropriate role for religion Is as a tool for management of the noosphere.  The deepest claim to authenticity for a religion is to be recognized as a tool for the evolutionary advancement of the human person, and through him the advancement of humanity.

Morality As A Basis For Dealing With The Noosphere

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

   Here Teilhard is succinctly stating one of his basic tenets of understanding human evolution:  Once put in an evolutionary context, all concepts which are pertinent to human existence begin to present themselves as aspects of the single, unified and coherent thing that they truly are.   

The Tool Set

In the same way that government must establish and safeguard the building blocks of society, such as Jefferson seeing the person as the basis for society…

In the same way that medicine must understand physiology to diagnose illness to be able to prescribe treatment…

In the same way that technology must understand metal structure to build a bridge…

Religion must recognize its role as a tool for understanding the noosphere to be able to assist us in living it in such a way that we maximize our potential for being fully and authentically human.

The Next Post

This week we took a second look at the last three of Teilhard’s insights into the concept of morality, seeing how he extended his understanding in the first two (the evolutionary context) to the last three (how it is a tool for continuing our evolution as humans).

Next week we will begin to look at what has to happen to religion if it is to begin to realize its potential as ‘co-creator’ of the future with science.

November 29 – Religion’s Seeds of ‘Articulating the Noosphere’ and How to Build Upon Them Expanding On Teilhard’s View of Morality- Part 1

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a more detailed look at Teilhard’s insights into the concept of morality, how it has been taught in Western religion, and how putting it into the context of evolution can point the way to incorporating it as a tool for ‘articulating the noosphere’.

   This week I’d like to look at the five insights from last week that Teilhard offers from his book, “Human Energy” in the context of the multifaceted view that we have been building in our search for “The Secular Side of God”.  Each one of these insights is in reality just an outline, a starting point for these subjects, and offers a basis for considering the concept of morality to be a cornerstone for ‘articulating the noosphere’.

Rethinking Religion

As we have seen, one of Teilhard’s key insights was that to be able to manage our journey through the noosphere, we must first understand it. The entire history of religion shows it to be our first attempt to do so.  Born in an era which depended on intuitive insights , the early religions were simply extensions of the clans which formed the base for the societal structures that came into being.  They all reflected the need to stabilize the ever-increasing size, density and complexity of human society.  All of the early myths and stories reflected the common understanding that the world had always existed, and that it had existed in manifestations that had only superficially changed over the years.

As we have seen elsewhere in this blog, these early noospheric insights did not begin to rise from the highly subjective perspectives that had held sway for thousands of years until the “Axial Age”, some 700 years BCE.  These perspectives, while somewhat impacted by early Greek thinking, managed to remain as the prevalent mode of thinking until mid-1200’s, when more empirical and objective perspectives began to appear in the West.

When this happened, the highly metaphorical insights into the composition of the noosphere began to change, culminating in the growing understanding of first the noosphere itself and then the universe which surrounds it, from static to dynamic.

The clash between the neothink offered by the nascent scientific evidence and the prevalent static and intuitive beliefs which still reflected medieval scholasticism is well documented, and to some extent still goes on today.  They offer profoundly opposed insights into the composition of the noosphere, and reflect the significant dualism that underpins modern attempts to understand it.  So it comes as no surprise that today we find it difficult to unravel these two threads to find a way to respin them into a single strand.

  In such a single strand, the concept of morality moves beyond the dualistic secular basis for a secure society and a roadmap to successful entry into the next life, and into a set of guidelines which ‘articulate the noosphere’ in such a way that we insure our continued evolution into states of greater complexity.

Rethinking Morality

   It was in this vein that Teilhard, along with other thinkers such as Maurice Blondel, began to look at the tenets and structure of religion, particularly Western religion, in these new terms offered by science.  The five insights that we saw last week offer a summary of his understanding of how this new thinking not only could bring a new, secular and empirical meaning to the ancient teachings, but that Christianity, as one of the first attempts to see religion and reason as sides of a single coin, was well suited to do so.

Teilhard’s five insights into morality all offer opportunities to not only increase the relevancy of religious teaching, but in doing so increase its value to science.  Not only can religious teaching be better grounded in empirical facts, but in doing so can provide a much needed ‘ground of humanity’ to science.

Looking a little deeper into the first two of Teilhard’s five insights into morality:

The Evolutionary Basis for Morality

“If indeed, as we have assumed, the world culminates in a thinking reality, the organization of personal human energies represents the supreme stage (so far) of cosmic evolution on Earth; and morality is consequently nothing less than the higher development of mechanics and biology.  The world is ultimately constructed by moral forces; and reciprocally, the function of morality is to construct the world.”

   Here Teilhard asks us to recognize that what religion has been trying to accomplish, with its topsy-turvy, noosphericly-risky, ultimately very human approach is to ‘articulate the noosphere’, using the slowly accumulated understanding of the noosphere provided by intuition, metaphors and dreams, and impeded by egos, fears, and ambitions. 

   He attaches no particular stigma to the fact that we’re already some two hundred thousands of years into human evolution, and in many ways ‘we’re not there yet’.  Considering that evolution is ‘a work in progress’, the ultimate use of the tool of morality is to ‘construct the world’.  Conversely this calls for us to ‘construct morality’ even as we ‘articulate the noosphere’.

   Properly understood, morals are the building blocks of the noosphere, by which we ourselves are ‘built’..

The Evolution of Morality

“Morality has until now been principally understood as a fixed system of rights and duties intended to establish a static equilibrium between individuals and at pains to maintain it by a limitation of energies, that is to say of force.

Now the problem confronting morality is no longer how to preserve and protect the individual, but how to guide him so effectively in the direction of his anticipated fulfillments that the ‘quantity of personality’ still diffuse in humanity may be released in fullness and security.”

   Here Teilhard introduces two insights:  First the most tangible way that morality ‘constructs the world’ is by clarifying the structure of the universe so that we can better understand it.  Secondly, it offers a clearer understanding of how we are to make the best use of it in unlocking the fullness and security that is still diffuse in us.

   As we better understand morals, we better understand the noosphere, and become more skilled at cooperating with its forces to increase our personal complexification.

The Next Post                  

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

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

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

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Today’s Post

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

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

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

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

Morality

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

The Evolutionary Basis for Morality

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

 

The Evolution of Morality

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Religion and Morality

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

Morality As A Basis For Dealing With The Noosphere

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

The next Post                   

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

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

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

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Today’s Post

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

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

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

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

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

The Convergent Spiral of Evolution

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

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

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

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

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

The Empirical Spiral

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

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

–          Matter appearing from pure energy

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

–          Molecules emerging from an infinitude of combinations of atoms

–          Such molecules evolving to the relatively astonishing organization of cells

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

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

–          Neocortices emerge from limbic brains,  themselves from reptilian brains

–          Conscious brains become aware of their functionality

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

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

Next Week

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

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

October 25 – Managing the Noospheric Risks, Part 3

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Teilhard  places ‘spirituality’ into the context of evolution,  in which context it can be seen not as a ‘opposite’ of matter but an essential aspect of what causes ‘the stuff of the universe’ to energize matter into increased complexity.  We also saw how Norberg, who articulates how such ‘matter-spirit’ combinations can be seen to increase human welfare, provides ‘proof of the pudding’ for Teilhard’s recognition of the necessary elements of human evolution and his audacious optimisim.

This week I’d like to continue exploring what’s involved in managing ‘Noospheric risks’ by placing them (as Teilhard has) into an ‘evolutionary’ context.

Seeing Human History in an ‘Evolutionary’ Context

As Teilhard suggests, one way to understand who and where we are is to place ourselves  into  the context of universal evolution.  This includes understanding how both religion and science occur in human history.

As many thinkers, particularly Johathan Sacks, point out, religion originally began as a very early human activity characterized by such right brain activities as instinct and intuition as enterprises which helped to making sense of both themselves and their groupings.   Stories such as ‘creation narratives’ provided a basis for societal conduct and were eventually coded into the first laws as humanity began to emerge from clans to social groups, then cities, then states.

As we saw in posts from September, 2015,The History of Religion , a record of the rise of human left brain thinking began with Greeks

The first movement toward some level of synthesis between the right and left modes of thought can be  seen in the New Testament  Paul, then John, who began to incorporate left brain ideas such as Paul’s “Fruits of the Spirit” and John’s  ‘ontological’ articulation of God (“God is love…”) as an essential aspect of ‘the ground of being’ in each of us.   While demonstrating a clear departure from the traditional right-brained Jewish approach of the Torah, they mark less of a departure from it than evolution from it.

Thus, as Sacks points out , Christianity can be seen as possibly the first  attempt to synthesize  right and left brain thinking modes.

Science is born from such an early such application, but was initially seen as competitive with the prevailing right brain concepts of the time, and hence threatening to the established church hierarchy (which is still stuck in many of the traditional dualisms which accept the dissonance between right and left brain thinking).

Science in its own way is also stuck.  Thinkers of the Enlightenment, ‘threw the baby out with the bath’ when they attributed human woes to religion.  Not that this was totally incorrect, since the ills of the secular aspect of all religions can be seen in their need for ‘hierarchies’, which have traditionally required adherence to absolute and dogmatic teachings to maintain control over their followers.  However, by neither recognizing that the primacy of the person and his freedom require more than ‘permission’, they also require such things as faith and love (as understood in the Teilhardian context), which science is hard pushed to articulate.

As Sacks puts It,

 “To understand things, science takes them apart to see what they are made of while religion puts them together to discern what they mean”.

From the Religious Side

One way to understand Teilhard (or any such ‘synthetic’ thinker, such as Blondel or Rohr) is to apply their concepts to such traditional ‘dualisms’.  We saw in last week’s post how Teilhard’s thoughts on spirituality show one such application, and how in just a few words, the traditional dualism of spirit and matter can disappear.  We have seen many other examples over the last many posts

Thus, we can see that putting traditional science and religion concepts into a truly ‘universal’ context, such as Teilhard proposes, can move us unto a mode of thinking which sees things much more clearly and less self-contradictory  than we could  in the past.  Teilhard saw such an enterprise as

 “A clearer disclosure of God in the world.”

   So we can see how Teilhard’s approach illustrates that one thing necessary for continued human evolution is a continuation of right/left brain synthesis by which science and religion can move from adversaries into modes of thinking in which our intuition is enhanced by our empiricism, and in which our empiricism can build upon our intuition.  We effect our own evolution by use of both modes of thinking.

This approach also, to  some extent,  recovers much of the optimism contained in the gospels, such as  the recognition that , as Blondel  puts it, “The ground of being is on our side”,   and as John puts it, “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”.

Such recognition of the positive nature of the agent of increasing complexity, and the awareness that such an agent is alive and empowering each of us, is another example of Teilhard’s “Clearer disclosure of God in the World”.  It also repudiates the natural Greek pessimism that had such influence on Christian doctrine and emerged in the Christian Protestant ontology by which Luther could see humans as “piles of extrement covered by Christ”.

From the Empirical Side

By the same token, Norberg’s rich trove of facts, which show how ‘progress’ is powered by increased human freedom and improved relationships, can be seen as evidence that we are indeed evolving.  The fact that the facets of empowerment which he documents:  personal freedom and improved relationships also happen to be the cornerstones of Western religion, strongly suggest that the continuation of human evolution is based on enhancement of them: an empowerment fostered and strengthened by our increased understanding of them,  of how they work and of how to deepen  them.

Something else is necessary.  Putting these concepts, ‘persons’ and ‘love,’ into an evolutionary context may well be necessary for us to overcome the profoundly influential dualisms which have thus far forged our world view, but this same evolutionary context also offers yet another aspect: Time.

Considering that the human species is some 200K years old, and only in the past two or so centuries have we begun to unpack these dualisms and recognize them  less as contradictions than as ‘points on a spectrum’, we need ‘patience’.  The morphing of such an integrated insight of humanity into a civic baseline in which it would be stated by Thomas Jefferson that:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

occurred only two hundred years ago.  An evolutionary ‘blink’, to be sure,  but by ordinary human standards,  represents many lifetimes, and an incessant search for how this ideal of human freedom and relationships should be played out (or in some cases,  stomped out) in human society.

Thus an appreciation of the pace of evolution must be learned.  Certainly it is not fast enough for most of us, especially if we live in ‘developing’ countries, watched our children suffer from curable diseases, hunger or war, or born with the ‘wrong’ skin color or ‘sinful’ dispositions.   It’s less important to rue the pace if human evolution than to appreciate its ‘axis’.

The Next Post

This week we have seen how putting human history into a ‘evolutive’ context helps us to begin to see how what have been traditional and deep seated ‘dualisms’ can be put into into a single integrated context, and begin the process of using both our human modes of thought to better understand who we are and how can move ourselves forward.

Next week we will continue this line of thought further.

October 18 – Managing the Noospheric Risks, Part 2

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at managing the ‘noospheric risks’ that we can see as evolution rises through the human species.  We boiled down the essential approaches to ‘building the noosphere’ (from the Post of October 4)

“…that human persons must be free to capitalize on their ‘interiority’ and be given the ‘liberty’ to continuously rearrange both their personal perspectives to identify enterprises which can be either used as stepping stones to new arrangements or corrected if they do not effect an improvement, and to engage with other persons to freely form ‘psychisms’ to perform these tasks.”

   But we noted that these approaches themselves need to be continually improved if they are to reflect true ‘articulations of the noosphere’.

This week we will continue this look, by exploring  a little deeper into science and religion, our two great systems of thought, as they attempt to help us ‘make sense of things’.

Spirit and Matter: Spirituality and Progress

We have noted, as both Teilhard and Norberg show, that no human movement forward (towards continued improvement in human welfare, toward increased complexity) occurs without some unplanned and unwanted consequence.  Skeptics of ‘secular progress’ decry the fact that such progress is meaningless if unwanted consequences ensue, and therefore decrease true spirituality in favor of 9simply) materialistic improvements .  Such critiques highlight what is seen as the futility of humans to overcome their ‘sinful nature’ and grow spiritually.  This criticism is well countered by Teilhard in his understanding of spirituality as simply a facet of ‘the stuff of the universe’.

“…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.”

And

“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. “

   In this unique perspective, Teilhard  offers a totally new perspective on the traditional spirit/matter duality  which sees them as opposites, requiring divine intervention into ‘lower’ matter in order to ‘save’ it, much as Luther envisioned humans as “piles of manure covered by Christ”.

Recognizing this, as Teilhard does so succinctly, bridges the gap between the ‘spitituality’ so prized by religionists and the ‘progress’ equally  prized by secularists.  In his view, they are not opposites, but simply two facets of a single integrated reality.  Both Teilhard and Norberg would agree that, properly understood, spirituality is embodied in any progress by which human welfare is advanced.  More succinctly, spirituality is the agency by which matter becomes more complex, therefore more evolved.

Thus the religionists are correct: the world needs more spirituality if it is to succeed.  However, with Teilhard’s more universal  understanding of ‘spirituality’ we can now see that spirituality is that which underlies the evolution of the ‘stuff of the universe’ (eg: matter, eg: us).  With this understanding, the idea of spirituality rises from the ‘otherworldly’ nature which requires us to look down on matter to one in which matter and its evolutionary rise in complexity are equally important to the spirituality which underpins it.

With this new approach, human welfare is not only just as important as ‘spiritual’ growth, it is actually a facet of it.  And seen in this light, Norberg’s metrics of ‘progress’ also provide evidence of the continued rise of spirituality in human evolution.

This perspective doesn’t mean that the human species will be ‘saved’ by all forms of religion or science; the ills of both of them are commonly enough reported in the free press, but the successes of both are embodied, as Teilhard, Norberg and Rohr point out, in the freedom of the individual, the recognition of the importance of relationships, and in the trust that these two facets of existence will

lead to a better future.  Compromising any of these three will compromise the continuation of human evolution.

As Richard Rohr succinctly puts it:

“The first step toward healing is truthfully acknowledging evil, while trusting the inherent goodness of reality.”

The Next Post

      This week we took a second look at managing the risks of continued human evolution, but relooking at how Teilhard offers a perspective in which spirituality and human progress aren’t just not in opposition to each other, they represent two facets of a single thing, increasing complexity.    Seen thusly, Teilhard’s extension of spirituality from human ‘holiness’ to a universal agency of ‘becoming’, and Norberg’s list of how such ‘becoming’ plays out in human affairs permits us a fuller appreciation of how evolution is occurring in our everyday lives.

Next week we will take a third look at this new perspective so we can better understand how it can make a difference in where we go from here.

October 11 – Managing the Noospheric Risks, Part 1

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Today’s Post

Last week we took another look at ‘articulating the noosphere’, this time in the light of Teilhard’s insights and the many facts which Johan Norberg cites in his survey of exactly how evolution can be seen to proceed in the human.  We saw how well the forecasts for the future that were posited by Teilhard early in the last century are being borne out with Norberg’s contemporary statistics.

We also saw how, Teilhard asserts, that  to continue the rise of complexity in the human species, which is the same as continuing its evolution, we must increase our knowledge of the noosphere so that we can learn to cooperate with its ‘laws’.  This increasing understanding is also necessary for us to deal with the ‘risks’ to continued human evolution .  This week we will take a look at how both religion and science , properly understood, are up to this task.

The Axis of Evolution

Almost every scientific approach to biological evolution uses the metaphor of ‘a tree’, as in “The Tree of Life”.  The metaphor is obviously sound, in that it shows that every living thing comes from a previous form, and with the new science of DNA available, each new branch reveals details of the form from which it came.

Unfortunately, the Darwinist approach to how such forms emerged is the predominant explanation for biological evolution.  As such, it assumes a ‘trial and error’ approach subject to a wide range of random events and thus relies on a causation popularly known as ‘survival of the fittest’.  Therefore, most scientists adhere to the belief that there is no underlying causation for the continuation of evolution:  it is ‘random’.

Teilhard notes how such an approach falls very short of providing an understanding of evolution at the universal level.  He cites scientific discoveries in the last century that describe how the fundamental universe has unfolded from pure energy, progressing through stages including the precipitation of matter from this initial state of energy through stages in which these initial primordial infinitesimal granules of ‘the stuff of the universe’ grow slowly but steadily from simpler to more complex entities until the cell appears.  It is not until this point, some four billion years ago, that the ‘trial and error’ phase of evolution can begin.

Teilhard refuses to admit some sort of divine intervention in this story, insisting that matter and energy, in their initial manifestations, contain a ‘coefficient of complexity’ by which each stage of evolution occurs as a result of this implicit factor, including the step from molecular to cellular entities.  Hence, this ‘coefficient’, while acting in all previous stages, necessarily takes new forms as the complexity of the entities increases.

From this perspective, the orderly ‘tree of life’ can now be seen to have a core element that links it to the preceding ten billion years in which complex molecules emerged from pure energy.  Teilhard refers to this core element as providing an ‘axis of evolution’, and recognizing that it affords us with a metric which unites all three eras of evolution: pre life, life and reflective life.  (Teilhard uses the term ‘reflective life’ to demark conscious life from life conscious of its consciousness.)  While this approach recognizes the impacts of random events, both in the form of cosmic radiation which modifies the DNA of living tissue as well as in the form of interplanetary collisions such as the K-T extinction, Teilhard points to the fact that in spite of them, evolution still can be clearly seen to proceed in the direction of greater complexity over time.

Continuing Evolution in the Human Species

Recognizing this phenomenon of ‘universal complexification’ allows us a starting place to continuing our ‘learning curve’ about the noospheric ‘laws’, a process that is necessary if we are to insure that such complexification continues in our species.

While science sees ‘learning the rules’ as digging deeper and further in the past for clues to how the universe operates, religion has assembled a complex and frequently contradictory set of guidelines for human behavior.  The ‘continuation’ that we seek must rest on both foundations, but only as they are ‘reinterpreted’ in the light of both Teilhard’s forecasts and Norberg’s statistics.

These two perspectives, of course, represent the two most significant human undertakings: science and religion.  Often seen as opposites, and an instance of a profound human ‘duality’, a more appropriate approach might be to see them as simply enterprises  which are influenced by the two modes of human thinking represented by the ‘right’ and ‘left’ brains, and reflected by instincts and intuition on the first side, and empiricism and analysis on the left.

Seen thusly, an integrated understanding of the noosphere requires a synthesis of these two venerable enterprises.  Such a synthesis, in turn, requires a shift of the understanding of God on the one hand, from the anthropomorphic, Greek-influenced model which evolved in the West to Blondel’s ‘ground of being’ and Teilhard’s ‘principle of evolution’.  Teilhard understood the goal of his thinking as “a clearer disclosure of God in the world”.

On the side of Science, Norberg’s identification of the objective measures of human evolution move the process of evolution from a random series of meaningless consequences to a recognition that not only is evolution not random, but in the articulation of its movement, there are indeed guidelines for its continuation.  Norberg implicitly recognizes underlying principle of human evolution, Teilhard’s ‘axis’, as it manifests itself as a necessary ingredient in the increase in human welfare that he documents so thoroughly in his book, “Progress”.  While there are many other causations at play, such as weather catastrophes, even cosmic accidents, which are indeed random, more important to human evolution are the freedoms and relations that he documents.

This brings us back to the focus of the Blog, “The Secular Side of God”.  We can now see that a fresh understanding of the ‘noosphere’ requires a relook at both Science and Religion, and this relook offers the potential of seeing these two great enterprises as two sides of a single coin, and not as history would have it, systems in opposition.

Returning to the ‘sphere’ as a metaphor, but in a different way than we have seen with his explanation of increasing population over decreasing available space, Teilhard notes that Religion and Science can be seen as parallel longitudes which decrease their distance as they approach the pole.  At the equator, they are at their maximum distance, but as evolution proceeds, they approach one another with an eventual coherence at the pole.

Just as we saw the ‘laws of the noosphere’ becoming clearer as we crossed the equator (with the ‘knee in the curves’ that begin to manifest themselves beginning two hundred years ago), we are now beginning to see (as both Teilhard and Norberg evidence today) a similar demarcation in the systems which energize this movement manifest themselves.

The movement of these systems toward such coherence marks the evolution of both enterprises towards their application to  the inevitable risks to human evolution that we have charted, and insure our continued ‘march toward the future’.

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at how the approaches represented by Teilhard and Norberg can be seen to ones which permit us to see how Science and Religion can ‘team up’ to insure our continued evolution.

Next week we will take a second look at how could be made to happen.

October 4 – Where Have We Got to?

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a final look at the risks that Teilhard saw in the continuation of human evolution. This post concluded the part of the Blog which has seen how Teilhard understands human evolution, and how it can be objectively assessed.

Beginning last summer we summed up Teilhard’s perspective on Articulating the Noosphere and Living the Theological Virtues.  We went on to explore his metaphor of evolution as the advance of humanity over an imaginary sphere, and how as we come to the equator, everything begins to change as the increase in human population no longer finds empty space to pour into, and consequently begins to fold in on itself.

We then began to address how this new phenomena effects a change in human evolution by starting with the question,  Is Human Evolution Proceeding and how Would We Know?, and proceeded to answer the question with evidence from Johan Norberg which quantifies such metrics.  We also saw how his quantification (beginning with July 26- Fuel as a Measure of Human Evolution) illustrates how Teilhard’s insights are being borne out today, but as we saw, not without risks.

This week we’ll begin to address how all this fits into our focus of “The Secular Side of God”.

A Relook at ‘Articulating the Noosphere’

Teilhard believed that understanding how evolution proceeds both in our lives and in our societies depends on developing an understanding of the structure, the warp and woof, of the ‘noophere’:  the ‘mileu’ which appears in cosmic evolution with the appearance of the human.  Without denying science’s understanding of evolution as seen in the stages of pre-life and biological life, he offers a perspective on not only how such evolution can continue on in the human species, but how the ‘articulations’ of the spheres of ‘pre-life’ and ‘life’ as described by science can be seen to continue in the ‘noosphere’.   His straightforward observation that ‘evolution effects complexity’ is just as valid in the noosphere as it was realms of Physics and Biology.  This observation, then, is the key to beginning to understand the structure of the ‘noosphere’.  To understand how evolution works in the human is to understand how such ‘complexification’ can be understood as acting in both our personal lives and in the unfolding of society.

As we saw last week, Teilhard summarizes the unfolding of such complexity in the human species as we

“…continually find new ways of arranging (our) elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space” by “a rise in interiority and liberty within a whole made up of reflective particles that are now more harmoniously interrelated.”

   And as we have seen in the past few weeks, Johan Norberg offers “A tornado of evidence” on how Teilhard’s projections of how “a rise in interiority and liberty” constantly effect “new ways of arranging ourselves” but requires “harmonious interrelations”.  Effectively, in Norberg’s evidence we see how Teilhard’s approach to understanding how the classical duality, “The one vs the many” plays out as we get better at ‘articulating the noosphere’.

And, as the subject of the blog has taken shape, the ‘reinterpretation of religion’, we can see more clearly now why such an undertaking is important for our continued evolution.  Classical Western religion, entwined as it has become with superstition, mythology and weighted down by medieval philosophy, nonetheless contains within it nuggets of true understanding of those ‘articulations’ which Teilhard asserts we must uncover and follow if we are going to continue to move forward.  Western religion is rife with teachings which address Teilhard’s  three essential elements of human evolution:

–          New ways of arranging ourselves (our cultural/social structures and how they expand across the globe through ‘globalization’)

–          A rise in interiority (our person) and liberty (our autonomy)

–          Harmonious interrelations (relationships which are capable of forming ‘psychisms’ capable of employing increases in our person and our liberties to effect new arrangements)

but as we have seen, require reinterpretation to uncover their relevance and focus to the job at hand.  Such reinterpretation of religion is necessary for it to provide signposts to the future.

Continuing the March to the Future

So, Teilhard asserts, to continue the rise of complexity in the human species, which is the same as continuing its evolution, we must increase our knowledge of the noosphere so that we can learn to cooperate with its ‘laws’.  As Teilhard forecasts and Norberg cites, in the past two hundred years we have seen distinctive examples of both.  Since the mid-1800s, as Norberg maps in detail, the speed at which we better understand what works and what doesn’t in an increasingly tight spiral of ‘trial and error’,  is ever increasing.   While Norberg and Teilhard both address this phenomenon, they also address the underlying evolutionary ‘physics’ which underlies it.

Norberg essentially agrees with Teilhard that human persons must be free to capitalize on their ‘interiority’ and be given the ‘liberty’ to continuously rearrange both their personal perspectives to identify rearrangements which can be attempted and either used as stepping stones to new arrangements or corrected if they do not effect an improvement, and to engage with other persons to freely form ‘psychisms’ to perform these tasks.

This should come as no surprise to many of us, put into these terms.  For the past hundred years, scientists and those in technical fields have experienced increasing participation in ‘psychisms’ as well as the satisfaction of using their innate skills and education to design, develop, field and deal with the consequences of their products.  They were not necessarily explicitly aware of how they were ‘articulating the noosphere’, nor always conscious of how their participation in their work groups contributed to their personal growth, but grew into an appreciation of the contributions of others as well as of the limited autonomy of those groups which bore fruit.  They were effectively participating in small ‘Teilhardic’ rearrangements.

The Next Post

For the last few weeks we have been exploring both the mechanism of increasing complexity in the human as well as the many examples of how this mechanism is playing out.  We’ve looked at both examples and risks- while progress is being made, how can we insure its continuation?

Next week we will return to address how religion, ‘divested’ of Dawkins’ ‘baggage’ can be reinterpreted to provide both relevance and functionality to such insurance.

September 20 – The ‘Noospheric’ Risks to Continued Human Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week we addressed those risks to continued human evolution that are based on the seemingly inevitable negative consequences of every aspect of human ‘progress’, but noted that, at least thus far, human innovation and invention seem up to the task of maximizing the advances over the consequences.

But can we count on this phenomenon to continue?  What can happen to ‘dry up’ this pool of intellectual energy, Teilhard’s ‘psychisms’, which have kept us moving thus far?

The Noospheric Risks

As we saw in our series a few weeks back on “Mapping the Noosphere”, the phase of human evolution in which increased population simply spills over into available space is over.  Even though the rate of increase of population has slowed, each increase now brings us into ever increasing proximity to each other, and our natural initial reaction is to recoil.  Take the example of looking for a seat at the airport.  Few will choose to sit near a stranger if a seat can be found next to one which is vacant.  The only instances in which we seem to be able to tolerate being closed in by the crowd are when we are related, as families or tribesmen, to those crowding us.

This recoil from increased compression is an indication of the fear that in the future we will be subsumed into the hoard, losing our identity, our autonomy and squelching our person.   There is a facet to the future that is ‘dreaded’; the future seems far less secure than the past.

   Each human innovation that has been cited in this series has occurred in the face of political, religious and philosophical pushback.  In the yearning for a non-existing but nevertheless attractive past, the practices of innovation, invention and globalism can be undermined.  The very fact that a strong majority of well-off Westerners can still consider the future to be dire is an indication of how little faith (well-justified faith if Norberg’s statistics and Teilhard’s projections are to be believed) is to be found.  In 2015, a poll cited by Norberg showed that a whopping 71% of Britons thought “The world was getting worse” and a miniscule 3% thought it was getting better.

Teilhard comments on this phenomenon:

“…so many human beings, when faced by the inexorably rising pressure of the noosphere, take refuge in what are now obsolete forms of individualism and nationalism.”

   With this insight, penned some eighty years ago, he correctly forecasts trends which can be seen in today’s increasingly divided West.  He goes on to elaborate:

“At this decisive moment when for the first time he (man, that is) 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.”

   And here he identifies the crux of the ‘noospheric’ risks to increasing evolution in the human species.  As he forecasts, we seem to be entering an era of “rising ideological division” and a “culture war” that has the potential to undermine our well-documented knack for problem-solving.  Nowadays, few adversarial groups seem capable of negotiating peaceful consensus solutions to problems, especially with opponents that are perceived as ‘even more unreasonably dogmatic’ (Pinker) than they are. This cycle is often driven by the irate stubbornness of a few vigorous leaders.  After all, as David Brin points out,

“the indignant have both stamina and dedication, helping them take high positions in advocacy organizations, from Left to Right.”

   And exactly how does this jeopardize our continued evolution?  Again, Teilhard explains how human evolution is shifting from the neurological increase in brain size to the ability to synthesize brains to increase the power of thought to innovate and invent:

“..as a result of the combined, selective and cumulative operation of their numerical magnitude, the human centers have never ceased to weave in and around themselves a continually more complex and closer-knit web of mental interrelations, orientations and habits just as tenacious and indestructible as our hereditary flesh and bone conformation.  Under the influence of countless accumulated and compared experiences, an acquired human psychism is continually being built up, and within this we are born, we live and we grow- generally without even suspecting how much this common way of feeling and seeing is nothing but a vast, collective past, collectively organized.”

   In short, such ideological division undermines the formation of such ‘psychisms’, and weakens their power to solve problems.

The Next Post

This week we took a first look the ‘Noospheric Risks’ to human evolution, ones which are more subtle, and hence more dangerous than those of a ‘structural’ nature.

Next week we will continue looking at these ‘Noospheric’ risks to better understand how they can undermine the continuation of human evolution.