Tag Archives: evolution in human life

February 14 2019 – What Part does the Divine Spark Play?

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Today’s Post 

Last week we continued our relook at God from the secular perspective, moving from seeing ‘Him’ less as a supernatural, separate, all-powerful person who ‘loves’ us and wants us to be good so we can qualify for a perfect afterlife, to understanding ‘Him’ as the basic agency of the flow of evolution seen in its increase of complexity ‘from age to age’.  Last week we extended this perspective to understanding how, for evolution to proceed, this agency’s participation rises from simple physical laws through biological principles to the appearance of an entity with consciousness which has become aware of itself: the person.  In such a way, God can be seen as ultimately personal.

Last week we also saw how, in a straightforward secular reflection, without the need for religious ritual or adherence to dogma, Teilhard demonstrates how any of us can begin to be aware of how this ‘divine spark’ is active in our ‘persons’.

This week, we will begin to explore how this understanding of the participation of the ‘ground of being’, the ‘divine spark” in each of us, is the cornerstone for the continuation of the evolution of the human species.

The Golden Rule: Recognizing the Spark

Nearly all of the world’s religions include a statement of the Golden Rule, generally considered to have been first acknowledged by Confucius about 500 BCE:

“What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others.”

   This is commonly restated to “Treat others as you would wish to be treated”.  As such, all these religions acknowledge that this reciprocal process must itself start with not only some grasp of how we ourselves wish to be treated but the belief that our basic wish to be treated is somehow ‘universal’, shared by others.  This wish is ‘normative’, common to all persons.

Jesus introduces this third, ‘universal’, context to the Golden Rule when he restates it as

“Love God, love your neighbor as yourself.”

 This restatement carries forward the two basic Confucian concepts of self and others, but brings into play the idea that in doing so we are somehow engaged with the ground of being, and such engagement places us in the thread of ongoing human evolution.

Jesus’ statement is traditionally translated as “God requires us to love one as a condition of salvation”, but in our secular approach to God, we have begun to see ‘Him’ as the ground of being from which flows the principle of evolution of which we are the most recent product.  Such ‘reinterpretation’ offers a deeper ‘articulation of the noosphere’ than does tradition, and also ties into the understanding that our life and the energy of evolution are somehow tied together.

Secular Morality… 

We have looked at how the assumptions which emerge when we unpack the Golden Rule, particularly using the hermeneutic of Jesus, point the way to our emergent evolution as persons and as societies.   Thomas Jefferson’s approach ( as seen previously ) is an excellent example of such a process.  From this reference of September 14, 2017, we saw how Jefferson understood the full impact of the Golden Rule:

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

   Jefferson expresses a very revolutionary concept of the human person and his society with these views.  At the time, the precedent for government was clearly to trust only in the provenance of royalty in the belief that if government were left to ‘the masses’, so the prevailing opinion said, chaos would result.  The belief that a consensus resulting from these same ‘masses’ could result in setting the course of the ship of state in a positive direction was very revolutionary, indeed .

This ‘will of the people’ is essential to our democratic form of government, but intangible and difficult to quantify.   Believing it to the extent that it is established as the basis for government has nonetheless resulted in a form of government that can be clearly seen to be highly successful, as Johan Norberg has described in detail.

…And Its Absence

Of course, it is very common even on the Western countries which have benefited most from Jefferson’s insight, to disbelieve that it exists.  Friedrich Nietzsche pulled no punches in his statement of disdain for the principle behind the ‘Golden Rule’, from his “On the genealogy of morals”:

“I abhor man’s vulgarity when he says, “What is right for one man is right for another”, “Do not to others that which you would not that they should do unto you”…   The hypothesis here is ignoble to the last degree: it is taken for granted that there is some sort of equivalence by value between my actions and thine.”

   In stark contrast to Jefferson, Nietzsche’s locus of societal order is not ‘the people’, it is the ubermensch, literally overman but usually translated as ‘superior man’.  As Steven Pinker wryly observes in a criticism of Donald Trump:

“..I fret about humanistic morality could deal with a callous, egotistic, megalomaniacal sociopath.  Nietzsche argued that it’s good to be a callous, egotistic, megalomaniacal sociopath.”

And Nietzsche’s rationale is that it takes such a superman to be the locus of social order.  Once the unworthiness of the underclass is established, it’s not surprising that it would take such a superior human to ride herd over the untrustworthy mobs.  Such disdain is the basis for the fear of ‘the other (Jews, Gypsies, immigrants, etc) that autocrats such as Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Kim instilled in their countrymen in order to promote themselves as ‘saviors’.

The Next Post

   Last week we took a relook at how God can be understood as the basic agent of evolution which over time adds a quantum of complexity to each new product, and how the current manifestation of this agency is the person, and how the basis of person is the extension of universal becoming as it manifests itself in every human.

This week we began to look at how this ‘divine spark’ can be seen as active in our social constructions, particularly in Jefferson’s assertion that “the people themselves” are the “safe depository …of the ultimate powers of the society”.

But we also saw how denial of this spark has historically led to some of the most heinous forms of government to have arisen in modern times, in the governments of Nazi Germany, Mao’s Red China, Stalin’s Red Russia and Kim’s North Korea.

Next week we will move on to see how cooperating with this ‘divine spark’ is essential to the continuation of the advance of evolution in the human species.

February 7 2019 –Awakening to the ‘Divine Spark’ Within Ourselves

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a look, in our recap of “The Secular Side of God’, at how Teilhard’s secular insights into God leads back to not only understanding God as the ‘universal ground of being’, but one which, as ‘His’ energy of becoming runs through all things in the universal ‘tree of becoming’, is alive in each and every human person.

This week we will begin a look at how awareness of this ‘spark of divinity’ in each of us can lead to the continuation of evolution of the human species.

Searching For The Path

In their eternal quest to determine “the will of God”, all religions represent an attempt to, as Teilhard puts it, “articulate the noosphere”.  It is clear to most religionists that there is a right way and a wrong way to live life in keeping with the ‘intentions of the creator’.

The issue of dogma, however, is also clear.  Human history is rife with examples of systematic and wholesale slaughter of those with different beliefs by those who believe themselves to be more correct.  Less developed countries today still have laws which mandate death to those whose statements of belief are considered ‘heretic’.

With this dismal picture in mind, the West’s insistence of ‘freedom of religion’, and consequently ‘freedom from religion’, are in retrospect a step towards a society in which the person and his personal freedom can thrive more completely.  As we saw in the writings of Johan Norberg, both are essential to continued human evolution.

In this positive path, the values of “The Enlightenment” can be clearly seen (See Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now”).    One other less positive effect, however, is noted by Teilhard:

“Faced with a sort of spiritual revolution, the first result of which was to make man bow down before himself.. Christianity.. initially recoiled in an attitude of disquiet and defense.  Accidentally, owning to its materialistic interpretation of the evolutionary movement it had just discovered in the universe, science took up a hostile attitude to the God of the Gospels.  To this challenge, believers in the Gospels had necessarily to reply by condemnation.  In this way the only too familiar unhappy war between science and religion was born and continued throughout the nineteenth century. “

      As Richard Rohr points out, one factor in the movement away from the Christian dimensions of society as seen in “The Enlightenment” was the increasingly formal and tightly structured Christian beliefs that Jonathan Sacks sees as influenced by Greek thought.  Rohr notes this as an emphasis on ‘adherence to teachings’ as opposed to metanoia, the transformation of human life that is essential to continued human evolution.  The end result is not just the primacy of ‘facts’ over ‘beliefs’, as stressed by the authors of the Enlightenment, but over time a reduction of the relevance of teachings.  In Rohr’s words:

“For centuries, Christianity has been presented as a system of beliefs. That system of beliefs has supported a wide range of unintended consequences, from colonialism to environmental destruction, subordination of women to stigmatization of LGBT people, anti-Semitism to Islamophobia, clergy pedophilia to white privilege.”

   While the Enlightenment certainly gave birth to a new wave of ‘left brained’ thinking, especially in the realm of science, Sacks notes that the many modes of government in which the primacy of the person and his freedom, as well as the fundamental moral and religious principles on which they were based, were diminished, yielding horrendous results, such as seen in the rules of such despots as Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, the Kims and others.

Rohr points out that the over-structured, tightly hierarchical Christian edifice in many ways has lost the path initially struck by the early church.

“Unfortunately, in the fourth century, St. Jerome translated the word metanoia, (“to transform life”) into Latin as paenitentia (“repent” or “do penance”), initiating a host of moralistic connotations that have colored Christians’ understanding of the Gospels ever since.”

   Such a focus on the primacy of atonement, leading to such theories as ‘original sin’, the theory of ‘substitutionary atonement’ and, in in many expressions a negative understanding of the human person, was to eventually surface in Martin Luther’s statement that persons are “piles of excrement covered by Christ”, and Freud’s negative assessment of the person as “dangerous”.

Relocating The Path

Rohr, following Teilhard, sees the essential, life-affirming, positive assessment of Jesus as the original theme of the gospels.  When John asserts that “God is love, and he who abides in love and God in him”, he is stating a basic hermeneutic of Jesus:  We are not just ‘children of God’: whatever is at the core of existence by which all things grow in the increase of complexity, it is active in our personal growth, our metanoia, and hence is at the core of our existence as well.

Richard Rohr is adamant that this hermeneutic must be restored to the center of Christian belief if Christianity is to regain the relevance to human life that can balance the empirical and impersonal basis of science.

The existential intimacy understood by Blondel, Teilhard and Rohr, while essential to Christianity (even to those expressions which minimize it) is not necessarily religious.  Teilhard offers a very secular description of encountering it:

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

   But as I descended further and further from that level of conventional certainties by which social life is so superficially illuminated, I became aware that I was losing contact with myself.  At each step of the descent, with the removal of layers of my identity defined from without, a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me.

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

   What science will ever be able to reveal to man the origin, nature and character of that conscious power to will and to love which constitutes his life?  It is certainly not our effort, nor the effort of anyone around us, which set that current in motion.  And it is certainly not our anxious care, nor that of any friend of ours, which prevents its ebb or controls its turbulence.

  We can, of course, trace back through generations some of the antecedents of the torrent which bears us along; and we can, by means of certain moral and physical disciplines and stimulations, regularize or enlarge the aperture through which the torrent is released into us.

   But neither that geography nor those artifices help us in theory or in practice to harness the sources of life.

   My self is given to me far more than it is formed by me.”

   This perspective is reflected by Blondel when he says (and I paraphrase):

“There is no stance which I can take where I see God there and I here.   Such ability to see, analyze and conclude lies on the crest of a tide which has risen in the universe over billions of years, which I did not summon and over which I have no power.  As a gift, my powers of sight, analysis and action can only be enhanced by more focused cooperation with it, or enfeebled by denial of it.”

The Next Post

Last week we took a relook at how God can be understood as the basic agent of evolution which over time adds a quantum of complexity to each new product, and how the current manifestation of this agency is the person.

This week we moved on to the single thread by which this quantum is added ‘from age to age”, how it manifests itself in all things, including us, and Teilhard’s example of finding it, not through adherence to religious dogma, but by simple recognition of its agency in our life.

Next week we will move on to seeing how recognition of this ‘divine spark’ is a cornerstone to the continuation of the advance of evolution in the human species.

January 31 2019 – The Secular Side of God: How Did We Get Here? Is God a Person?

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Today’s Post

Last week we returned to the question of God, and how God could be understood in a ‘secular’ sense, that is, from a non-religious perspective in keeping with the title of this blog, “The Secular Side of God”.  Understanding God as ‘the ground of being’, the agency by which the universe marches toward increased complexity, offers a starting point for understanding how this complexity can be seen as it appears in ever higher states until it reaches (so far) the human person.

Thus far, while this might establish God as a ‘principle’ by which the universe evolves towards greater complexity, it raises the question of God’s ‘personness’.  How does such a secular approach square with the Western religious concept that ‘He’ is somehow ‘personal’? Without this characteristic, isn’t God the same disinterested creator understood by the Deists?

Is God a Person?

One of the most common characteristics attributed to God by Western religion is that of ‘personness’.  In this perception, God is ‘someone’ with which each person can have a specific and tangible relationship, one through which the person is enriched.

The Jewish tradition understood that while God might be supernatural, there was connection possible between ‘Himself’ and ‘His’ creation. While the Jews were one of the first people to worship a single god, their tradition does not seem to be concerned with how God creates, much less how God is in ‘himself’, apart from ‘His’ relationship with creation.  Their perception of God is always perceived ‘in relationship’.   Whatever, whoever and however ‘He’ is apart from this relationship is of less interest to the writers of scripture than how ‘He’ manifests ‘himself’ to human persons.

Jonathan Sacks contrasts the translation of God’s statement of “His” being in the Old Testament from the Jewish “I will be where and how I will be” to the Western translation in Greek, “I am who am”.  This translation from Hebrew to Greek imposes a subtle but important change to how God is understood differently between the two religions. While the Christian understanding of God is static, immutable and constant, it omits the Jewish perspective of a ‘future tense’ in the Greek translation.  Effectively, the Jewish understanding of God admits to our greater understanding as we evolve, as well as a more immediate connection to ‘Him”.

This ‘future tense’ noted by Sacks is the key to understanding the essential connection between ‘person’ and ‘God’.  Looking at the concept of God as Teilhard does, in the context of ‘evolution’, this ‘principle of becoming’ (without which evolution would not occur) itself can be seen in the ever new ‘states’ which appear as evolution proceeds.   It goes from the nuclear forces by which atoms are forged, through the chemical forces which shape molecules, and on up the evolutionary chain, following the axis of increasing complexity, until (so far) it manifests itself in the energy by which human persons unite in such a way in which they are enriched.

Thus, while the hermeneutic of the value of ‘personness’ can be found in both Judaism and Christianity, it is an emergent characteristic of evolution.

The characteristics of this agent of evolution in the emergence of matter from the ‘primordial soup’ of the Big Bang, while not in themselves personal, are nonetheless the basis for the eventual emergence of ‘personness’.  Just as God is the agency of gravity, electromagnetic forces, chemical reactions and so on, ‘He’ is therefore the ‘agent’ of the ontological energy by which evolution continues in the human person.

The Personal Universe

Teilhard takes this insight a little further.  He recognizes that a universal characteristic of reality can be seen in the passage from energy to matter to thought on our infinitesimal speck of the immense universe.  The characteristic of increasing complexity as seen on our planet is evidence of the same ‘axis of increased complexity’ that functions everywhere in the cosmos.

In keeping with the ‘Standard Model’ of Physics, Teilhard notes that every product of universal evolution is composed of basic elements, such as quarks, which evolve into more complex entities, such as atoms and molecules.  Where conditions permit, these components will find ways to assemble themselves into centered, mobile and therefore increasingly complex entities such as cells.  In their continued ‘complexification’ these entities will continue their evolution, as they did on Earth, towards more complexity.  At each step, as happened here, entities can, conditions permitting, evolve more complex ways to unite, produce more complex and differentiated entities, and so on to a level which eventually becomes aware of its awareness.  Our common term for such a level is ‘personness’.

How will such entities elsewhere be different from human persons?  It’s impossible to tell, but other molecules might be capable of the complexification of our carbon and its fruitful alliance with oxygen.   Certainly at the biological level on our planet, without the K-T extinction (which stopped evolution of the dinosaurs), the foremost thinking entity on our planet might have evolved to be reptilian rather than mammalian.  The basic principle of evolution seems to be ‘end state agnostic’, and open to the emergence of any one (or all) creatures which possess ‘reflective’ powers similar to ours.

As Stephen Jay Gould famously said:

“If the evolutionary tape were played again, human life would not be expected.  In fact, even if it were replayed a million times or more, man would not be expected.”

  (Of course, Gould’s statement, meant to diminish what he saw as  ”human arrogance supporting the belief in God” did not take into account the probability that each of these ‘replays’, conditions permitting, would eventually lead to some sort of reflective consciousness.)

In Teilhard’s insight, all matter is capable of such evolution, and, where conditions exist to allow it, eventually consciousness aware of its existence will emerge.   Since such ‘consciousness aware of itself’ is a fruit of such increase of complexity, seemingly inevitable in all evolving systems (conditions permitting), Teilhard uses the term ‘Personal’ to describe the universe.

The Next Post

Last week we returned to the question of God, in keeping with the title of this blog: “The Secular Side of God”.   We took a relook at how God can be understood as the basic agent of evolution which over time adds a quantum of complexity to each new product.

This week we expanded this rehash to see how God can be considered as personal, engaged by evolution’s products as they become aware of not only their evolution but of the unique consciousness by which they become persons.  This unique level of consciousness, and the awareness that by possessing it we are not only all part of the same ‘tree of evolution’, but that increased awareness of it, and more importantly, cooperation with it is the only way that we can insure the continued evolution of both ourselves and our species.

Next week we will take a look at how such an awakening to this ‘spark of becoming’, effectively the ‘Divine Spark’ that we all possess, is a cornerstone to our continued march towards the future.

January 24 2019 – The Secular Side of God: How Did We Get Here? The Question of God

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Today’s Post

Last week we returned to the focus of this blog, ‘The Secular Side of God’ by beginning a summary of how Teilhard and others have opened the door to an understanding of the basic agent of evolution.   When Richard Dawkins states that God could be considered a’ “basis for a process which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence” (‘The God Delusion”), not only does he offer a way to clarify and refocus the fundamental concepts of religion but a clarification of science as well.

This week we will continue this summary by exploring how this new approach offers religion a new relevancy not only to human life, but in doing so, to its role in the continuation of human evolution.

So What Happens to God in the Teilhardian Shift? 

Many Christian thinkers critical of Teilhard base their case on the idea that a God relegated to the role of ‘energy’ begins to approach theDeistic concept, that of a God who ‘winds the universe up’ and without further interest or involvement, turns it loose.  In this model, God is distant and uninterested in human affairs.  It retains the Christian concept of God as “a person” (albeit very powerful), but denies the essential Judeo-Christian idea of ‘intimacy’ with ‘Him’.

This critique overlooks the basic concept of energy, particularly as it can be seen in the light of evolution’s tendency toward increased complexity.  Acknowledging this energy, as Teilhard did,  not only retains the Christian idea of intimacy with God, but returns it to the level seen in the Gospel stories of Jesus, removing, for example, the medieval concept of saints as ‘intersessionaries’ who ‘negotiate’ with God on our behalf.  In the vision of both Teilhard and John (‘He who abides in love abides in God and God in him”) there is simply no hard distinction to be made between Blondel’s God and our person.  As Blondel puts it,

 “It is impossible to think of myself…over here, and then of God, as over against us.  This is impossible because I…have come to be who I am through a process in which God is involved.”

  In Teilhard’s insight, the energy which moves evolution forward manifests itself differently in the different phases of evolution: Basic entities (atoms, molecules) by atomic, gravitational and chemical forces, biological entities by cellular principles, and humans are united by the energy in which we become more whole as we unite, and by which we become more unique as become more whole.

The play of energy in evolution, as understood by Teilhard, initially emerges as forces described by the “Standard Model” of Physics, but becomes more subtle as it interacts with matter more quickly in the forces described by Biology, and currently manifests itself in the forces by which we grow as persons and thus unite with others to form societies.

The degrees of ‘articulation’ of the evolving entities are better understood at the simpler (and older) stages of evolution, but are still unfolding as we learn more about how the universe is composed.  While biology offers still another layer of ‘articulation’, the process by which the purely ‘physical’ evolves into the partially ‘spiritual’ (eg consciousness and more distinctness), the ‘science of the human person’ is much less clear.

This lack of ‘articulation’ of our ‘noosphere’, however, does not keep us from continuing to evolve along Teilhard’s ‘axis’ toward more complexity.  As we have seen in the statistics of Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress”, a simple metric for measuring our evolution is ‘human welfare’, which he describes in great detail.  Such process is not necessarily due to better objective understanding of evolutionary principles, but is nonetheless the result of finding better ways to embrace the ancient concepts of person, freedom and relationship.

Thus, whatever we posit as Dawkins’ “basis for process..to..complexity”, and whether we understand it or not, it is carrying us along.

So how can such a concept of God be seen as compatible with that of religion?

The God That is Essential to Evolution

Teilhard simply focuses on the essential element of whatever composed the ‘stuff of the universe’ at the very first moment of its existence.  Without an agent of evolution by which the elements of which this ‘stuff of the universe’ were composed, it seems obvious that this initial ‘stuff of the universe’ would be ‘dead on arrival’; the universe would be very simple and very static..

The ‘essential element’ of course is the ability of these elements to unite in such a way as to produce increasingly differentiated and complex products.  In their more complex state, the potential of these products to unite and form more complex offspring is also increased.

Seeing the universe as emerging in such ‘cycles of becoming’ leads to the insight that these cycles evolve along a single axis, one of increasing complexity, by which all things are connected by not only their place in the flow, the upwelling, of this basic energy over time.  The increased potential for their uniting at every stage of evolution also reflects a ‘spark’ of the single quantum of energy which flows through them.  This spark, as we shall explore next week, offers still another basis for connection.

In this upwelling, each product of evolution, active as it is in producing future products of more complexity, is thus cooperating with the agency of evolution, and is thus intimately related to other products.

Thus Teilhard’s understanding of God as the essential agent of the universe’s ever-increasing potential for higher potential moves God from a distant progenitor, now retired, uninterested, and thus uninvolved, to an ever-active principle of being which flourishes in each product of evolution, from the quark to the person.

The Next Post 

This week we returned to the question of God, as suggested in the title of this blog: “The Secular Side of God”.  As on all subjects, we followed Teilhard in his hermeneutic of placing all things in an evolutionary context in order to better understand them.  Understanding God as ‘the ground of being’ which powers the universe’s march toward increased complexity offers a starting point toward understanding the manifestation of this complexity as it appears in ever higher states until it reaches (so far) the human person.  This also provides a basis for understanding how God, who is not a ‘person’, can nonetheless be considered ‘personal’.

Next week we will we will examine this claim in more detail.

January 10, 2019 – The Secular Side of God, Redux

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a look at the potential synergy between religion and science as seen by Jonathan Sacks, who understood it to be not only possible but necessary.

Sacks also returned us to the underlying theme of this blog when he introduced a secular concept of religion:

“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.”

   This week we will look at how this statement is a key insight into “The Secular Side of God”.

 

The Secular Side of God and Continuing Human Evolution

 

We have seen how Johan Norberg in his book, “Progress”, offers significant metrics on the unprecedented two hundred year uptick in human welfare that has occurred since the mid eighteen hundreds.  We also saw how Norberg sees the two characteristics of human freedom and relationships as essential to this increase.  Norberg never mentions God or any of the beliefs common to the God religions in his exhaustive listing of the metrics of human welfare, nor does he go into the ‘noospheric risks’ that we explored last October.

Five things, however, seem clear.

One – Evolution is proceeding under our feet, without conscious and explicit management, and that it is proceeding in the direction that Teilhard postulates (increased complexity).  Such complexity can be seen and even measured in the characteristics of human welfare that Norberg lists.

Two – As Norberg cites, the characteristics of freedom and relationship are essential for these metrics of welfare to unfold.

Three – Even though traditional religion is rife with superstition, dependence on hierarchy and desire for power, its prime focus is the human person and the relationship among persons.  This can be seen in the fact that nearly all religions contain some version of the ‘Golden Rule’ which identifies the key to harmonious relationships as a positive self-image.  We have seen how Jefferson extends this recognition of the worth of the person into a building block of a governmental paradigm which underlays the most evolutionary successful societies on Earth.

Four – While science spasmodically (and often contradictory) attempts to address the human person, as Sacks observes:

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

This leaves religion, warts and all, as the only “philosophical understanding of the human condition and our place within the universe.”  The trick is to reinterpret it (such as Jefferson did) to clarify those ‘understandings’ which will underpin our continued evolution.   

Five – Since “The past is no guarantee of the future”, we have no guarantee of the future of our evolution.   There are, as we have seen, potential pitfalls, and if these noospheric risks are not managed properly, evolution cannot be expected to continue.

   We have seen how Jefferson made use of the core message of Jesus to formulate his position on the importance of the human person to the structure of society.  In doing so, he was thus was the first to envision an ‘attachment point’ between the ‘spiritual’ themes of Western religion and the evolving ‘secular’ themes of Western culture, which had been seen as in opposition for the first half of the two hundred years of evolutionary uptick that Norberg maps.

Knowledge, Power and Evolution

Restating Sacks ’assertion:

“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.”

   This reflects Teilhard’s insight that to manage our voyage through the noosphere, we must understand it.  But Sacks goes a little deeper by quantifying this search for understanding in terms of ‘items of knowledge’ and ‘accession to power’.  As he sees it, both facets of our voyage require us to answer the question “how should it be used?”  Understanding of the noosphere involves more than the empirical insights of science. As Sacks sees it, it is more important to our continued evolution to understand their meaning.

In this approach, Sacks understands religion in one sense as a “philosophical understanding of the human condition and our place within the universe.”  This is quite different from the traditional understanding of religion as ‘truths to be adhered to’, and much more in line with the underpinning of the beliefs that apply to Norberg’s assessment of human welfare.

As an example of how such a ‘noospheric risk’ can present itself, consider how many times in recorded history a despot has come to power by distorting “items of knowledge” to “accede to power” by using news designed to incite fear (such as Hitler’s campaign to blame Jews for Germany’s woes) as a step to power.  Trends such as this can be seen today in the demonization of ‘the other’ in the many arguments on immigration.

As we saw in the posts on morality, Teilhard saw the need for religion’s understanding of morality to be reinterpreted in light of human evolution.  Sacks articulates why this is necessary, and, like Teilhard, understands that managing our existence requires us to understand how such things as information and power must be managed properly.

Beginning to understand such a ‘Secular Side’ of what religion has traditionally referred to ‘God’ is a first step toward unlocking religion’s great potential to partner with science as tools for continuing our personal and collective march into the future.

The Next Post

This week we have seen how Jonathan Sacks returns us to the theme of this blog, “The Secular Side of God”, with his reinterpretation of religion as a “philosophical understanding of the human condition and our place with the universe.”

Next week we’ll begin to review what we have seen in this blog that addresses such a reinterpretation.

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.