Tag Archives: Teilhard de Chardin

August 22, 2019 – Can There Be a ‘Spiritual’ Ground of Happiness?

Leave a reply

Today’s Post

Last week we took a second look at the slippery subject of happiness, this time from the perspective of universal evolution. We saw how Yuval Noah Harari ‘s book, Sapiens, suggested that we have dug our own grave due to our unique human characteristics, and because of this, true happiness for us was difficult if not impossible.

In looking at this further, we agreed that humans have indeed departed from the evolutionary ‘accommodation’ delivered by ‘Natural Selection’.   Perhaps our current state is a result of this discontinuity, but as we saw, not necessarily destined to continue.

While disagreeing with his dystopic conclusion, we saw the merit in acknowledging that our species has nonetheless broken the bond enjoyed by our evolutionary predecessors and that this breach is indeed a source of the ‘pain of our evolutionary convergence’. But when looking at evolution from Teilhard’s perspective, such pain is not unexpected in the ‘rise of complexity’ embedded in the roots of evolution. Perhaps we need to see it as transitory, or as Patricia Allerbee, author of Evolutionary Relationships, puts it, the long history of rising universal complexity suggests that we have only to allow ourselves to be “lifted by the evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”. To do this, “we only have to begin to pay attention”.

This week we will take a third look at happiness, a look which involves such ‘seeing’. This week we will begin a look at happiness from the perspective of ‘spirituality’

What is Spirituality?

I have deliberately framed the word ‘spirituality’ with apostrophes in recognition of the freight that this term carries with its overtones of ‘the supernatural’ and the eons of religious teaching which seemed to widen the gap between the lives we live and the ‘ideal’ life which lies far above us.

A problem arises when we try to address the underlying agency of evolution, that which causes the universe to become more complex over time. What term do we use to discuss it? Teilhard used the term ‘complexification’, which certainly is accurate, but he prefers the term ‘spiritual’. From his point of view, ‘spiritual’ simply refers to the agent which is present in all matter and causes it, over time, to take on more complex characteristics. Without it, evolution could not proceed. To him, ‘spiritual’ is ‘natural’, but only if the term ‘natural’ is understood in its widest, most universal, context.

We have seen in this blog how this concept can be found outside of religion. We saw on July 11 how Paul Davies understands universal evolution, including its extension into human life, to be underscored by increasing complexity.

But a less likely proponent of this position is Richard Dawkins, famous atheistic scientist. Dawkins, in his anti-religious book, “The God Delusion” nonetheless states that the idea of a “first cause of everything” which was the “basis for a process which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence” was entirely viable. In the next breath, he insists that “we must very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers.” He is suggesting that there’s definitely something afoot in universal evolution, but that we have to address it from a secular perspective if we want to make anything of it.

As we have seen many times in this blog, Teilhard would have agreed at this level. His take on spirituality also eschewed terms like ‘supernatural’, as he understood Dawkins’ ‘process’ to lie in the plane of natural existence.“…spirit is neither super-imposed nor accessory to the cosmos, but that it quite simply represents the higher state assumed in and around us by the primal and indefinable thing that we call, for want of a better name, the ‘stuff of the universe’. Nothing more; and also nothing less. Spirit is neither a meta- nor an epi- phenomenon, it is the phenomenon.”

By identifying spirit as the phenomenon, and affirming its existence neither outside (epi) nor above (meta) nature, Teilhard is referring to the observed fact that the universe increases in complexity over the course of its evolution. This fact assumes that there is an agency, folded into matter, which energizes every evolutionary step from energy to matter, simple matter to quarks, quarks to protons, protons to atoms to molecules to complex molecules to cells to neurons to brains to consciousness. As Jonathan Sacks observes, in each step the new evolutionary products display a collective complexity that is a property of new product, not just aggregated properties of the individuals that comprise them.

Thus ‘spirituality’ is simply a word which refers to this tendency of ‘the stuff of the universe’ to ‘complexify’. As Teilhard goes on to say

“Spirituality is not a recent accident, arbitrarily or fortuitously imposed on the edifice of the world around us, it is a deeply rooted phenomenon, the traces of which we can follow with certainty backwards as far as the eye can reach.   The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self-conscious.”

   Therefore, the acknowledgement of the existence of this ‘cosmic spark’ in all things offers us a perspective on how our being fits into the sweep of evolution, even if it is different from the environmental ‘accommodation’ enjoyed by our predecessors. If, as Patricia Allerbee asserts, the ‘forces of evolution’ are such that they can, as they have done for fourteen billions of years, ‘optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity’ if we only begin to ‘listen’, then listening to the ‘voice’ of this ‘cosmic spark’ as it exists in our lives can permit human life to be more harmoniously intertwined with our environment.

Using Teilhard’s definition, spirituality is therefore indeed a third ground of ‘happiness’.

The Next Post

This week we began a third look at the slippery subject of happiness, this time from the perspective of ‘spirituality’, but took Teilhard’s understanding of this equally slippery term from his recognition of the agency of universal ‘complexification’.    Given this understanding of ‘spirituality’ as the term which refers to the universal phenomenon of ‘complexification’, this suggests that some measure of our happiness could be due to how well we listen to the ‘cosmic spark’ as it exists in each of us and hence, as Patricia Allerbee suggests, can open ourselves to the ‘optimization that can happen in our lives’. In simpler terms, we can trust the agency of universal evolution as it is in work in ourselves. But as Allerbee recons, we have to first learn to ‘listen’ to it.

“Easier said than done’, goes the old adage. Humans may well be now at their most advanced stage of evolution so far, but where in this stage can be found first the methods of finding this spark so that we can indeed ‘listen’, and then how it is possible to make sense of what we hear and put it to use in life? Any success in either of these endeavors is certain to bring us into increased ‘accommodation’ with our environment (better aligned with evolution), and hence closer to our goal of ‘thinking with the whole brain’.

Next week we will take another step in this exploration of happiness, this time exploring our accumulated lore of such searching and deciding.

August 15, 2019 – The Evolutionary Ground of Happiness

Leave a reply

Today’s Post

Last week we took a broad overview of the subject of ‘happiness’ and its vagueness, as we began to place it into Teilhard’s context of universal evolution.   We began with the ‘material’ view of happiness, and looked at several aspects from the viewpoints of psychology (such as surveys of this highly subjective subject) and biology (especially genetics), and saw that while all these searches for the ‘seat of happiness’ provide insights, the ‘bottom line’ is still evasive.

This week we will look at human happiness from the viewpoint of cosmic evolution. If, as we have maintained throughout this blog,

  • Teilhard’s insight that the underlying manifestation of universal evolution, from the ‘big bang’ to the present can be seen in the increase of complexity,
  • and this increase can be measured by the increase of consciousness,
  • then the fourteen or so billions of years of universal evolution of which we are products can’t be ignored.

Whatever it is that has effected the rise of complexity in the ‘stuff of the universe’ must be active in each of its products. As one of these products, it must be active in us. If it is, it can be trusted to continue in us, and our ‘happiness’ is in some way related to it.

Can humans, An Evolved Species, Ever be happy?

If we are to understand our evolution as persons and as of society from the context of universal evolution, our happiness, or at least our potential for happiness, must be understood in this way as well. How can our capacity for happiness be understood in such an evolutionary context?

Paraphrasing Patricia Allerbee, author of “Evolutionary Relationship”, this long history of rising complexity suggests that we have only to allow ourselves to be “lifted by the evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”. To do this, “we only have to begin to pay attention”.

Last week we saw how Yuval Noah Harari, in his book, “Sapiens”, believes that humans have not only evolved much faster than their environment but are ruining the environment from which we are becoming increasingly estranged. He notes that our predecessor species enjoyed long periods of flouresence, on the order of several million years, because their pace of evolution matched the pace of the evolution of their environment. This insured, he thinks, a continuing and long lasting ‘accommodation’ between species and their environments; an accommodation that humans have lost. The result, he goes on to opine, is the existential unease that makes is almost impossible for us to be ‘happy’ and hence will result in untimely extinction.

While I disagree with his conclusion, the idea that we have broken the implicit bonds with our environment has some merit. This week we will take a look at this aspect of the potential for happiness.

It’s not so much that humans have become unable to be happy, but more that our instinctive reactions to our surroundings, kept in play by our reptilian and limbic brains, no longer work as well for us as fhey did for our ancestors. This is true for our potential for happiness as well.

So, What’s The Alternative?

   As we have cited several times, Teilhard charts the many ‘changes of state’ that the ‘stuff of the universe’ undergoes in its journey towards increased complexity, such as energy to matter, simple building blocks evolving into more complex atoms, then molecules, than cells, then neurons, then brains, then consciousness. With each new change of state, new capacities appear, ones that were not in play in the precedent products, but ones neither completely free of the characteristics of the precedents. Teilhard notes the example of the cell evolving from the molecule: “the cell emerges ‘dripping in molecularity’”. It takes some time before the new capacities fully emerge, and the next rung of complexity can be mounted.

It is in this transitory state that we find ourselves today, humans can be seen as still, to some degree, ‘dripping in animality’. Humans may have a new capacity in the neocortex brain, but the skill of using it to advance our evolution and actualize our new potential in this new ‘change of state’ is still in development.

An example of such a new ‘skill’ was addressed earlier in this blog. The skill of ‘thinking with the whole brain’ was addressed last June, but can be seen in the intellectual process of overcoming the dualisms that infect our lives by simply using the neocortex to ‘ride herd’ on the stimuli of the ‘lower’ (reptilian and limbic) brains. It’s not a matter of ignoring these stimuli; they have evolved to enrich mammalian existence and enhance the capacity for ‘survival’. It’s more a matter of becoming aware of them, understanding them to be able to manage them to enrich human existence and enhance our own unique dimensions of survival. This is a ‘skill’ which we are still learning.

Thus the key to understanding ‘happiness’ from an evolutionary perspective is to understand what is indeed unique about human nature and how it works (or should work) in the context of an evolved universe.

Put another way, human life is most enriched when it fits harmoniously into the ‘forces of evolution’. Both humans and their environment have evolved over billions of years in which products have increased their complexity, and most recently when this increase in complexity has been quickened by a ‘natural’ selection in which products and their environments are able to ‘fit together’.

The excellent and insightful activities of science have certainly been able to quantify such things as universal time spans, the structures and configurations of evolutionary products which reflect this ‘complexification’, and details of the history of living things as well as our ontological and sociological part in it.

However, as we have seen, and as Teilhard, Sacks and Davies have pointed out, science is ‘marking time’ (Teilhard’s phrase) before it addresses what is unique about human existence: the person. As Teilhard points out (and Davies and Sacks restate)

“Up to now, Man in his essential characteristics has been omitted from all scientific theories of nature. For some, his “spiritual value” is too high to allow of his being included, without some sort of sacrilege, in a general scheme of history. For others his power of choosing and abstracting is too far removed from material determinism for it to be possible, or even useful, to associate him with the elements composing the physical sciences. In both cases, either through excessive admiration or lack of esteem, man is left floating above, or left on the edge of, the universe.”

   This, however, does not mean that humans cannot reflect upon themselves and their unique place in cosmic evolution, and begin to discern ways to use their unique capacities to better ‘fit’ into life and hence to enhance their enjoyment of it.   In addition to the ‘material’ and ‘evolutionary’ grounds of happiness, there is also a ‘spiritual’ ground.

The Next Post

This week we took a second look at the slippery subject of happiness, this time from the perspective of universal evolution. We saw how Yuval Noah Harari ‘s pessimism suggested that humans could never be truly happy due to the wide chasm that they have created with their environment. While disagreeing with his dystopic conclusion, we saw the merit in acknowledging that our species has nonetheless broken the bond enjoyed by our evolutionary predecessors and that this breach is indeed a source of the ‘pain of our evolutionary convergence’, but is not unexpected in the ‘rise of complexity’ embedded in the roots of evolution.

Next week we will take a look at evolution from a third perspective as we continue our exploration of ‘happiness’.

August 8, 2019 – The Material Ground of Happiness

4 Replies

Today’s Post

Last week we continued our exploration of the ‘middle ground’ of the ‘terrain of synergy’ in which the efforts of science and religion overlap as they continue to address human life. We saw how the aspect of ‘happiness’ in the human person, while much to be desired, is both difficult to quantify, and if common belief would have it, difficult to attain.

This week we will take a closer look at this slippery subject, to see if Teilhard’s hermeneutic of placing a subject in the context of universal evolution will help us to see it more clearly.

What Is Happiness

The long string of human thinking in our literature, philosophy and religions presents us with a wide spectrum of stances that we can take in response to Shakespeare’s “slings and outrages” as inflicted by life. At one end of this wide spectrum lies simple acceptance of endless rounds of ‘fate’ and ‘fortune’, as the Easterners would have it.   At the far other end the ‘joyous embrace’ of cycles, which may well recur, but also rise over time, as envisioned in the West . Not surprisingly, most of us (and our literature, philosophy and religion) occupy the terrain closer to the center. Most approaches to happiness contain both some level of acceptance of those things over which we have no power mixed with some level of confidence that whatever our lot, it is capable of some improvement.

Happiness, to some extent, is the name we apply to the degree of acceptance with which we respond to these cycles.

Thus, happiness is difficult to pin down. Circumstances which might depress one person might be shrugged off by another. Personal welfare that might cause satisfaction in one might not be enough to satisfy others. Our news is filled daily with stories of people unconsoled by their good fortune, as well as those that manage some degree of life satisfaction without significant material welfare.

Where do we get the information that underpins these stories? The answer is that states of happiness are reported by those who experience them. Their subjective stories are reported, with no small measure of bias on the part of the reporter, and interpreted according to the mindset of the receiver.

In other words, not only is the concept of happiness slippery, its basis in reality is highly subjective.

Still, the search for its dimensions continue. Psychologists conduct surveys, biologists explore chemicals, and religionists look to faith. Does this level of contradictory activities mean that there’s nothing that can be said? Let’s look at a few aspects:

  • Surveys: For decades, psychologists have been searching for a process of conducting surveys free of cultural, economic, religious and racial bias. Not only do the continuing waves of surveys show a wider range of reported states of happiness than statistics suggest, but many of them are contradictory.
  • Biology: Many biologists suggest that happiness results directly from our chemistry. They state that chemicals such as dopamine and serotonin are direct causes of the sensation of happiness, and minimize those things that lead to their secretion in the brain. Thus, in the ‘nature vs nurture’ spectrum, in their view, nurture doesn’t have a chance.
  • Genetics: All of us know persons who are generally cheerful, even under difficult circumstances. We also know those whose glass is always ‘half empty’. From this view, we are all predisposed towards some level of happiness or unhappiness.
  • Religion: The religions of the world all aim at some level of accommodation with reality, from (as above) acceptance to embrace. Their hermeneutics and practices are clearly myriad, and often very contradictory.

For all this, science doesn’t have a good handle on happiness, contentment, or any of the ‘states’ of well-being.

A more subtle approach to happiness falls into the realm of relative measures. For example, if a very poor person comes into a large sum of money, the impact on their happiness is directly related to the improvement in their situation. They can be safely said to have increased the level of their happiness by a large amount.

For a rich person, even a large amount of money will not have anywhere near the impact as did the poor person. In the case of the person less well off, the impact will likely be longer lasting, as the money can also be put to use in caring for family and assuring a comfortable future. In the other case, the money will most likely not affect the person’s well-being, much less that of his family.

A curious take on this subject involves generally happy people who are nonetheless report that they are unhappy, a phenomenon which is relatively new in human evolution. This ‘dualism’ occurs when individuals are relatively well-off and well-educated, known as ‘the middle class’. As referred to in a recent article (July 11) of the Economist, this ‘satisfaction paradox’ can be seen when seemingly contented people vote for angry political parties.

This paradox can be seen in the dissociation between longtime political partners: personal well-being and incumbent political parties. As the Economist relates, the common election of an incumbent party has historically been the result of a general feeling of ‘well off’ among the population.   Today, we are seeing a surge in angry ‘Populist’ and ‘Nationalist’ parties elected by populations who consider themselves as ‘well off’.

The Economist traces one possible cause of this phenomena, prevalent in the ‘developed’ world, as the result of aging populations. Certainly, this demographic feels uncomfortable being caught up in rapid changes. As an example, many of us ‘old folks’ were taught, as we taught our children, how to use a dial phone. This same group, in many cases, are being taught how to use ‘smartphones’ by their grandchildren.

The reliance on ‘habit’, those learned since birth to enable us to smoothly function, is becoming a liability, as the necessity for a rapid learning curve seems to be more prevalent. The ‘fruits of our labor’, pensions, investments and assets built up over a lifetime of cultivating productive ‘habits’, may well have provided us with much quality of life, but do not necessarily constitute a comfortable intellectual nest for today’s turbuolence.

This certainly leads to an increase of indignation, a level of personal life satisfaction which is nonetheless deeply critical of others. We have seen how indignation can induce pleasant feelings, but this phenomenon also brings us back to the insights of Yuval concerning the ‘fit’ between the human person and his environment.

Consciousness aware of itself speeds up evolution in an environment highly subject to our influence. This ‘upset,’ not unlike weather (static air mass becomes unstable, leading to the emergence of patterns: a complexification/change to a new organization with new attributes).   Can the tension between a changing environment caused by humans who themselves are rapidly changing have such a future? Is it possible that the process of harmony-disharmony-change of state that we see today result in a new harmony?

And, on top of this, what is the forecast for a level of accommodation, even happiness, for the human person caught up in such a dynamic mileu?

If Teilhard understood it correctly, and the energy by which human persons unite is no more (but no less, as he would say) than the current manifestation of the fourteen billion year upwelling of the cosmos, then how can we not recognize the potential for fulfillment, both at the personal and the level of society?

More specific to the topic of happiness, how can Teilhard’s perspective be applied to each of us?

The Next Post

This week saw a broad overview of the subject of ‘happiness’, its vagueness, and began to place it in Teilhard’s context of universal evolution. If the energy of increasing complexity and emerging consciousness can be seen in human relationships (love, in its most universal appearance) and consciousness aware of itself, how can we better understand how we fit into it?

Next week we will begin to explore such ‘universal accommodation’ and attempt to locate the appropriate niche for the human person is this grand process of universal evolution.

 

August 1, 2019 – Human Life: Dealing With the Pain of Convergence

2 Replies

Today’s Post

Over the past few weeks we have been exploring the ‘terrain of synergy’, the area of fruitful coherence between science and religion. In the past two weeks we have seen how Jonathan Sacks looks at this terrain from the middle ground, the terrain in which we live our daily lives.

As Sacks, Davies and Teilhard all avow, both our personal and collective evolution requires us to both better understand this phenomenon in which we are enmeshed, and our need for this understanding to guide us in cooperating with it.

This week we will take another step into looking at this phenomenon as we address it from its influence on our inner, personal life. It’s time to address the slippery phenomenon of ‘happiness’.

If We’re So Evolved, Why Ain’t We Happy?

It’s not difficult to find references to ‘existential anxiety’ in the current press. In spite of the recent increase in global human welfare reported by Johan Norberg, the persistence of pessimism and even depression among our contemporaries seems to be increasing. The causes underlying this phenomenon are certainly not clear, but the effect seems universal.

In his bestselling book, “Sapiens”. Yuval Noah Harari takes a unique position on this. He sees the cause of our ‘existential anxiety’ rooted in the speed of human evolution. In his view, the speed of our human unique evolution has a considerable impact on how we feel.

Yuval notes that, distinct from our pre-human ancestors, we have evolved much faster than our skills of accommodation with the environment could develop.

From his perspective, in the (relatively) glacial speed of pre-human evolution, species could ‘grow up’ with their environment, changing no faster than their environment changes. As a result, ‘Natural Selection’ in turn could ‘select for accommodation’, insuring that each species evolved in concert with its environment. In keeping with his Darwinist perspective, such an ‘evolutionary coherent pace’ insures not only better coherence between these ancestors and their environment but insures their ‘survival’. He cites science’s study of the past as showing ‘life cycles’ of our immediate ‘homo’ genus ancestors (egaster, rudalfensis, and others) to be in millions of years, and believes that these lengthy spans are the result of the more harmonious relationship between them and their environments. It’s not that their environments didn’t change, but rather that when they did change, such as in global warming and cooling cycles, the groups simply migrated, like the other animals, to different areas.

Yuval believes that with our subspecies, sapiens, our rapid population growth changed this dynamic, forcing the need for agriculture, with its corollaries such as towns, governments and laws, and interrupting the migratory instincts developed by Natural Selection. Thus the speedup of sapiens drove a wedge between us and our environment from which we have never recovered. We are, in effect, ‘longing for the good old days’.

In addition, he notes that humans have had a larger impact on the environment than our ancestors, and impose this impact much quicker as well. This is causing an additional disconnect as both our evolution and these environmental impacts change faster than we, as a species, can become comfortable with it.

Harari goes to great length in his book to call out the significant disconnect between humans and their environment, identifying the point in our history which occurred with the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, in which humans ceased to be nomadic and became sedentary, as a pivot point in human evolution. Prior to this point, while the human evolutionary ‘rate’ was slower, its impact on the environment was much less, and as he theorizes, our ancestors were ‘happier’.
After this point, he notes the rapid rise of human population (in which humans had a more reliable food source), which had the downside of introducing a reduction in the human’s sense of ‘belonging’ to the environment. He cites many ills of post-agrarian society, such as the need for intensive, benumbing labor (to tend the fields), the crowding and ugly by-products of overpopulation in cities resulting in diseases and other ills. He sees this turning point as a ‘decision’ and a huge ‘evolutionary mistake’ resulting in what he sees as the root of widespread unease in human civilization today. In his telling, with the Agricultural Revolution, humans, enabled populations to explode, negatively affect their environment and ‘ruining’ a satisfactory accommodation between humans and their environment which persists to this day.

He sees in this an underlying paradox in human evolution. Our ability to impact our environment impedes our accommodation of it. We are more ready, he asserts, to change it rather than (as our ancestors) live with its perceived problems. Each change that we make produces yet another problem that we believe we have to fix, and so on to the present day. Each of these changes creates yet another degree of alienation from nature, and contributes to an additional degree of anxiety. He extrapolates this tendency to a future in which our negative impact on our environment, our increasing discomfort with it and the incessant necessity for new technology to ‘fix’ it, leads inevitably to a future in which we quickly become totally dependent on automation, resulting in our untimely extinction. Unlike the reign of our Homo ancestors, in the millions of years, he gives us only a few thousand or so.

This dystopian view of human evolution (not the first, as Malthus showed us) provides one answer to the question of ‘if we’re so evolved why ain’t we happy?’

So, Why Ain’t We?

Setting aside the fact that not all of us are unhappy, the issue of happiness shows a long trail of evolution in itself, and can be seen in the immense spectrum of attitudes that represents total fatalism at one end and joyful acceptance at the other.

Teilhard also saw the rise of anxiety as resulting from the rapid rise of human evolution:

“Surely the basic cause of our distress must be sought precisely in the change of curve which is suddenly obliging us to move from a universe in which the divergence, and hence the spacing out, of the containing lines still seemed the most important feature, into another type of universe which, in pace with time, is rapidly folding-in upon itself.”

   So, we are brought to the point of considering the ‘terrain of synergy’ from the perspective of human happiness as well as that of the continuation of our species. Are we, as Harari predicts, doomed to a future in which we, unlike the millions of species which preceded us, doomed to carry our increased evolution as a burden in which our survival must be paid for by our unhappiness. Is there a perspective, grounded in both material and spiritual tangibility, in which we can see our future otherwise?

In this blog we have consistently followed the thoughts of Teilhard de Chardin , supplemented by those of other writers whose vision of the future suggest the answer to this question is an unqualified ‘yes’. Admitting, however, that the general issue of human happiness is very slippery, I’d like to take a perspective on the ‘terrain of synergy’ that continues, as Jonathan Sacks has opened the door, to the ‘middle ground’ of it. Harari is certainly insightful in his look backwards in history, but does this retrospective necessarily lead to the dismal future he predicts? Turning Teilhard’s succinct perspective of evolution, “Everything which rises must converge”, might it be true that “Everything which converges must rise?”

The Next Post

This week we followed up on Jonathan Sacks insights on the middle ground of the ‘terrain of synergy’ in which the different but complementary methods and insights of science and religion might overlap.   In spite of the optimistic tone of Sacks, as well as that of Teilhard and Paul Davies, we saw how Yuval Noah Harari offers a highly negative prognostication.

Next week we will continue our exploration of this ‘middle ground’ from the slippery perspective of human happiness. Not only is it difficult to quantify, but even more difficult to establish causes and effects. We will see if our long journey towards seeing the ‘Secular Side of God’ can offer any insights into seeing this phenomenon more clearly.

July 25, 2019 – Human Life: Reconnecting Our Parts to the Whole

Leave a reply

Today’s Post

Last week we moved from the ‘terrain of synthesis’, the areas potentially common to science and religion as identified by Teilhard and Paul Davies, to the ‘middle ground’ addressed by Jonathan Sacks: that occupied by the human person.

This week we will go a little deeper into exploring the potential of this ground to personal human growth.

The Road to Synthesis

Sacks moves from his review of the history between science and religion to address what he sees has resulted from the “crumbling of the arch between Jerusalem and Athens” and the need for rediscovery of the ‘terrain of synergy’.

“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 substitutes cause and effect for reflection, will and choice.

   Science and religion have their own logic, their own way of asking questions and searching for answers. This is not an argument for compartmentalization, seeing science and religion as did (Stephen Jay) Gould as ‘non overlapping magisteria’, two entirely separate worlds. They do indeed overlap because they are about the same world within which we live, breathe and have our being. It is instead an argument for conversation, hopefully even integration. Religion needs science because we cannot (find God) in the world if we do not understand the world. If we try to, the result will be magic or misplaced supernaturalism.”

   He goes on to echo Davies’ observation that science, as it does not address the phenomenon of rising complexity in the universe, is poorly equipped to include the human person in its deliberation.

“By the same token, 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.”

   He offers an articulation of the “Terrain of Synergy” that we addressed last week.

“It is precisely the space between the world that is and the world that ought to be that is, or should be, the arena of conversation between science and religion, and each should be open to the perceptions of the other. The question is neither, “Does Darwinism refute religion?” nor, “Does religion refute Darwinism”? Rather: “How does each shed light on the other, and “What new insights does Darwinism offer religion?”, and “What insights does religion offer to Darwinism?”

   Recognizing the “Terrain of Synergy” is much more than a philosophical goal. While it is a worthy objective to better understand where we fit into the ‘scheme of things’, we are still faced with the need to unpack this understanding into a way of personal life in which

“(in general) religion and science, far from being opposed, are on the same side of the table, using their distinctive methods to help us better understand humanity, nature, and our place in the scheme of things.”

   Reflecting Thomas Jefferson’s reinterpretation of Jesus’ teaching (Part 1 of “So Who And What Was Jesus’), he goes on to say

“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. This has been demonstrated four times in the modern world when an attempt was made to create a social order on secular lines: The French Revolution, Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany and Communist China. When there is a bonfire of the sanctities, lives are lost.

   Science cannot locate freedom, because the word is one of causal relationships. A scientific law is one that links one physical phenomenon to another without the intervention of will and choice. 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. That is precisely what Spinoza, Marx and Freud were arguing, that freedom is an illusion. But if freedom is an illusion, then so is human dignity.”

The Next Post

This week we took a deeper look at the ‘terrain of synergy’ in which the different but complementary methods and insights of science and religion might overlap.   Three weeks ago we looked at how Paul Davies and Teilhard offer two very clear examples of thinking about synergy between science and religion, and this week and the last we saw how Jonathan Sacks looked at it from the perspective of the ‘center’ of this terrain, which is where most of us live our daily lives.

Next week we will build upon Sack’s insights, much closer to home, to look at how this movement toward ‘synergy’ between such things as left-right brain thinking, science-religion coherence and general overcoming of daily ‘dualisms’ can lead to what Richard Rohr refers to as “whatever reconnects (re-religio) our parts to the whole”.

July 18, 2019 – Science, Religion, Synergy and Human Life

Leave a reply

Today’s Post

Last week we looked at, in some detail, how the perspectives and insights of Paul Davies and Teilhard offer the concept of a ‘terrain of synergy’ in which the underlying basis of universal evolution, increasing complexity, can be examined as Teilhard states, by “assailing the real from different angles and on different planes”.

This week we will address this terrain from the insights of Jonathan Sacks, Former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the United Kingdom, who views this from the middle ground.

The Human Person’s Need for Balance

Sacks locate the center point of this ‘terrain of synergy’ in the phenomenon of the human person:

“It is not incidental that Homo sapiens has been gifted with a bicameral brain that allows us to experience the world in two fundamentally different ways, as subject and object, ‘I’ and ‘Me’, capable of standing both within and outside our subjective experience.  In that fact lies our moral and intellectual freedom, our ability to mix emotion and reflection, our capacity for both love and justice, attachment and detachment, in short, our humanity.”

   He notes that the difficulty of attaining such synergy can be seen in the human difficulty to integrate these two modes of understanding, resulting in the dualisms to which we have become accustomed.

“ It is this (potential for synergy) that the reductivist – the scientist who denies the integrity of spirituality, or the religious individual who denies the findings of science- fails to understand.”

   He also notes that most of us do not live our day-to-day lives in such a divided world.  While the empirical facts that guide science must be recognized, our daily lives are lived in a mileu more ‘intuitional’ than ‘empirical’.   He uses the human characteristic of ‘trust’ as an example.  As Yuval Noah Harari explains in great detail in his book, “Sapiens”, the whole human edifice of economics, (so necessary for the welfare detailed by Johan Norberg) is predicated on ‘trust’.   This welfare, unprecedented in human history, requires not only that individuals trust one another, but that they trust the ‘imaginary’ but tangible fabric of society.  The nodes of this fabric, such as states, banks, schools and laws are both results of ‘trust’ and structures upholding welfare.

Such trust isn’t empirically measurable or provable (as the empiricists would require) but it is nonetheless a key strand of the fabric that holds society together.  Those times when it erodes (as in an economic collapse), human welfare suffers greatly.

Sacks goes on to show how trust is more than just part of the glue that holds society together, and is the basis for our own personal outlook:

“Almost none of the things for which people live can be proved.  For example, a person who manages the virtue of trust will experience a different life than one to whom every human relationship is a potential threat.”

   And this is where the ‘center’ of the ‘terrain of synergy’ is located.

How Did We Get Here?

As Sacks sees it, the road to today’s bifurcation between science and religion began in the sixteenth century:

“The rise of science can be seen to have resulted from the impact of the wars of religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that led figures like Descartes and Newton to seek certainty on the basis of a structure of knowledge that did not rest on dogmatic foundations.  One way or another, first science, then philosophy, declared their independence from theology and the great arch stretching from Jerusalem to Athens began to crumble.  First came the seventeenth century realization that the earth was not the center of the universe.  Then came the development of a mechanistic science that sought explanations in terms of prior causes, not ultimate purposes.  Then came the eighteenth century philosophical assault by Hume and Kant, on the philosophical arguments for the existence of God.  Hume pointed up the weakness of the argument from design.  Kant refuted the ontological argument.  Then came the nineteenth century and Darwin.  This was, on the face of it, the most crushing blow of all, because it seemed to show that the entire emergence of life was the result of a process that was blind.”

In his view, the Christian religion of the West arose with a few foundational cracks that would eventually weaken it.

“Christendom drew its philosophy, science and art from Greece, its religion from Israel.  But from the outset it contained a hairline fracture that would not become a structural weakness until the seventeenth century.  It consisted in this: that though Christians encountered philosophy, science and art in the original Greek, they experienced the religion of their founder in translation.  While Greek is not the language of Jesus, it was the natural language of thought of Paul, the writers of the gospels, the authors of the other books of the NT, the early church Fathers, and the first Christian theologians. This was (brilliant but with) one assumption that would eventually be challenged from the seventeenth century until today: namely that science and philosophy, on the one hand, and religion on the other, belong to the same universe of discourse.  They may, and they may not.  It could be that Greek science and philosophy and the Judiac experience of God are two different languages- that, like the left- and right-brain modes of thinking only imperfectly translate into one another.”

  Sacks not only envisions the possibility that science and religion can ‘intertranslate’, but goes a little further.  He believes that they need each other.  Better yet, he believes that humanity needs both of them to be able to flourish.

The Next Post

This week we addressed Davies’ and Teilhard’s ‘terrain of synthesis’ as the intersect between science and religion, this time from Jonathan Sacks’ ‘middle ground’: the human person.

Next week we will build on this centrist vision to address how the powerful systems of science and religion can benefit from expanding this terrain.

July 11, 2019 – The ‘Terrain of Synergy’- Areas Common to Religion and Science

Leave a reply

Today’s Post

Last week we went a little deeper on the possibility of synergy between science and religion; one which would enhance and enrich both bodies of thought and contribute to the continuation of our evolution.

However, while Davies and Teilhard offer two very clear examples of thinking about synergy between science and religion, the question can be asked, “what areas of focus could be common to science and religion?”  Aren’t they, as claimed by Stephen Jay Gould (and echoed by Richard Dawkins), “two completely different and non-overlapping magisteria?”

Mapping the ‘Terrain of Synergy’

While science’s search for the agency by which the universe becomes more complex will go on for some time, as predicted by Paul Davies, humankind cannot afford the luxury of waiting for an empirical closure on the subject if it’s going to continue its evolution.  Our evolution is not only proceeding ‘under our feet’ whether or not we understand it, the rate rate is increasing.  Each day that passes seems to demand more choices with the mounting of the pressure of our advancement from instinct to volition.

The list of evolutionary threats seems to grow every day, and each individual risk gives rise to the prediction, “if this trend continues… (fill in your favorite evil)”.  Malthus may have been wrong in his prediction, but how do we know that eventually he will be proven right and the curtain of humanity will finally fall?

Therefore it is imperative that we build on those intuitions which have carried us thus far, but with the caveat that they must stay in coherence with the findings of science.  The source of these intuitions is religion, properly divested of Richard Dawkins’ “baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers.”

Jonathan Sacks agrees, and goes a little further by identifying some of the many subjects that when addressed would light the way towards a synthesis suitable for mapping a route to the future.

“There may be, in other words, a new synthesis in the making.  It will be very unlike the Greek thought-world of the medieval scholastics with its emphasis on changelessness and harmony.  Instead it will speak about:

– the emergence of order

– the distribution of intelligence

–  information processing

– the nature of self-organizing complexity

– the way individuals display a collective intelligence that is a property of groups, not just the individuals that comprise them,

– the dynamic of evolving systems and what leads some to equilibrium, others to chaos.

   Out of this will emerge new metaphors of nature and humanity; flourishing and completeness.  Right brain (religious, intuitive) thinking may reappear, even in the world of science, after its eclipse since the seventeenth century.”

   This list is echoed, with much more articulation, by Davies.  Also note that many of these subjects have long been the object of study and debate by religion.  Effectively, Sacks and Davies have begun mapping the territory that, when explored, offer the terrain of ‘synergy’ between science and religion.

Teilhard elaborates on traditional religion as rich ore to be refined into an elixir which enriches human evolution.

   “After allowing itself to be captivated in excess by the charms of analysis to the extent of falling into illusion, modern thought is at last getting used once more to the idea of the creative value of synthesis in evolution.  It is beginning to see that there is definitely more in the molecule than in the atom, more in the cell than in the molecule, more in society than in the individual, and more in mathematical construction than in calculations and theorems.  We are now inclined to admit that at each further degree of combination something which is irreducible to isolated elements emerges in a new order.”

    Davies, from the scientific perspective, echoes the insights of Teilhard and predates those of Sacks toward the need for science to expand its reach to include this underlying principle by which the universe unfolds:

“The general trend towards increasing richness and diversity of form found in evolutionary biology is surely a fact of nature, yet it can only be crudely identified, if at all. There is not the remotest evidence that this trend can be derived from the fundamental laws of mechanics, so it deserves to be called a fundamental law in its own right.

   The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, so it turns out, is not to be understood as a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles. Rather, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of these new pieces of behavior requires research which is as fundamental as, or perhaps more fundamental than, anything undertaken by the elementary particle physicists.”

   Thus both Davies and Teilhard can be clearly seen to “assail the real from different angles and on different planes”.  Such an approach as Davies is suggesting would act as an agent which can help religion to “..divest the word ‘God’ of all the baggage that it carries in the minds of most religious believers” from one angle while Teilhard offers the translation of science’s universal insight to the lives of human persons from another.

The Next Post 

This week we took a deeper look at the skill of using the ‘whole brain’ to assess the ‘noosphere’, focusing on the different thinking modes of science and religion, as represented by Paul Davies and Teilhard, and how they illustrate the potential to envision them as Teilhard did, as global “meridians as they approach the poles…,(which) are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the pole”.

While Davies and Teilhard offer two very clear examples of thinking about synergy between science and religion, there is another voice that contributes to this dialog, and that is Jonathan Sacks.   Next week we will take a look at his insights to move us along in understanding how ‘thinking with the whole brain’ can be understood.

July 4, 2019 – Science and Religion: An Integrated View of Reality

Leave a reply

Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at how the seemingly opposing perspectives of science and religion, our two great modes of thinking on this planet, could be seen as simply two facets of a fundamentally integrated movement towards a more comprehensive understanding of ourselves and the universe of which we are a part.  Teilhard likened them to two meridians on the surface of a globe which draw near as they approach the pole:

“Like the meridians as they approach the poles, science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.  I say, “converge” advisedly, but without merging, and without ceasing, to the very end, to assail the real from different angles and on different planes”.

   Given the traditional enmity between them, many would conclude that more of one inevitably results in less of the other.  This conclusion certainly seems to be borne out by the many polls in western countries which show a decline in religious participation.  ‘Accommodation’ has been automatically translated as ‘surrender’.

This week we will look at both Teilhard’s model of “assailing the real from different angles and on different planes” and how Paul Davies’ recognition of science’s need to ‘accommodate’ the human person offers a starting place for a true ‘accommodation’ in which one is enriched by the other.

Science and Religion: Drawing Nearer to the Poles

As a first step to rethink this classic duality, Paul Davies, a professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, simply puts scientific understanding into an evolutionary perspective:

 “No scientist would claim that the existing formulation of the laws of physics is complete and final.  It is therefore legitimate to consider that extensions or modifications of these laws may be found, that embody at a fundamental level the capacity for matter and energy to organize themselves.”

   One aspect of such ‘extension or modification’ lies in the Inclusion of the phenomenon of increasing complexity into the scope of science.  He notes that not only is such inclusion necessary for a more complete understanding of the universe in which we live, but will open the door to a subject significant but so far poorly treated by science: the human person.

Teilhard de Chardin also understood that the recognition of increasing complexity was key to a comprehensive understanding of reality, and also recognized the missing piece:

“Up to the present, whether from prejudice or fear, science has been reluctant to look man in the face but has constantly circled round the human object without daring to tackle it.  Materially our bodies seem insignificant, accidental, transitory and fragile; why bother about them?  Psychologically, our souls are incredibly subtle and complex: how can one fit them into a world of laws and formulas?”

   Thus, such inclusion as proposed by Davies, requires a new empirical perspective, an extension to traditional science.  Such emphasis on emerging complexity, while perhaps new to science, echoes Teilhard’s insistence that this same emphasis brings more relevancy to religion itself.  After all, he notes, religion has always assumed that there is a facet to the human person which is connected in some way to whatever universal agency by which the universe unfolds.   Again, from Teilhard:

“To outward appearance, the modern world was born of an anti-religious movement: man becoming self-sufficient and reason supplanting belief.  Our generation and the two that preceded it have heard little but talk of the conflict between science and faith; indeed it seemed at one moment a foregone conclusion that the former was destined to take the place of the latter.

    But, as the tension is prolonged, the conflict visibly seems to be resolved in terms of an entirely different form of equilibrium- not in elimination, nor duality, but in synthesis.  After close on to two centuries of passionate struggles, neither science nor faith has succeeded in discrediting its adversary.  On the contrary, it becomes obvious that neither can develop normally without the other.  And the reason is simple: the same life animates both.  Neither in its impetus nor its achievements can science go to its limits without becoming tinged with mysticism and charged with faith.”

   The ‘mysticism’ to which Teilhard refers here is less the classical religious concept of ‘tuning into to the supernatural’ and more the recognizing of the presence of a heretofore unrecognized agency of universal evolution.  ‘Faith’ in this insight refers less to ‘adherence to dogmatic statements so that we will be saved’ and more believing in both the inherent comprehensiveness of reality and our innate capability to understand it.

The Next Post

This week we took a deeper look at the skill of using the ‘whole brain’ to assess the ‘noosphere’, focusing on the different thinking modes of science and religion, as represented by Paul Davies and Teilhard, and how they illustrate the potential to envision them as Teilhard did, as global “meridians as they approach the poles…,  bound to converge as they draw nearer to the pole”.   While Davies and Teilhard offer two very clear examples of envisioning synergy between science and religion, the question can be asked, “what areas of focus could be common to science and religion?”  Aren’t they, as claimed by Stephen Jay Gould (and echoed by Richard Dawkins), independent ‘non overlapping magisteria’

Next week we will take a look at some areas where it would be appropriate to explore the idea of synergy.

June 27, 2019 – Science, Religion and Thinking With the ‘Whole Brain’

2 Replies

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Last week I was floating down the Rhine river from Basel to Amsterdam.   Sorry for the interruption in postings.

Today’s Post

Two weeks ago we took a deeper look at the skill of using the ‘whole brain’ to assess the ‘noosphere’, the mileu in which humans operate, to further understand our place in it and better understand how we can develop the skill necessary to cooperate with the flow of evolutional energy as it rises through the human species.

This week we will extend this theme of ‘coherence’ to our two great human paradigms of understanding and the ‘hermeneutics’ which we employ in them as we further our attempts to ‘make sense of things’.

Science and Religion: Activities of Two Hemispheres? 

As we have seen several times in this blog, the two modes of thought, empiricism and intuition, commonly seen as left and right brained activities, can be used in opposition, as evident in the many dualities that we have addressed.

Ultimately, however, there is but one reality, no matter how hard we try to break it up into bite size pieces to be better able to digest it.  As Teilhard says in his Preface to the “Phenomenon of Man”

 “Like the meridians as they approach the poles, science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.  I say, “converge” advisedly, but without merging, and without ceasing, to the very end, to assail the real from different angles and on different planes”.

   Science and religion are typically seen as left and right brained functions, manifest in empiricism and intuition, and the duality expressed as ‘science vs religion’ is common in our debates.  Teilhard’s deep insights into the nature of ‘being’ certainly precipitated heated criticism from both his science-oppositional hierarchy and from the predominately anti-religionists of science.

The fact that they have been so vehemently debated in the past does not necessarily mean that they are in true opposition, but often one or the other holds sway in the reasoning process.  What is necessary for ‘whole brain thinking’ is for recognition of each hemisphere’s need for the other: intuition as the starting point for objective empiricism, and empiricism as the infrastructure to verify and clarify intuition.

Hence, thinking with the whole brain requires these two perspectives to complete and enrich the other, whether we are addressing reality from the ‘left brain’ empirical perspectives of science or those of the intuitional ‘right brain’ of religion.

From the religious perspective, Teilhard (and Blondel before him) clearly understood how the scientific concept of evolution represented the possibility of reinterpreting the teachings of traditional religion in a way which clarified the immediacy of God, diluted religion’s superstitious and supernatural aspects and ultimately opened the door for a belief by which humans could more effectively contribute to their personal as well as societal evolution.

From the scientific perspective, Paul Davies, professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, outlines the many ways that science is beginning to articulate religion’s insistence that a cosmic thread of ‘becoming’ rises through all things, and thus offers a door to inclusion of the human (heretofore omitted from scientific thought) in scientific discourse.

We don’t need to be able to empirically understand the nature of this underlying agent of increasing complexity to be able to cooperate with it.  The ancients understood enough of it to be able to craft a belief system and the resultant social organization that benefited from it.

Are Religion and Science Compatible?

As Davies moves towards articulating the underlying agent by which the universe ‘complexifies’, he is moving beyond the traditional scaffolding of science.  He acknowledges the need for an ‘extension’ to the traditional science of Newton, Einstein and Planck if we wish to empirically treat such complexification.  Religion needs a similar extension which places this same complexification in a more central focus.  Teilhard fits this bill:

“”The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world”

   I believe that Davies would reply that:

The true science is that which recognizes the existence of a creative agency in the ever-increasing complexity that underlies universal evolution.

   Davies notes that Einstein didn’t replace Newton’s ‘laws’ with relativity, nor does quantum physics replace relativity.  In both situations, the understanding of phenomenon simply expands from the realm previously described into a realm more recently recognized.  As new phenomena are so recognized, new concepts, relationships and paradigms are required to address them.

Teilhard does the same for religion.  As he goes to great pains to describe, the scientific concept of ‘evolution’ does not require the jettison of legacy religion in the human journey toward completeness.  He simply offers an approach to religion that, anticipating Richard Dawkins:

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

   Teilhard sees the ‘secular side of God’ in fact as the ‘religious side of science’

Thus Davies’ empirical quest for the agency of universal complexity is the scientific equivalent of Teilhard’s intuitional religious quest: the object is ultimately the same, and requires healing of the basic ‘dualism’ between religion and science.  The facilitation of such cohesion would equip the human mind with a ‘wholeness’ with which it can more adeptly navigate the process of human evolution.

Newton addressed the narrow but essential niche of existence of which we are aware in our daily lives.  Einstein (relativity), then Planck (quantum physics) expanded Newton’s field of view to the mini- and macro- spheres of the universe: the mega hot and the mega cold, the mini-small and the cosmically large outer reaches of existence of which we are unaware in our day-to-day existence, but which underpin (and overarch) it nonetheless.  These three steps have led in turn to the elegant but still incomplete models of the Standard Model of Physics, Relativity and Quantum Physics as science advances in its quest to ‘make sense of things’.

What Teilhard brings to the table is that these visions of reality are all somehow woven into a single cloth of cosmic existence, and what Davies recognizes is the necessity to first acknowledge this single cloth, then go to work expanding Einstein and Planck to the next level of theory.  Not a ‘meta’- physics but an extension of Newton, Einstein and Planck to the next level in which the agency of evolution and its universal product of ‘complexity’ becomes not just better recognized but quantified in such uncertain terms that the necessity for our allegiance to the laws which they reveal is unquestionably clear.

In such a way, Teilhard’s vision of ‘coherence’ between science and religion, in which they mature their legacy gifts of understanding into a collegial effort “to assail the real from different angles and on different planes”, begins to be less a dream and more of a reality.

The Next Post

This week we took a deeper look at the skill of using the ‘whole brain’ to assess the ‘noosphere’, focusing on the different thinking modes of science and religion, and how it is possible to envision them as Teilhard did, as global “meridians as they approach the poles…, bound to converge as they draw nearer to the pole”.

Next week we will dig a little deeper into what many would consider unlikely: the possibility that science and religion, and the perspectives, viewpoints and hermeneutics which they traditionally represent, are nonetheless simply facets of a single, integrated, and coherent attempt to make sense of the universe in which we live.  Is it possible for science to accommodate the intuitions of religion, with its hopes, faith and insistence on love, and for religion to (as Dawkins insists) “..divest the word ‘God’ of all the baggage that it carries in the minds of most religious believers” and accept the scientific discovery of ‘complexification’ as the manifestation of God’s creation?

June 13, 2019 – Science, Religion and Thinking With the ‘Whole Brain’

Leave a reply

Today’s Post

Last week we took a deeper look at the skill of using the ‘whole brain’ to assess the ‘noosphere’: further understand our place in it and better understand how we can develop the skill necessary to cooperate with the flow of evolutional energy as it rises through the human species.

This week we will extend this theme of ‘coherence’ to our two great human paradigms of understanding and the ‘hermeneutics’ which we employ in them as we further our attempts to ‘make sense of things’.

Science and Religion: Activities of Two Hemispheres? 

As we have seen, the two modes of thought, empiricism and intuition, can be used in opposition, as seen in the many dualities that we have addressed.   It’s not that they are in true opposition, but that often one or the other holds sway in the reasoning process.  What is necessary for ‘whole brain thinking’ is for each to recognize the need for the other: intuition as the starting point for objective articulation, and empiricism as the infrastructure to verify and clarify intuition.

Ultimately, after all, there is but one reality.  As Teilhard says in his Preface to the “Phenomenon of Man”

 “Like the meridians as they approach the poles, science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.  I say, “converge” advisedly, but without merging, and without ceasing, to the very end, to assail the real from different angles and on different planes”.

   Science and religion are typically seen as left and right brained functions, and the duality of science vs religion is common in our debates.  Teilhard’s deep insights into the nature of ‘being’ certainly precipitated heated criticism from both his scientific-oppositional hierarchy and from the predominately anti religionists of science.

However, thinking with the whole brain requires these two perspectives to naturally complete and enrich the other, whether we are addressing reality from the ‘left brain’ empirical perspectives of science or those of the intuitional ‘right brain’ of religion.

From the religious perspective, Teilhard (and Blondel before him) clearly understood how the scientific concept of evolution represented a way to reinterpret traditional religion in a way which clarified the immediacy of God, diluted religion’s superstitious and supernatural aspects and ultimately opened the door for a belief by which humans could more effectively contribute to their personal as well as societal evolution.

From the scientific perspective, Paul Davies, professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, outlines the many ways that science is beginning to articulate religion’s insistence that a cosmic thread of ‘becoming’ rises through all things, and thus offers a door to inclusion of the human in scientific discourse.

We don’t need to be able to empirically understand the nature of the underlying agent of increasing complexity to be able to capitalize on it.  The ancients understood enough of it to be able to craft a belief system and the resultant social organization that benefited from it.

Are Religion and Science Compatible?

As Davies moves towards articulating the underlying agent by which the universe ‘complexifies’, he is moving beyond the traditional empiricism of science.  He acknowledges the need for an ‘extension’ to traditional science which empirically treats such complexification.  Religion needs a similar extension which places this same complexification in a more central focus.  Teilhard fits this bill:

“”The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world”

   I believe that Davies would reply that:

The true religion is that which recognizes the creative aspect of God in the ever-increasing complexity that occurs with universal evolution.

   Davies notes that Einstein didn’t replace Newton’s ‘laws’ with relativity, nor does quantum physics replace the Standard Model of Physics.  In both situations, the understanding of phenomenon simply expands from the realm previously described into a realm more recently recognized.  As new phenomena are so recognized, new relationships and paradigms are required to address them.

Teilhard does the same for religion.  As he goes to great pains to describe, the scientific concept of ‘evolution’ does not require the jettison of religion in the human journey toward completeness.  He simply offers an approach to religion that, anticipating Richard Dawkins:

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

   He sees the ‘secular side of God’ in fact as the ‘religious side of science’

Thus Davies’ empirical quest for the agency of universal complexity is the scientific equivalent of Teilhard’s intuitional religious quest: the object is ultimately the same, and requires healing of the basic ‘dualism’ between religion and science.  The fabrication of such cohesion would equip the human mind a ‘wholeness’ with which it can more adeptly navigate the process of human evolution.

Newton addressed the narrow but essential niche of existence in which we live life.  Einstein (relativity), then Planck (quantum physics) expanded Newton’s field of view to the mini- and macro- spheres of the universe: the mega hot and the mega cold, the mini-small and the cosmic large outer reaches of existence of which we are not aware in our day-to-day existence, but which underpin (and overarch) it nonetheless.  These three steps have led in turn to the elegant but still incomplete models of the Standard Model of Physics, Relativity and Quantum Physics as science advances in its quest to ‘make sense of things’.

What Teilhard brings to the table is that these visions of reality are all somehow woven into a single cloth of cosmic existence, and what Davies recognizes is the necessity to first acknowledge this single cloth, then go to work expanding Einstein and Planck to the next level of theory.  Not a ‘meta’- physics but an extension of Newton, Einstein and Planck to the next level in which the agency of evolution and its universal product of ‘complexity’ becomes not just better recognized but quantified in such uncertain terms that the necessity for our allegiance to the laws which they reveal is unquestionably clear.

In such a way, Teilhard’s vision of ‘coherence’ between science and religion, in which they mature their legacy gifts of understanding into a collective effort “to assail the real from different angles and on different planes”, begins to be less a dream and more of a reality.

The Next Post

This week we took a deeper look at the skill of using the ‘whole brain’ to assess the ‘noosphere’, focusing on the different thinking modes of science and religion, and how it is possible to envision them as Teilhard did, as global “meridians as they approach the poles…, bound to converge as they draw nearer to the pole”.

Next week we will dig a little deeper into what many would consider unlikely: the possibility that science and religion, and the perspectives, viewpoints and hermeneutics which they traditionally represent, are nonetheless simply facets of a single, integrated, and coherent attempt to make sense of the universe in which we live.  Is it possible for science to accommodate the intuitions of religion, with its hopes, faith and insistence on love, and for religion to (as Dawkins insists) “..divest the word ‘God’ of all the baggage that it carries in the minds of most religious believers” and accept the scientific discovery of ‘complexification’ as the manifestation of God’s creation?