Tag Archives: Reinterpretation of Religion

Reinterpretation, Part 3 – Reinterpretation Principles, Part 1

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Today’s Post

Last week we addressed the need to reinterpret our traditional beliefs and identified the need for guidelines, ‘principles’ which can be applied as we begin this journey.

The Teilhardian Approach

The insights of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin have provided a basis for our search for “The Secular Side of God”.  Teilhard’s unique approach to the nature of reality provides insights into the fundamental energies which are at work in the evolution of the universe and hence are at work in the continuation of evolution through the human person.  His insights compromise neither the theories of Physics in the play of elemental matter following the ‘Big Bang” nor the essential theory of Natural Selection in the increasing complexity of living things, but rather brings them together in a single, coherent process.

While expanding and integrating these two powerful explanations of nature into a single vision, his was one of the first to include the undeniable phenomenon of ‘reflective thought’, the ‘knowledge of consciousness’ which makes the human person both unique in the biological kingdom and yet rooted in the cosmic scope of evolution.  This uniqueness, unfortunately, has been often addressed by science as an ‘epi-phenomenon’ or just as a pure accident.  Teilhard instead places it firmly on the ‘axis of evolution’, that of increasing complexity, thus affording us a lens for seeing ourselves as a natural and essential product of evolution.  Understanding evolution, therefore, is an essential step toward understanding the human person, how we fit into the universe, and how we should react to it if we would maximize our human potential.

Principles of Reinterpretation

Teilhard’s unique approach to evolution is addressed in more detail in the eight posts, “Looking at Evolution” January-April 2015”.  His approach offers a basis for principles which will be valuable in our search for reinterpretation and relevance of traditional religious thought:

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

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

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

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

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

The Principle:  Just as atoms unite to become molecules, and cells to become neural system, so do our personal connections enhance our personal growth

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

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

–          This addition points the way to understanding how evolution continues to proceed through the human person and his society.  The neurological advancement in living things evolves the central neural system (the brain) in three stages:

  • Reptilian: Basic instinctual life sustaining functions: breathing, vascular management, flight/fright reaction
  • Limbic: Appearance of instinctive emotional functions necessary for the longer gestation and maturation of mammals
  • Neo-Cortex: Appearance of the potential for mental processes independent of the stimuli of the ‘lower’ brains.

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

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

The Principle:  Finding the core of a religious teaching involves understanding how the teaching can lead to increasing this skill.

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

“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.”

Or, As Richard Rohr puts it, “Our lives must be grounded in awareness of the patterns of the universe.”

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

Richard Rohr sees our growth as human persons as taking place in a series of Order > Disorder > Reorder. As he sees it, “Most conservatives get trapped in the first step and most liberals get stuck in the second”. His insight is that healthy religion is all about helping us get to the third, ‘Reorder’.  In this third stage we begin to demand that teachings must be both relevant and capable of helping us find the basic human threads of growth, the

 “ tides in the affairs of men, which, when taken, lead us to new life, but when omitted, all our voyage is bound in shallows and miseries” (apologies to Shakespeare)..

The Next Post

This week we looked at principles of reinterpretation that were derived from Teilhard’s insights.  Next week we will consider other principles that we will employ as we examine religious teachings for their relevance to human life.

Where Have We Got To? : A Summary of The Blog So Far – Religion

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Today’s Post

Last week’s post summarized the first two segments of the blog, Evolution and Science.  Today’s post will summarize the third segment, Religion.

Religion (September, 2015 to April: 2016, What is Religion?)

We have seen that the general rise of complexity as observed by science requires a ‘principle’, just as do the play of the forces identified by Physics, Chemistry and Biology.  However, extrapolating from this general observation to a God as reflected in the many conflicting religious creeds is quite something else.  The spectrum of ‘belief’ is very broad indeed, and each creed reflects a different perspective on ourselves as well as the reality that we inhabit.

In this third segment, we looked at Religion from a secular perspective, as the human attempt to make sense of our environment and the part that we play in it.   From this perspective religion can be seen to evolve, not in the physical sense of slow changes to our physiology, but through the cultural structures by which acquired knowledge and wisdom are passed from generation to generation.

These posts (Sept 3 – Jan 7, The Evolution of Religion) went on to examine religion as an evolving, living thing, tracing its emergence from ancient myths and rules for society, through the influence of early historical modes of thought, and on through the confluence of the great Greek and Hebrew civilizations to their impact on Western society.

With this historical perspective in mind, we went on to offer a multifaceted definition of religion.

We noted that in general, evolution in the human can be seen in the increasing skill of applying the neocortex brain to the stimuli of the lower limbic (emotions) and reptilian (fear, antagonism) brains. (February 4– What is Religion? Part 2: The Evolution of Understanding)

With this perspective in mind, we explored other areas of human existence in which religion contributes to our understanding,

–          a basis for human action (February 18– What is Religion? Part 3: Enabling Us to Act)

–          contributing to our sense of place in the scheme of things, (March 3– What is Religion?  Part 4: Belonging)

–          understanding of our potential and the basis for it, (March 17 – What is Religion?  Part 5: Transcendence)

–          as both a contributor to the stability of society (March 31 – What is Religion?  Part 6:  Stability, Part 1), and its flip side, as often an inhibitor to this stability (April 14 – What is Religion?  Part 6:  Stability, Part 2).

From these posts, religion can be seen as a plethora of assertions about ourselves and our place in the universe.  Many of these assertions are clearly in contradiction:

The Eastern emphasis on the diminishment of the uniqueness of the human person as it approaches the ‘all’, versus the Western emphasis of the enhancement this uniqueness as it approaches the ‘all’

In the Western (Judeo-Christian) tradition:

The ‘monotheistic’ assertion, in which a single God is the root of all reality, versus the ‘duality’ necessity for a second such ‘root’ to explain the existence of evil

And, closer to home:

The ‘left’ Western understanding of scripture as metaphorical truth, versus the ‘right’ Western understanding of scripture as literal truth

Nonetheless, all these systems of belief have a core which embraces a transcendent aspect of reality, the open-endedness of human person and the need to overcome the restrictions of ego to be able to be able to capitalize on human potential.

On To the Final Segment

In preparation for the final segment, in which we will re-look at many of the basic precepts of Western religion, we will employ the observations, assertions and perspectives that we have gathered in the first three segments.  In summary:

–          The universe unfolds from principles identified by Physics, but advances in the direction of increased complexity

–          Understanding that each new product of evolution contains the potential for this increased complexity is to perceive an ‘axis’ along which evolution proceeds

–          To acknowledge this principle of increasing complexity as an addition to those principles recognized by science is to recognize the existence of a principle by which we come to be as evolutionary products aware of their consciousness

–          All human thought addresses this principle by attempting to

o   articulate this principle: to describe, measure, and in general, understand how it is manifested in our lives

o   understand how our lives can be lived in order to see it more clearly

o   learn how to take full advantage of it: to maximize our potential, and therefore live our lives more fully.

–          Of all human thought, Religion comes closest to addressing this principle most explicitly.  In Teilhard’s words, religion consists of an attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’.

So given that reality does indeed contain a thread which, if recognized and followed, will lead on to an enhancement of our lives, can the many manifestations of understanding presented by our Western religions indeed be leveraged for such ‘articulation’?  If so, how?

The fourth and final segment of this blog will explore such leverage.  While the bewildering array of dogmas, theological statements, rituals and historical twists and turns found in Western religion are often contradictory and indeed often antagonistic, there are many basic concepts which are potentially compatible and even integrated at their historical base.   As quoted previously, from Karen Armstrong:

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

Further, and this is the goal of the final segment, the perspectives developed in the first three segments of this blog offer a basis of reinterpretation of the traditional teachings of Christianity.  Such reinterpretation offers the prospect of clarifying their relevance to human life.  By seeing the ‘spiritual kernel’ which shines through the often clumsy statements of belief offered by our Christian expressions, it is possible to understand the potential that they offer to our human existence.

Borrowing from Maurice Blondel, the perspectives of the first three segments of the blog offer ‘principles of reinterpretation’ that seek to understand ‘statements about the divine’ (as expressed by traditional Christianity) in terms of ‘statements about the human person’.

The Next Post

In the past two weeks, we have summarized the first three segments of the blog.  Next week we will move on to the fourth and final segment of the blog in which we will address the many statements of Western belief and explore the means of reinterpreting them in the light of the perspectives offered in the first three segments.

In this way, we will explore how religion can be seen to take on the secular task which powers the continuing evolution of the human person and his society.

Where Have We Got To? : A Summary of The Blog So Far – Evolution and Science

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Today’s Post

For he past several weeks we have explored a ‘secular’ definition of religion from the perspectives of the human person’s understanding, evolving, acting, belonging, sense of transcendence and stability.

The fourth and final phase will address ‘reinterpretation’ of our Western religious teachings in the light of the first three phases:

Evolution, as understood by Teilhard

Science as an objective understanding of reality

Religion as seen as an agent in human evolution.

This week we will pause in pursuit of a “Secular God” to summarize what we have said in the first two of these three phases.

Evolution (October 2014 – May 2015)

In this segment, we saw how Teilhard’s unique approach to evolution opens a new door to not only understanding the basic forces at work in the unfolding of the entire universe, but understanding how God can be seen as active in them.

Teilhard simply notes that science has come to understand that a thread can be seen as rising through the process of evolution:

–          The connections of entities at each stage can result in more complex entities at the     next

–          The more complex entities which result are capable of more complex connections

–          Hence a key thread of evolution can be seen in this advancement of the complexity of entities and the energy which unites them

A key example of this dynamic can be seen in connections between simpler entities, such as electrons, the groupings of which result in the more complex atom.  As in the case of atoms, the new entities at each stage of evolution contain the potential of effecting an increased complexity of the results of the unions produced at the previous stage.

Teilhard sees this as intuitively obvious, since if any stage did not have the potential for increased complexity (for example, if electrons could not have evolved into atoms), evolution would have come to a full stop billions of years ago.  (Nov 29-Dec 11, 2014: The Teilhardian Shift)

Further, Teilhard notes that this phenomenon of ‘increasing complexity’ occurs in all three of the stages of universal evolution acknowledged by science: ‘pre-life’, ‘life’, and ‘human life’.  He sees this phenomenon as a ‘thread’ which unites all three stages, and hence is the underlying principle at work in the evolution of the universe.

Teilhard offers a perspective on the universe in which the human person is neither afterthought, accident nor supernaturally inserted.  Emerging through a natural process which began at science’s ‘Big Bang’, he is the latest manifestation of this thread of ‘increasing complexity’.

The human person is deeply rooted in cosmic reality. 

Teilhard notes that as the human person emerges as the latest product of this long process of increasing complexity, the fundamental spiral of ‘more complex entities’ united by ‘higher levels of energy’ now manifests itself in the appearance of human entities united by the energies of love.  (May 14, 28:  Love as the Energy of Continued Human Evolution)

Once the phenomenon of ‘increasing complexity’ is recognized as the basic principle of evolution, the door is opened to a ‘Secular’ aspect of the ground of being, to “God”.  (Jan 22- April 20, 2015: Looking at Evolution)

Science (June 2015 to August, 2015)

In this second segment, we explored many of the findings of science, particularly the Standard Model of Physics.  We saw how the Cosmological Constants illustrate how the forces described in the Standard Model must have certain relationships to be able to effect the evolution of matter toward the increasingly complex states initially identified by Physics and Chemistry. (June 11 – 23 July: The Framing of the Universe)

We than saw how this increasing complexity continues in living things as expressed in the theory of ‘Natural Selection’.

We also saw that as excellent as are the theories expressed in the Standard Model and Natural Selection, they fail to address the underlying phenomenon of increasing complexity.  As a result, the scientific understanding of consciousness, and particularly human consciousness, is without context and is therefore incomplete.

Teilhard sees traditional science as addressing neither ‘the phenomenon of man’ nor his place in the universe.

We saw how Teilhard observed that complexity can be seen to rise through the processes described by Physics, then by Chemistry, then by Natural Selection, then on through human inventions, such as cultural constructions.  This rise is therefore the thread that not only connects the three eras of evolution, but provides the key context for understanding the later emergence of complexity in the form of neurological systems, consciousness and eventually the human person.

In this segment, the action of God can now be understood in the principle of rising complexity, as it completes and unites the family of laws as identified by Science.   Initially, this principle is manifested in the laws of Physics (atoms), later in those of Chemistry (molecules), then in those of Natural Selection (cells), then in Biology (cellular animals), then in mammals with large brains (Neurology).  It becomes more distinct in animals with brains capable of acknowledging their existence (humans).   The conclusion of this segment was that once the principle of rising complexity is understood as active along with those principles acknowledged by science, the evolution from stardust to humans can be put in a single comprehensive context.

Without it, physics is powerless to advance.  With it, the universe advances from pure energy to persons.

With the inclusion of complexity as a principle of universal evolution, the extension of the action of a ‘ground of being’ is transformed from ‘material’ to ‘personal’.   In the words of Teilhard

“..I doubt that whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and becomes human in him”

This is the basis for a “Secular Side of God”.

The Next Post

Next week I will conclude this summary of the blog with a summary of the third segment:

September, 2015 to March, 2016: Religion