Tag Archives: Reinterpretation of Religion

August 17 – The Secular Side of The Trinity

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Today’s Post

Last week we summarized the last facet of the complex God that emerged in just a few hundred years after the death of Jesus, the ‘Trinity’.  We also noted how this concept emerged at the same time that the new church began to become part of Roman society and how the church began to drift into an institution which became more dependent on adherence to dogma.  As its dogma became more articulated, truth became more ‘an object of faith’ required to assure salvation and than an insight for living.  It didn’t help that the new church was now becoming an essential part of the Roman structure which required a new level of adherence to dogma to insure a unified society.

Yet, as we saw from Karen Armstrong’s observation, the teaching of ‘Trinity’ was “simply baffling”, and from Richard Rohr that this teaching seems ‘furthest from human life’.

With all this, what secular sense can we make of it?

The Secular Side of the Trinity

From our secular viewpoint the perspective of the Trinity is much simpler.  From our secular perspective, 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 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 the human person: the ‘signpost to God’.  In the same way we can see a third manifestation of this ‘axis of evolution’, the ‘Spirit’, in the energy which unites the products of evolution in such a way as to effect this increase in complexity.

More specifically, we can begin to see how this ‘triune God’ can be seen to be ‘person’.   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 becoming of the universe in general, but as the principle of this manifestation 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’

As we have noted frequently in this blog, Teilhard describes this third ‘person’, this third manifestation 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.”

   And in addressing this last agent of becoming, 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 the energies manifest in forces such as the atomic forces, electricity and magnetism, gravity and chemistry 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 to understand 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 maturity) 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.  Rohr offers these terms, expressed in religious language, as an integrated understanding of the trinity:

“I believe that faith might be precisely that ability to trust the Big River of God’s providential love, which is to trust the visible embodiment (the Son), the flow (the Holy Spirit), and the source itself (the Father). This is a divine process that we don’t have to change, coerce, or improve. We just need to allow it and enjoy it.  Faith does not need to push the river precisely because it is able to trust that there is a river.”

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 ‘brought the world to its current level of complexity’ works in our individual lives, as our personal dimension of the ‘axis of evolution’.

Next week we will address the concept of spirituality, and how it can be seen in the light of our secular inquiry.

August 3 – The Trinity

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a final look at Jesus from our secular perspective, and noted how quickly the highly integrated understanding of 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 God 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 the unique evolution of the concept of God: the Trinity.

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.  The idea of God as supreme supernatural creator somehow intertwined in human life is a common thread of the Jewish scriptures (the ‘Old Testament’).   As we have seen, the understanding of Jesus evolves over time in the New Testament, but the concept of a third ‘person’ wasn’t developed until late in the first three hundred years of the new Christian church.

The idea of something (or someone) involved in the coming to be of the universe, and in how this process is reflected in human life, shows up even in the Old Testament.  It is strongly suggested by Jesus, for example, in his statement to the apostles that a spirit (an ‘advocate’) would be sent after he was gone.

It wasn’t until the early days of the early church’s theological development until this agent began to be considered God 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 separate but unified ‘persons’ whose agency in reality was reflected in three separate ways.  The most commonly used terms ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Spirit’ are of little use in achieving an integrated understanding of this complex concept.  Thus in the same way that the church required belief without understanding (as we saw in the final determination that Jesus was both God and Man), as an ‘act of faith’ necessary for salvation, 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 up until the Nicene council, that of the trinity continued to be debated.  As the Arian controversy was dissipating following the Nicean council, the debate moved from the deity of Jesus to the equality of the Spirit with the Father and Son.  A key facet of this controversy lay in the lack of scriptural clarification of ‘the Spirit’ as a person of God in the same way as was ‘the Son’.  On one hand, some believers declared that the Spirit was an inferior person to the Father and Son. On the other hand, the Cappadocian Fathers argued that the Holy Spirit was a person fully equal to the Father and Son.

This controversy was brought to a head at the Council of Constantinople (381) which affirmed that the Spirit was of the same substance and nature of God, but like Jesus, a separate person. Gregory of Nazianzus, who presided over this council offered this explanation:

“No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendor of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Three than I am carried back into the One. When I think of any of the Three, I think of him as the whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking escapes me”.

  As 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 from human life.  The church didn’t make it easier by declaring such statements to be ‘objects of faith’ which must be believed without understanding even though such belief was a prerequisite for salvation.  But as we saw last week, faith is much more than adherence to precepts, it is an essential aspect of human existence.

So, what secular sense can we make of this?

The Next Post

This week we saw how the new Christian church evolved its concept of God from the Jewish ‘Father” to a complex triune but difficult to grasp concept.

Next week we will consider this concept of a ‘triune’ God from the perspective of our search for ‘The Secular Side of God’.

May 25  – Jesus: Part 2- John and the Cosmic Christ

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Today’s Post

Last week’s post looked at the earliest writings about Jesus: the beginnings of the ‘New Testament’ as seen in the letters of Paul and the ‘synoptic’ gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke.  We saw how these gospels did not necessarily depict a Jesus who considered himself divine, and instead showed a teacher whose ‘millennialist’ beliefs led him to preach moral behavior in preparation for the ‘coming’.

This week we’ll take a look at the gospel of John, in which Jesus is depicted as not only as divine, but in some way, eternal.

The Second Perspective: John

John seems to have written the fourth Gospel as many as thirty years after Paul, and probably had access to both the letters of Paul and the synoptic gospels.  While the synoptic gospels stressed the teachings of Jesus, his interpretations of the Torah and his millennialist beliefs, John delves into the nature of God and how it could be that Jesus himself was divine.

As we saw last week, Bart Ehrman doesn’t consider the concept of a ‘God-Man’ as necessarily audacious during Jesus’ time due to the many similar and familiar myths of antiquity.  John, however, goes into detail of how Jesus was divine, indeed co-extensive with God, laying the groundwork for the doctrine of ‘the Trinity’ which would emerge later in church history.

With John we see a significantly different depiction of Jesus’ life and death from that of the synoptic gospels.  Some examples:

–          Jesus’ claims to divinity are much stronger, including self-identification with the ‘Son of Man’.

–          There are more stories of miracles, and the nature of the miracles is more supernatural

–          In the synoptic gospels, Jesus hesitates, often even refuses, to perform miracles as a sign of his identity.  He even downplays miracles, and notes that they are also performed by others.  In John, Jesus not only performs miracles frequently, but does so as signs to compel belief.

–          Where Paul sees Jesus as a human who is ‘exalted by God’ as a reward for his sacrifice, John sees Jesus as having been ‘one with the Father’ from the beginning of time

–          Where Paul and the synoptic gospels treat ‘love’ as the correct form of behavior, John goes on to depict ‘love’ as an aspect of God Himself

–          Where Paul identifies Jesus as ‘the Christ’ prophesied in the Old Testament, John goes much further, stressing his eternal kinship with God and introducing the concept of Jesus as ‘The Word’.

The Cosmic Christ

This last new concept in John’s depiction of Jesus is the most important of all.  Not only does it stress a close kinship between Jesus and God, it posits Jesus as eternal, as having always existing even as God has always existed, and being co-responsible for the act of creation itself.

John introduces the idea of Jesus, as the Christ, as “the Word”.  As Ian Barbour says:

“The term word merges the logos, the Greek principle of rationality, with the Hebrew image of God’s Word active in the world.  But then John links creation to revelation: “And the Word became flesh.” “

   With this concept, John locates Jesus as part of the same ontology in which creation itself was effected.  Jesus, as ‘the Christ’, had always existed, along with God, and collaborated with God in the act of creation.  Jesus, in this context, represents the ‘blueprint’ for creation, in the same way that God represents the ‘act’ of creation.  While the terms ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ are used to distinguish between these two facets, John doesn’t see this as reflecting an ontological ‘order’ in which one comes from the other, but an ontological ‘equality’ in which they are ‘co-temporal’.

So, in John’s view, Jesus ‘the man’ is simply the inevitable appearance of the human aspect of the ‘word’, the personal aspect of creation as it unfolds.  Jesus is indeed, The “Word become flesh.”

John, Love, God and Jesus

The idea of love is generally addressed as a manifestation of emotion in human relationships.  From this perspective, love is an ‘act’, or an emotion that underpins the act.  John overturns this common approach by identifying love as the very nature of God.  He does not say that God loves, nor even that God loves perfectly.  John says that God is love; that the very nature of God is love itself.  By distinguishing the phenomenon of love from an action of God (found in the many lines of scripture that describe God as ‘loving’), John goes one step further and describes God as love itself, which opens the door to an ontological engagement with God in the act of loving.  From John’s perspective, we don’t love God so that we can earn a position in the afterlife, we love God (and we love in general) because it is ultimately essential to our growth as human persons.

To John, we ‘become’ through a relationship with God which effects our personal growth.

We have seen this passage from John several times, but it’s worth reviewing in light of this week’s post:

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

The Next Post

We have seen in the last two posts how the person of Jesus has been depicted in the Christian ‘New Testament’, and how this depiction changes over the three (Paul, Synoptic Gospels, John) groups of texts.  Next week we will take a look at how the emerging portrait of Jesus can be seen in light of our search for a secular God.

April 27 – At The Root Of Everything, Part 2

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how religion can be seen as an attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’, in which the ‘laws’ of our personal and cultural evolution are sought and by which we can assure our continued personal and cultural growth.   This week we will take a look at how such articulation at the level of religion slowly informs our cultural standards.

From Articulating the Noosphere to Regulating Human Behavior

Society has long struggled to both understand the principles which underlie a ‘successful’ society and to codify these principles into what we now understand as ‘secular laws’.  As chronicled by Nick Spencer in his book, “The Evolution of the West”, religion’s role in this historic process has been dualistic.  In many cases it has found itself trapped in the perpetuation of its financial and legalistic manifestations and power structures, and in other cases it has contributed to the fundamental concepts by which civilization has successfully evolved.

As discussed in the post of 6 August 2016 (Isn’t This Just Deism?, Part 1, http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=201508), the thinking of Thomas Jefferson captured both arms of this dualism.   While his approach was to discard the ‘otherworldly’ aspects of the New Testament and focus on Jesus as a secular moralist, he nonetheless drew the basis of his understanding of human nature and personal freedom from these teachings.  The result, of course, was a basis for a set of laws which has underpinned a truly ‘successful’ society.

Larry Siedentop, in his book, “Inventing the Individual’, traces the history of ideals that form the basis of Western values.   It’s not so much that these ideals are absent in Eastern thinking, but do not enjoy the primacy seen in the West.  His take on the ‘articulation of the Noosphere’ that has emerged in the West:

o   Each person exists with worth apart from their social position

o   Everyone deserves equal status under secular law

o   Religious belief cannot be compelled

o   Individual conscience must be respected

 

As Teilhard (and many others) have noted, the Western evolution of understanding of the person and society is becoming a standard embraced elsewhere:

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

The Perennial Philosophy

While considerable diversity and frequent contradiction is paramount among the threads of thought seen in the evolution of religion, Aldous Huxley saw common cornerstones in all of them.  He defines the immemorial and universal ‘Perennial Philosophy’ which permeates all religions as:

“…the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being.”

  Translating this semi-theological assertion into the perspectives of our ‘Secular God’, we can see that this concept of the ‘Perennial Philosophy’ reflects the principle which powers the coming–to-be of the universe (the ‘world of things’) and that it is reflected in some way in the core of the human person.

Effectively, this ‘metaphysic’ points the way to the underlying activity by which we have come to be and the guidelines by which we successfully negotiate our growth.  The Perennial Philosophy recognizes that there are basic dynamics of human existence which, understood and managed properly, will lead to increased completeness.  The religious and societal norms which have evolved, therefore, are our attempt to articulate these dynamics and the activities of understanding and management of them.  By definition, as we evolve as persons and as societies, we hope to evolve them in a direction which activates our potential.

Or, as Karen Armstrong puts it in her insights on the many streams of thinking which developed during the ‘Axial Age’:

 “The fact that they all (the sages of the Axial Age) came up with such profoundly similar solutions by so many different routes suggests that they had indeed discovered something important about the way human beings worked”.

The theologian, Cynthia Bourgeault, puts it a little differently:

”I think it’s fair to say that all of the great spiritual paths lead toward the same center—the larger, nondual mind as the seat of personal consciousness—but they get there by different routes.”

What’s the Alternative?

Successfully negotiating the continuation of our evolution goes beyond fulfilling our potential.  It is obvious today that human activity always has the potential of contributing to our extinction.  Finding and understanding the ‘laws of the noosphere’ also requires us to adapt to our ever-increasing population and the effects it has on the planet.  One example of such an adaptation is acknowledged by John McHale in his book, “The Future of the Future”:

“At this point, then, where men’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.”

   It’s not just that we are in danger of destroying our planet, but that even more danger lurks in our ever-increasing proximity to each other.  As our population continues to expand, we are more and more at the mercy of our instincts to defend our space, to keep ‘the other’ at a distance, to defend our territory and make sure we get our fair share.  Inventing McHale’s ‘conceptual technologies’ means to develop evolutional strategies that overcome this strong resistance to closeness.

In this area it’s essential to our continued evolution for us to ‘use our neo-cortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of our reptilian and limbic brains.”

These ‘basic dynamics’ and ‘conceptual technologies’, therefore, are what is sought by humans in their attempts to ‘articulate the noosphere’.   Culling them from the enormous and often contradictory cluster of statements of beliefs that have arisen over the long evolution of religion is the main goal of the ‘reinterpretation’ process that is the focus of the last segment of our search for ‘The Secular Side of God’.

As Teilhard sees it, referring to a person’s belief:

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

The Next Post

So, if we believe that that all statements of religious beliefs include some elements of the ‘Perennial Philosophy’, what remains is to address these statements and, using the perspectives we have developed thus far, reinterpret them to find such kernels.  Next week we will begin to apply our ideas of the ‘Secular Side of God’ as we address many of these statements.

April 17 – At The Root Of Everything, Part 1

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Today’s Post

In the last few weeks we have summarized our ‘Secular God’, and in the posts that followed, identified a ‘ground of being’ without recourse to the traditional precepts of Western religion.  At the same time, we have seen how reinterpreting traditional Christian concepts in the light of Teilhard’s insights into universal evolution have brought the kernels of belief in these venerable concepts to the fore.  This week we will move to the next step of this ‘reinterpretation’ by addressing the ‘Root of Everything’.

What’s At The Bottom of It All?

This blog has assumed the perspective of Teilhard with his more comprehensive understanding the process of evolution in the coming-to-be of the universe.  This process sees evolution as proceeding along an axis of increasing complexity over time.  Teilhard was one of the few thinkers to see how this process, well established during the preceding thirteen or so billion years which precedes us, still continues in us: in our personal development as well as the development of our species.

He, as well as other thinkers such as Jonathan Sacks, Maurice Blonde and Karen Armstrong, saw the history of religion as the evolving search for the basis of personal life.   As we have seen, the basis of personal life emerges as a branch of this ‘axis of evolution’ and it rises through living things.  The seven posts on the ‘History of Religion’ address this emergence, beginning with http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=201601.

The Common Threads of Religion

All of the evolving threads of religious thought, spread across the manifold evolution of cultures and societies, slowly began to evolve their understanding of the roots of reality from a coarse animism and a necessary adjunct of the state to the paradigm shift seen in the ‘Axial Age’ (900-200 BCE).  As Karen Armstrong puts it,

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

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

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

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

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

1) the ‘noosphere’ (the milieu of organized human thought) is structured by ‘laws’ by which evolution proceeds through the human

2) such evolution cannot proceed unless we understand and cooperate with them the same way that we are learning to cooperate with the laws of Physics and Biology.

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

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

The Next Post

Next week we will continue our process of reinterpretation by taking a look at the ‘Perennial Philosophy’, which sees the core approach to human existence as common in all religious thought and how our laws are informed by it.

March 30 – So, With All This, Who or What is God? – Part 3

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a look at the characteristics of Immutability, Divinity and Omnipotentiality ascribed to God by traditional Christianity, and showed how these characteristics are addressed in our approach to ‘The Secular Side of God’.

This week we will continue this thread, addressing the characteristics of Omniscience, Chance, Transcendence and Immanence.

Omniscience

   This traditional teaching asserts that God is ‘all-knowing’.  It presents another conundrum: If God knows everything in advance, how is it possible for humans to have free will?  If he doesn’t know everything, and we do have free will, how can he be God?

Our secular point of view does not understand God as a ‘person’ but rather as the ‘agent of person-ness’ which effects the appearance of the ‘person’ as a result of an evolution which proceeds by way of increasingly complex entities over time.  As we have seen earlier, rerunning the “tape of evolution”, as Stephen J. Gould has famously asserted, would not necessarily result in the human person as we know ourselves.  But what Gould fails to recognize is that such a rerun of the ‘tape of evolution’ would still proceed along the same ‘axis of evolution’, with the same potential for increasing complexity.  Continuing this billions of year thread, it would necessarily result in entities of such complexity as to become conscious of their consciousness.

Our secular point of view points to a future which is open to us as human persons as our personal and collective evolution continues along this same axis.  As we saw with the clinical observations of Carl Rogers, cooperation with our legacy natures. the kernels of our persons, will always lead to our enrichment, our personal continuation of the ‘axis of evolution’.

Chance and Necessity

This brings up another perennial argument: that of the role of chance in evolution.  As Einstein has famously said, “God does not play dice with the universe.’  Although this quote was aimed at the indeterminacy of the theory of Quantum Physics, it has been used to support the theory of determinism promoted by Creationists:  God intended the specific creation of humans.  Therefore, the question is asked, “If God intended humans, how can chance, with which we’re all intimately acquainted, play a part?”

Teilhard’s answer to this conundrum is that if evolution is to continue, it must continue along the 13 billion year thread of increasing complexity.  Therefore such an observable phenomenon as increase in complexity will occur despite random events.

The Cretaceous–Tertiary (K–T) extinction some sixty-five million years ago is a prime example of the continuation of complexification despite chance events. The K-T extinction ended the long (one hundred fifty million year) primacy of reptilian animals.  While there are several theories of the cause of the event, the most prominent asserts that the Earth suffered an impact by a very large asteroid, causing a giant cloud that ushered in a ‘global winter’ which the reptiles, being cold-blooded, could not survive.

Archeological evidence clearly shows that the evolution of the dinosaur had resulted in a gradual enlargement of the brain cavity:  evidence of the ‘thread of evolution’ as it rose through the reptilian entities.  With their extinction, and the resulting enlargement of available ecological niches, the prevalent theory suggests that with the extinction of the dinosaurs the way was cleared for a rebound of evolution of mammals.  As we know, the rise of complexity (measured in increase of the brain cavity as previously seen in the dinosaurs) then re-continued in the mammals.

The asteroid collision was clearly a random, chance event, but not such as to derail the rise of complexity at the heart of cosmic evolution.

Transcendence and Immanence

   One traditional Christian characterization of God is that he is both transcendent and immanent.  This characteristic has spurred much thinking since evolving Christianity, with its dualistic branches, understood God as both ‘supernatural’ (“timeless, immutable, incorporeal”- Augustine) and as deeply intimate with the ‘human person’ (“God is love and those who abide in love abide in God and God in him”- John).  How is it possible to be both?

Jonathan Sacks, addressing the branch of belief which understands God as ‘supernatural’, cites the Christian theology of ‘atonement’.  He sees it as the theory that Jesus had to die to reconcile such a distant (supernatural) God to his immanent (natural) creation.  As Richard Rohr puts it:

“The substitutionary atonement “theory” (and that’s all it is) seems to imply that the Eternal Christ’s epiphany in Jesus is a mere afterthought when the first plan did not work out.”

  This development of Christian theology stands in opposition to John’s statement about the nature of God:

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

   John provides the basis for overcoming all the dichotomies that were to rise as Christian theology developed under the influence of Plato and Aristotle.  He makes no complete distinction between the presence of God in the human and the presence of “God as he is in himself”.

Gregory Baum sees Blondel’s understanding of the complete immanence of God as:

“It is impossible to conceptualize God as a being, even as a supreme being, facing us.  Since God has entered into the definition of man, it would be an error to think of God as a being apart from man and superior to him.”

   So, putting both God and man into the context of evolution permits an integrated understanding of both characteristics.  God, understood as the basis of the sum total of the manifold principles of universal evolution, is indeed transcendent, in that God himself is the underlying principle,  but the play of these principles as experienced by us in our continued evolution is completely immanent.

The Next Post

Next week we will continue our process of reinterpretation by taking a look at the ‘Perennial Philosophy’, which sees the core approach to human existence as common to all religious thought.

March 16 – So, With All This, Who or What is God? – Part 1

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March 16 – So, With All This, Who or What is God? – Part 1

Today’s Post

Last week we recapped how, using the methods of science, we have identified a God which can be understood in a ‘secular sense’, requiring no adherence to religious precepts, but is yet as close to us as we are to ourselves.  Such a God satisfies the requirements of science as expressed by the eminent atheist thinker, Professor Richard Dawkins as:

“The first cause …  which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence.”

   without recourse to

“all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers”.

   This week we will begin the final phase of this blog, ‘Reinterpreting Religion’, by addressing how traditional Christian concepts of God can be reinterpreted in the light of such a secular approach.

God as the Ground of Being

Conventional Western religion, expressed in the form of Christianity, has evolved the concept of God from Jewish expression to that most explicitly framed in the Western Scholastic tradition.  Thomas Aquinas is most associated with this theology in his association of Greek thinking with traditional Church teaching.  His ‘Summa Theologica” developed a ‘metaphysics’ which explained reality as an association between the divine (God) and his creation, blending scripture, Greek reasoning and faith.

As discussed in the ten posts beginning in September, 2015 (http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=201509), Western religious thought has always reflected what Jonathan Sacks refers to as ‘dualism’.  Dualism sees all the major expressions of religious thought as having evolved along two parallel paths.  On one path, creation is ‘good’, creation (including humans) is destined for ‘one-ness’ with its creator, humans are reflections of the divine (‘in His image’), and God is ‘father’.  On the other, creation is flawed, separated from its creator (requiring divine sacrifice to reconnect), humans are sinful at their core, and God is vengeful.  This dualism, evident in the Basic Jewish texts (the Christian ‘Old Testament’) spills over into Christianity, with its tension between such concepts as ‘love’ and ‘justice’, ‘damnation’ and ‘salvation’, ‘natural’ and ’supernatural’, ‘this life’ and ‘the next’.

Once Rome capitalized on Christianity’s universal nature as a tool for social unity as Rome became an increasingly diverse empire, Christianity quickly became more legalistic than fraternal.  Its dogmatic statements and rules for attaining salvation increasingly replaced Jesus’ teaching of ‘the law of love’.  The pastoral ‘Jesus’ of the synoptic gospels was supplanted by the ‘universal Christ’ of John.

Sacks sees the dualism that could be found in Jewish beliefs becoming more pronounced in Christianity, as this universal expression began to incorporate elements of Greek philosophy.  As he sees it, “Christendom drew its philosophy, science and art from Greece, its religion from Israel”, thus exacerbating the dualism that had its roots in Jewish teachings.

Our concept of the ‘secular’ God is quite obviously quite different from this conventional and traditional view.  Here are three examples:

   God is not ‘a person’.  In Teilhard’s view, God is the basis for person since he is the sum total of all the universal forces by which the universe evolves from a formless block of energy to the highly articulated multifaceted reality that we see around us, including ourselves.  As science has showed us, evolution ‘ramifies’: the products of evolution branch out at each step of the universe as it rises from its initial cloud of energy through a few granules of matter which become several subatomic particles which become hundreds of atoms, then tens of thousands of molecules then an uncounted myriad of cells.   One of the threads of this tens of billions of years of becoming is that which eventually leads to ‘the person’.  Since that evolution produced the entity that we refer to as ‘the person’, person therefore is seen as one of many evolved characteristics.  As Blondel sees it

“God is not a super-person, not even three super-persons. That God is person reveals that man is related to the deepest dimension of his life in a personal and never-to-be reified way.”

Our secular perspective, therefore, reinterprets God from being ‘a person’ to the much more profound understanding of God as the personal facet of the ground of being.

   God is not ‘supernatural’, if the term refers to something that exists outside, above and apart from nature.  In Teilhard’s view, the action of God (the agent of complexity) is so woven into the action of evolution as to be ‘co-substantial’ with it.  As Blondel says, there is no position that we can take which sees God as ‘there’ and we as ‘here’, since we require the evolutive action of God within us to be able to make the statement.  As we have seen over the last several weeks, our very growth as persons requires us to find that spark of ‘person’ that exists in us all, that we did not create, and which is given to us ‘gratuiously’, unearned, and finding this spark is the first step to finding God.

   Finding God is the simple realization that what differentiates us from any other product of evolution is that humans have to become aware of what it is that got us where we are, and how to cooperate with it, if we are to progress further.

   God is, in a very real, tangible and unsentimental way, ‘love’.  Once love is shorn of its emotional and sentimental aspect, it can be seen as the play of universal, integrative energy as it has manifested itself in the human person.  Just as entities at every stage of evolution have capitalized on integrative energy to unite in such a way as to effect a more complex entity, so can humans capitalize the energy of love in the same way to increase their individual complexity, to grow.

   Such a God as we have come to in our search thus far, while being understood so differently in many ways from our legacy Western beliefs, is not necessarily antithetical to the beliefs themselves.  As we shall see in the remaining posts of this blog, they can be reviewed for their relevance to human life and as such ‘reinterpreted’.

The Next Post

Next week we will continue this process of reinterpretation by taking a look at some of Western religious teachings on God in the light of our secular approach.

March 2 – Searching for the “Secular Side of God” Where Have We Got To So Far?

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Apologies

As readers will notice, the last edition, intended for March 16, was posted on February 16, by mistake. This week’s post will return to the correct order.  Many apologies.

Today’s Post

For the last several weeks we have been addressing the discovery of God through recognition of the thread of universal evolution as it rises in us.  We saw how this thread not only manifests itself in our capacity for personal growth and development (as articulated by Carl Rogers), but how, as we learn to trust in it, to be open to it, we can decide to cooperate with it.  As we have seen, this connection to the kernel of person with which we were born is effectively our connection to God.  Last week we saw how cooperating with this energy of becoming can be understood as ‘loving God’.

This week we will review how we got here, from Teilhard’s insight into the basic forces of evolution, through Science’s articulation of these forces, and finally to Psychology’s emerging understanding of the basic human enterprises of growth, relationship and maturity.

Teilhard’s Evolutionary Insight

The idea that evolution proceeds through the increase in complexity over time is not new.  Many thinkers, both scientific and religious, have remarked upon the increasing complexity of matter as it becomes more complex over time.  Science’s discoveries have given substance to this observation by articulating the processes described in the ‘Standard Model’, which describes how matter has emerged from the pure energy of the ‘Big Bang’ to the highly complex molecular structures which were the building blocks of the cell.  The theory of evolution as ‘natural selection’ has become better understood with the discovery of the gene and how it continues to lift the complexity of living things, even to the advent of the human person.

With all this, however, science has so far been unable to pin down the underlying mechanism of rising complexity.  Richard Dawkins bemoans the fact that we do not understand this mechanism as it plays out in the long first phase of evolution, from the Big Bang to the first cell, but believes that eventually this principle will become better understood:

“The first cause that we seek must have been the simple basis for a self-bootstrapping crane which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence.”

   He fails, however, to acknowledge that this ‘simple basis’ which ‘raises the world’ nevertheless must consist of a principle of evolutionary uplift that unifies the three great eras of evolution: pre-life, life, conscious life, and that it therefore continues to be active in human evolution.  ‘Simple’, perhaps, as he asserts.  ‘Profound’, however, without doubt.

This is, of course, Teilhard’s great contribution to this conundrum: the recognition that evolution proceeds through increased complexity, and therefore any complete understanding of reality must acknowledge that, as products of evolution, we humans are subject to it.

From Evolutionary Insight to Finding God

Teilhard’s insight into evolution, taken at a universal level, leads us to understand that this great uplift which “raised the world as we know into its present complex existence” is the same principle which is active in our individual lives.  It works along with (and is fundamental to) the great energies of the universe: atomic and molecular forces as well as those seen in Natural Selection.  Taken as whole they are manifestations of a single ‘ground of being’.

In keeping with our secular approach to God, these great energies would seem to have nothing to do with the anthropomorphic God so prevalent in the West (and so abhorrent to Dawkins).  Unlike Dawkins, however, we will go on to see how those traditional Western religious concepts, once reinterpreted in the light of our secular approach, are remarkably compatible with it.

Teilhard moves us on to the task of ‘finding God’.  As we saw in “Relating to God (Sept 6-October 27), he describes meditation as the search for actions of this principle of existence as they appear in ourselves.  This search, as he describes it, depends on no prior belief other than that resulting from a clearheaded grasp of evolution as it raises the complexity of reality.  He describes a search for a ‘Secular God’, which is nonetheless the most concrete agent of humanity within us.

Finding God Through Finding Ourselves: Psychology as Secular Meditation

   We saw how the evolution of scientific empirical thinking inevitably led to addressing the human person, and how this approach has evolved from Freud to current day existential psychologists.

All the great theorists of this period believed that there was a basis, a fundamental ‘ground’ for the human person which, if understood, could be managed to improve life.  Very few took Western religious teachings as a source for inquiry into this kernel of the person.  Indeed, many of them felt that traditional religious teachings could be antithetical to authentic human growth.   Thus, assumptions about the nature of this kernel varied widely.

It wasn’t until the early twentieth century that psychiatrists, using empirical data as a basis, began to objectively see this nature as basically ‘positive’, and therefore trustworthy.  The psychological journey slowly evolved from ‘analysis and diagnostics’ to a ‘guided inner search’.

And as Teilhard points out, an inner search for ourselves will always lead us to God.  Teilhard expresses this statement of belief as:

“Those who spread their sails in the right way to the winds of the earth will always find themselves born by a current towards the open seas.”

Summing Up ‘Connecting to God’

Adding to our steps from the January 5 post:

-After identifying God as an 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,

with which we can come in contact

by searching for the kernel of ourselves

using the emerging insights of science

understanding love as the energy which unites and completes us

we now understand that finding ourselves is not only finding God,

but loving  God

The Next Post

We have, using the methods of science, identified a God which can be understood in a ‘secular sense’, requiring no adherence to religious precepts, but is yet as close to us as we are to ourselves.  Such a God satisfies the requirements of science as expressed by the eminent atheist thinker, Professor Richard Dawkins as:

“The first cause …  which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence.”

   without recourse to

“all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers”.

   Next week we will begin our process of ‘reinterpretation’ with a look at how Teilhard’s perspective offers an opportunity to look at God from a new, ‘secular’ perspective.

February 2 – – Relating to God, Part 7: Loving God, Part 2 

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  Today’s Post

Last week we addressed how Teilhard saw love as the latest energy to become effective in the long list of energies that have powered evolution: the strong and weak atomic forces, gravity as a force which changes simple atoms into complex atoms, atoms into molecules (with chemical forces), and natural selection effecting more and more complex aggregations of cells.  He saw evolution as eventually forging an entity, aware of its awareness, which could now unite with other entities to effect its own maturation, and through it the maturation of society.  In summary, an entity emerged which was now susceptible to the energy of love.

The Action of Love

Teilhard addresses how this new energy plays out in human relationships.  (This was addressed in more detail in the May, 2015 Posts, http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=201505.)

In a nutshell, he saw that our personal evolution, our personal growth, is the same as our continued ‘complexification’.  Teilhard sees our complexification as occurring in two basic steps, repeated over and over, as we ‘become persons’.

He refers to the first step as ‘ex-centration’, in which we become more aware of our environment, and of other persons, and begin to lose the self-centeredness that framed our infancy.  As we become more adept at this, we become more open to others, and are able to allow our relationships to mature.  (See http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?p=305 to see how Carl Rogers articulates our maturation)  As these relationships develop, we become aware of the regard which others hold for us, which prompts us to see ourselves more clearly, less subjectively.  This results in the second step of ‘centeredness’, in which we become more ‘the person that we are’, and less ‘the person that we thought we were’.  And as we saw with the clinical observations of Dr. Rogers, the more authentic and less centered person that we become, in addition to being more capable of self-management, the more we are able to engage in deep, personal relationships.  Thus the cycle continues in a spiral fashion, leading us always towards deeper maturity.

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

Thus love is indeed a powerful force for our continued evolution:  As we grow, we become more able to love and thus more complete as persons.  As in the case of every step of evolution from the big bang to the present, we as entities unite to effect an entity which is more capable of uniting and thus becomes more ‘complexified’.

Loving God

So how does this approach to human love and evolution lead to a relationship with this universal force which is active in us?  How can we ‘love’ the ground of being?

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

Now that we have seen how God can be understood, and loved, as the sum total of all the forces of the universe including that which effects beings conscious of their consciousness, we can go on to take a look at how such an understanding of God can be used to reinterpret the most basic precepts of Western religion.  Next week we will sum up how we got to such a ‘Secular Side of God’ that would be the basis of this inquiry.

January 19 – Relating to God, Part 7: Loving God, Part 1

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Today’s Post

We have spent the past few weeks following Teilhard’s use of meditation to the finding of God.  We have followed this thread as it appears in the science of Psychology, noting the evolution of Psychology as ‘assisted secular meditation’, and saw how it can lead us to an understanding of the person that Kierkegaard believed “to be that self that one truly is”.

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

A Relook at Love

(The subject of Love and evolution is addressed in more detail in the blog “The Phenomenon of Love” (http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?page_id=57) which addressed the concept of love from Teilhard’s evolutionary standpoint.)

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

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

Teilhard notes that the systematic and ever repeating act of evolution is the increasing of complexity which results from simple union.  Over and over in evolution, from the big bang to the human person, the same phenomenon can be seen:

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

Science observes this phenomenon as active in the evolution of simple matter from the first bosons to the very complex molecules which underpin life.  Natural Selection observes the continuation of this rise of complexity, at a much higher rate, in the evolution from simple cells to the neurons which underpin the human characteristic which we call ‘consciousness’.  Without such a fundamental principle of existence, evolution as we know it would not be possible.  Without it, the universe would still be a ball of unorganized energy.

Love As The Energy Of Evolution In The Human

As we have mentioned several times in this blog, we can hardly expect such a powerful and inexorable upwelling of complexity to stop with the human person: this agent of evolution is just as active in humans today as it has been throughout the history of the universe.  The question remains: how can we see it as active in our lives?

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

These energies are manifold, and different types of energy come into play at different rungs of complexity.  For example, gravity was unable to have an effect on evolution until particles acquired mass.   The forces of chemistry were mute until the arrival of molecules.  And the forces of love could not play their part until the entities of evolution became conscious.  Love, therefore is the energy which effects our own ‘complexification”.

Seen through Teilhard’s eyes, the increasing complexity in living things, resulting as it does in the phenomenon of consciousness, results in entities subject to the play of energies so subtle as to be immeasurable yet so powerful as to power the ascent of complexity which is ‘consciousness aware of itself’.

The Next Post

Teilhard addresses how this concept of love is ‘the energy which unites persons in such a way as to continue the rise of complexity in evolution’.   Next week we will take a look at how he sees it at work in our lives, and how we can see cooperation with this energy as ‘loving God’.