Tag Archives: X Religion and Evolution

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

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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.

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

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­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­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?

April 18 2019 – How can Indignation Jeopardize Human Evolution?

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Today’s Post

    Last week we explored what goes on in our ‘thinking system’ as external stimuli is processed by the ‘lower brains’,  stimulating the neocortex faster than it can examine and evaluate the external stimuli to decide on a reaction.  We also saw how these stimuli manifest themselves in the form of ‘messenger chemicals’ or ‘neurotransmitters’ sent to the neocortex, many of which are experienced by the neocortex as ‘pleasurable’.

This pleasurable response to a negative stimuli is captured in our term for it, ‘indignation’.  When we disapprove of the actions of others, for example, we can feel good about it.

This week we will take a look at how this natural condition, known to thinkers for ages, can metastasize to new proportions in the milieu of the rapid, ubiquitous and near universal world of the internet. 

The Danger of Indignation Today

What’s different about such a common condition today, and how can it be seen as possibly undermining the continuation of human evolution?

David Brin, author and social critic, notes the “rising ideological divisions that are becoming more prevalent today, even to the point of “culture wars”, that makes it increasingly difficult to form coalitions to solve problems”. Today it seems that fewer groups seem capable of negotiating peaceful consensus solutions to problems.  Such an impasse is often driven by the irate stubbornness of a few vigorous leaders, especially if they are armed with the stamina and dedication of indignation, knowing, in Brin’s words,

“.. with subjective certainty, that (they) are right and (their) opponents are deeply, despicably wrong.”

   Last week we saw how the internet, with its various forms of social media, not only act as an amplifier for beliefs and assertions, but as a positive feedback mechanism which can enhance and reinforce biases, negativity and pessimism.

What’s involved in getting to this deeply dogmatic, self-centered and troubling state of mind?

Brin calls attention to studies that investigate reinforcement processes in the human brain, especially those involving dopamine and other messenger chemicals that are active in producing pleasure responses, such as those at the Behavioral Neuroscience Program State University of New York at Buffalo.  He refers to this physiology as “chemically-mediated states of arousal that self-reinforce patterns of behavior”.

Such self-induced arousal can be seen as “self-doping”, in which individuals have the power to trigger the release of psychoactive chemicals simply by entering into certain types of consciousness.  Typical types of such arousal include anger, or more specifically, ‘indignation’.

When such self-induced behavior becomes frequent it can become habitual, even to the point of addiction.

Such ‘self- doping’ of course is not limited to indignation. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, using MRI, have examined the brain activity that occurs when volunteers won games of chance, and found that responses were very similar to those responding to cocaine.  Evidently, gambling produces a pleasant stimulus similar to cocaine.

Simple activation of brain reward systems does not necessarily constitute addiction.  We do this every time we hold our love ones, hear beautiful music, or even find the word which satisfies the crossword clue.  Those who practice meditation, also a self-induced state, also report the pleasure of entering into a meditative state.

Rather, the extreme control of behavior—exemplified by a deterioration in the ability of normal rewards to govern behavior (termed ‘motivational toxicity’)—is the distinguishing feature of an addiction.

Motivational toxicity is apparent when rewards which are normally effective in influencing behavior lose their ability to motivate.  This is typically seen in drug addicts when they neglect formerly potent rewards such as career, relationships and sex, and focus their behavior on the acquisition and ingestion of drugs.

So it appears possible to habitually pursue drug-like reinforcement cycles — either for pleasure or through cycles of withdrawal and insatiability that mimic addiction — purely as a function of entering an addictive frame of mind.  Such pursuit requires no mental discipline (such as does the practice of meditation) and produces much stronger sensation.  A sense of righteous outrage can feel so intense and delicious that those caught up in this emotional whirlpool actively seek to return to it, again and again.  It is not necessarily associated with one political outlook or another, as it seems to be a trait that crosses all boundaries of ideology.

Since it undermines our ability to empathize with opponents, accept criticism, or negotiate practical solutions to problems, it undermines the mature discourse necessary to a healthy society.  Further, it skews how the world is experienced.  While the torrent of news today, and its incessant reliance on ‘click-bait’ content promote a sense of pessimism, motivational toxicity takes this level of pessimism to the point that the positive trends such as reported by Johan Norberg can not only be ignored, they must be seen as insidious ‘fake news’ designed to lull us into a untrustworthy sense of security.   Such an enhanced and reinforced pessimism increases the paranoia in which long-standing and successful social and political norms are no longer to be trusted.  In a society in which such pessimism prevails, the structure of democracy will not survive.

The problem with chronic dopamine release is not just the danger it poses to society at large.  As the cycle increases, brain receptors become desensitized and continued self-doping bring less pleasure.  As with any psychotropic drug, regular release of dopamine will in turn result in a craving for a larger release to feel the same ‘high’.  When this happens, the only way to achieve the high is to increase the rage and act out more; either verbally or violently.  This is how anger addiction is born.

As we saw last week, this cycle is further reinforced by the feedback power of the internet.   This sort of dopamine response is induced by the many ‘clickbait’ posts found on social media, and as the need for more production of it increases, the internet gladly ups the volume and content of negative and indignation-worthy content to accommodate.  At the same time, the skill of using the neocortex to modulate and minimize the stimulation is eroded.  The person becomes less and less capable of objective evaluation of the increasingly indignation-inducing posts.

The Next Post

This week we took a closer look at how anger, and its everyday manifestation of indignation can metastasize to new proportions in the mileu of the rapid, ubiquitous and near universal world of the internet, and how this can constitute new dangers to both personal and societal evolution.

Next week we will look into how this natural and common phenomena can turn into practices which can jeopardize our continuing evolution.

April 4 2019 – What’s New About Today’s Unprecedented Pessimism?

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Today’s Post

Last week we began to take a look at what first seems to be a new ‘dualism’, which, when set against all the traditional dualisms we have examined (spirit/matter, this life/the next, sin/grace, damnation/salvation) first appears as just one more.  As we saw, the hard edges of such dualisms begin to crumble into a ‘spectrum of the real’ when we hold up the universal evolution perspectives of Teilhard, Rohr and others.  As we saw with Jonathan Sacks, such dualisms simply represent an unbalanced approach to reality in which one side of the brain dominates our thoughts by prioritizing, for instance, such things as empiricism over intuition or intuition over facts.  From Sacks’ perspective, such dualisms simply represent the difficulty of “thinking with the whole brain”, and begin to resolve themselves as we become more adept, for example, at looking at both sides of an issue.

Is this new negativity, this pushback against reasoned discourse which reveals itself in such deep and  coarse sociological divisions as can be seen in today’s politics and social media, just one more ‘dualism’ which can be resolved by applying Teilhard’s evolutive hermeneutic?  Or is it quite different, and indicative of a deeper, more insidious and therefore stronger threat to our continued evolution?

This week we will peer more deeply into this modern phenomenon.

The Persistence of Indignation

There’s obviously nothing new about ‘indignation’.  Indignation is simply the emotion we attach to disapproval of the actions of others.  It is well described in our earliest forms of literature, as is the different actions and sensations that it incites in us.

We have addressed in this blog the many ways that our ‘triune’ brain affects our perceptions and provide stimuli to our actions, but to summarize:

The ‘reptilian’ brain resides in the brain stem, and was the first brain to be formed in the animal family.  It controls the most basic animal functions, such as breathing (even when we’re unconscious).  It is also responsible for ‘fight or flight’ stimuli, letting us know when we’re hungry, and as an impetus for reproduction.  In its ‘fight or flight’ stimuli it warns of danger to insure our safety.  As such, it is the root of many of our ‘negative’ emotions, such as fear and anger.

The ‘limbic’ or ‘mammalian’ brain is more recent, ‘layered’ on top of the ‘reptilian’ brain, and is more responsible for emotions and sensations of pleasure that come from being socially connected.  The ‘reptilian’ brain provides the instinct to procreate, but the young are left to hatch from untended eggs and are left on their own to mature.  The ‘limbic’ brain introduces a post-natal period in which the young are nurtured until some degree of autonomy is attained, in keeping with their more complex neural systems and the resultant longer gestation periods.  Such ‘social’ instincts are not only essential to the maturation of the individual, but go on to provide (in the higher primates) the structures of society in which individuals can override the ‘individual survival’ stimuli of the reptilian brain in favor of the ‘survival’ of the family or social group.

The ‘neocortex’ brain is the most recent of the ‘brain layers’, and the most complex.  It introduces the ability to have knowledge of our awareness, and to process this knowledge independently of the stimuli produced by the lower brains.

All three ‘brains’ are capable of ‘self-medication’.   Apparently, all three levels of the brain are capable of producing such chemicals as dopamine and other messenger chemicals that are active in mediating pleasure response.   This is evolution’s way of rewarding activity which is consistent with the brain’s awareness of its surroundings and productive of activity which increases the individual’s evolutionary potential.  Our days are filled with such sensations, from the reward our brain provides when the solution of the morning crossword pops into our head to the pleasure of a close relationship.

But, like all things in the human evolutionary spectrum such a natural and necessary flow of neurological energy can work to ends less appropriate to the continuation of human evolution.

The Danger of Indignation

As we have stated, there are few subjects easier recognized than indignation.   It is commonly experienced in our increasingly fast-paced culture, which seems to require a nearly endless increase in patience and forbearance to survive with any equanimity at all.  No matter what accommodation we have achieved with our constantly changing mileu, the next day will require even more.

At the same time, we are subjected to an endless barrage of data, much of it irrelevant and difficult to sift in ‘real time’.  We are often called on to take actions the consequences of which are unknown.

One seeming effect of such a kinetic existence is an increase in the friction between persons resulting in being thrown into increasingly close proximity and requiring increasing tolerance if social balance is to be maintained.

As the social critic, David Brin, observes:

“We have entered an era of rising ideological division and a “culture war” that increasingly stymies our knack at problem-solving. Nowadays, few adversarial groups seem capable of negotiating peaceful consensus solutions to problems, especially with opponents that are perceived as even more unreasonably dogmatic than they are. This cycle is often driven by the irate stubbornness of a few vigorous leaders. After all, the indignant have both stamina and dedication, helping them take high positions in advocacy organizations, from Left to Right.”

   The resultant ‘culture war’ that Brin identifies can be clearly seen in today’s news: the ‘we vs they’ nature of immigration debates, the tendency to ‘demonize’ opponents on the left or right, and the inability to arrive at consensus on any subject, as if the middle of the road has somehow become the edge of oblivion.

The statesmanlike attributes of empathizing with opponents, accepting criticism, or negotiating practical solutions to problems, so prized by the framers of our constitution, seem to be in scant supply today.  History shows that without them, the state lurches into a one-sided approach to everything, which no matter ‘left’ or ‘right’ eventually becomes unresponsive to democratic norms and destructive of individual and collective freedom.

The rapidly changing nature of our society, with its current trend of tightening our bonds through ever more immediate connectivity, can act as a media for both improving our grasp of reality in such a way as to enhance our reaction to it, and at the same time as a media for increasing our pessimism that evolution is actually moving us forward.  What is it about this current phenomenon that makes it so risky?

 

The Next Post

This week we looked a little closer at how human ‘complexification’ seems to require human compression, and how if we fail to understand this and put it into perspective, our continued human evolution as entities able to ‘think with both sides of their brain’ seems to be at risk.

Next week we will look more closely at what seems to be going on inside our heads as we deal with the risks of indignation.

March 28 2019 – What’s At The Root of the Pessimism?

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Today’s Post

Over the past few weeks we have been addressing the ‘Cosmic Spark’, the principle of ontological development of the universe by which it comes to be and continues its increase in complexity from the big bang all the way to the human-unique ‘awareness of consciousness.’  We have looked at this ‘principle’ as one which requires both recognition and cooperation if human evolution can be expected to continue.  Evolution is now in our hands.

We have traced awareness of this Cosmic Spark first through the attempts of religions and philosophies to ‘articulate the noosphere’, then through the rise of science as this articulation took on greater empiricism, then through how the pace of human evolution, as quantified by objectively measured and rapid increases in human welfare, has risen over the past hundred fifty years first in the West, then spreading rapidly through the ‘developing world’.

This is an astoundingly optimistic outlook, one which Johan Norberg, who chronicles such a viewpoint admits is difficult to share in the face of a steady drumbeat of a perceived ‘march towards the dogs’.  We have discussed this strange phenomena as can be found in the negative fibers in our Western religion, as well as the nihilism of Nietzsche and the failed police states, but there are others, more neurological in nature, which are more insidious and hence more dangerous, at work.

The Fruits of Negativity

One would think after reading Norberg’s nine specific measures of the phenomenal improvement in the human condition over the past hundred fifty years, a ‘microblink’ in the history of universal evolution, that there would be every reason to see ourselves, especially in the West but as emerging worldwide, as living in a true ‘Golden Age’.  The reduction in warfare, increase in life span, reductions in disease and hunger, and rapid reductions in poverty, all delineated by Norberg, present a powerful picture of ‘Progress’.  Rapid advances in technology make our lives more comfortable, and the explosion of communications links us together in a way that would have seemed to pure magic just a generation ago.

But an undercurrent of dissatisfaction beneath all this cannot be ignored.  Even the most casual subscriber to social media, or follower of disturbing political trends such as extreme Nationalism, hints of resurgence of racism, feelings of ‘unfairness’ and inequality, quickly realizes that there trends in society which generally work against the idea of a ‘Cosmic Spark’.

And of course, our propensity for more and better connectivity itself can be a ‘two-edged sword’.  Resentments that have been built up over the past seventy years have created the perception of inequality out of control, even among those who are well off.  How can I be ‘well off’ if there’s somebody out there better off than I, and look at the benumbing volume of data that pushes this in my face every day?

To some extent, the ‘egality’ of social media (amplified by our rapidly polarizing politics) has stripped the cover of ‘political correctness’ (once referred to as ‘politeness’) from social intercourse and introduced the ‘right to indignation’.  The image this conjures is unhappy persons sitting behind dimly lit, spittle-covered computer screens and hurling invective into a coarse, hostile but ever-welcoming neuro netscape.

But is there anything new here?  Can’t we find such invective in our holy books?  Haven’t prophets for centuries predicted our long, slow but inevitable descent toward ‘the dogs’, (even if the poet Jeanette Walworth could remind us, “The dogs have had an awful wait.”)?

It’s certainly true that the internet provides us with a megaphone of unprecedented size, scope and volume, as well as an anonymity which eludes consequences.    The imprimatur which validates our messages is simply the volume of ‘likes’ from the logosphere.  Memes survive in a sort of crude Darwinism in which ‘the fittest’ becomes the ‘most popular’, and the most popular is increasingly that pitched at the lowest denominator of human emotion.

So, what is actually new about this phenomenon, other than perhaps its technology-driven unprecedented size, scope and volume?  Further, why should it be considered more threatening to our continued evolution?

The Next Post

This week we continued our look at the ‘flip side’ of Norberg’s (and Teilhard’s) profound and well documented affirmations of ‘human progress’, which optimism, (if one is to believe in the rising tide of pessimism as found in today’s politics and social media) is not necessarily shared at large.

Next week we will look more closely at the truly unprecedented roots of this phenomenon.

March 21 2019 – Why Deny the Cosmic Spark?

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Today’s Post

Over the past several years we have been tracing the current of evolution as it continues its fourteen billion years of rise in complexity, most recently through our individual and collective lives.  Through the insights of Teilhard de Chardin we have been able to see how God can be understood as the name we give to basis for and the continued principle by which this journey continues.

This week we begin to look at ‘denial’ of the Cosmic Spark.  If it is, as Teilhard asserts, the essential element which has brought the universe into its current state of complexity, can we be assured of its continued presence in our personal and collective lives?

A Recap

This blog addresses the subject of God in ‘secular’ terms; that is without recourse to traditional Western (or Eastern) religious thinking.  This approach opens a fresh ‘hermeneutic’  to making sense of religion by finding ‘reinterpretations’ which square with what we are uncovering about reality through the methods of science.  It is not that religion is basically antithetical to science, but that reality is something that can be approached by both the empirical and intuitional modes of human thinking; the ‘right’ and ‘left’ brains.

In our journey, we have come to see both science and religion pointing to an evolution by which complexity rises over time, and how this complexity makes and remakes its products in ever increasing manifestations of complexity.  In such a way that in the latter phases of evolution, this increase in complexity shows up as increased awareness, consciousness and sphere of activity of the individual products.  Teilhard and many others (such as Johan Norberg) see these characteristics as evidence of increases in human ‘personness’ and ‘freedom’.

In tracing this thread first through the sequentially increasing complexity of pre-life (quarks, electrons, atoms, molecules) then into the much more complex world of cells, neurons, brains and consciousness aware of itself, we have become aware of a common thread which runs through the fourteen billion years of evolution that we are aware of.

We have seen how the earliest Christian teachings (especially Paul) grasped the tangibility of this thread (The ‘Cosmic Spark’) as it rises through our lives, but also how the more Greek Platonic influences tipped the scales toward an ‘outsider’ God, an “over and against of man”, as seen by Blondel.  The ‘intimate’ God, proclaimed by Jesus, articulated by Paul and expressed so eloquently and straightforwardly by John in his statement:

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

is not as important to church hierarchy as the God of structure embraced after the Council of Nicea which insured the new Church’s place in the political scheme of things.

Over the past few weeks, we have also seen how such an insight as the Cosmic Spark nonetheless offers a hermeneutic for reinterpreting the basic message of Western Christianity: clarifying its message and deepening understanding of how it can be seen as the sap which flows in all limbs of this ‘tree of life’.  Further, we have seen how acknowledgement of it and cooperation with it not only is essential to continuing human evolution, but in doing so enriches our individual lives.

We have also been able to see, through the volumes of metrics offered by Johan Norberg, how in spite of our general clumsiness in recognizing and cooperating, we humans have become generally increasingly adept at increasing our collective evolutionary complexity.  As Richard Rohr puts it:

 “All of us, without exception, are living inside of a cosmic identity, already in place, that is drawing and guiding us forward. We are all (engaged), willingly or unwillingly, happily or unhappily, consciously or unconsciously.”

   Evidently, it is not necessary that we consciously and systematically uncover the action of the Cosmic Spark in human life to benefit from it.

Or is it?

What Could Hold Us Back?

In spite of our conscious or unconscious ability to move human evolution ahead, we have looked at the impediments that our society has developed which can get in the way.  We saw how a negative strand of thinking has entwined itself in Western Christianity that gives rise to a mistrust of this ‘Cosmic Spark’ and manifests itself in echoes of Luther’s belief that humans are ‘Piles of excrement covered by Christ’, and Freud’s belief that the fundamental nature of the human person is ‘dangerous’, and cannot be trusted.   Consequences of such negativity can be seen in our time in the arrival of the anti-personal regimes of Stalin, Mao and the Kims.

But surely in our resolute resistance to such anti-evolutionary currents, successful thus far in overcoming them, the battle is won?

Unfortunately, as even the most cursory examination of current social norms show, in spite of the tremendous increase of worldwide human welfare as documented by Norberg, general trust of these norms is becoming harder to find in those societies most enriched by it.   Trends in such things as recent elections and current social media show not only an increasing unease with our norms, but a downright prevelance of antisociality which works against cooperation.

History has clearly shown that the benefits of a society in which freedom and innovation prevail are phenomenal, with such benefits as decreases in infant mortality, extensions of freedom to all segments of society, reductions in malnutrition, warfare, disease and poverty.  In spite of such ‘hard’ data somehow a large segment of Westerners, where all these trends began, seemed called to be suspicious, even in downright disbelief, at these benefits.

Today, we see trends in our politics in which we are encouraged to mistrust those Democratic norms which have thus far carried us to such unprecedented levels of human welfare.  Why now, after such a hard-won plateau of welfare, should such anti-evolutionary thinking become prevalent?

Who are we?  Are we indeed untrustworthy carriers of the evolutionary genes which are capable of raising our complexity (read our innate capability to grow as whole human persons)?  Is there anything to Teilhard’s profound trust in the Cosmic Spark, or has this bubble, risen for fourteen billion years, only to burst in our inadequate hands?  Is human nature, as asserted by Freud and Luther, really untrustworthy?  Was there a golden age when we were, as some thinkers claim, ‘one with nature and free from sin’, or is our unease simply the result for looking, for the first time, at the cosmos and recognizing its vast potential?

Richard Rohr reflects both the siren song of the past and Teilhard’s great confidence in the future when he states that

“Paul offers a theological and ontological foundation for human dignity and human flourishing that is inherent, universal, and indestructible by any evaluation of race, religion, gender, sexuality, nationality, class, education, or social position. He does this at a time when perhaps four out of five people were slaves, women were considered the property of men, temple prostitution was a form of worship, and oppression and wholesale injustice toward the poor and the outsider were the norm. “

   But that still leaves us with the question, “Why, with all the evidence of improvement in human welfare, why do we still cling to a pessimism that is capable of eroding the underpins of evolution from beneath us?  Where does what seems to be such an upwelling of mistrust come from and how can it be dealt with?  Is this just another ‘duality’, or is there something more deep-seated and hence more insidious at work?

The Next Post

This week we began a look at the ‘flip side’ of Norberg’s (and Teilhard’s) profound and well documented affirmations of ‘human progress’, which optimism, (if one is to believe in the rising tide of pessimism as found in today’s politics and social media) is not necessarily shared at large.

Next week we will look more closely at this phenomenon.

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.

December 27 – The Confluence of Religion and Science- Part 2

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Today’s Post

   Last week we took a first look at Teilhard’s insights into how we can begin to see Christianity as less a competitor to science and more as a step toward an integrated understanding of the human person and his place in Teilhard’s ‘noosphere’.

Last week’s three insights were taken from Teilhard’s collection of papers entitled “Human Energy”.  This week we will continue looking at Teilhard’s conviction of the value of Science and Religion to each other, taking four more insights from his cornerstone book, “The Phenomenon of Man”.

Science and Religion: Getting From Here To There

In the fourth insight, Teilhard cites his belief that to live the noosphere we must understand it:

“Man is, if I have not gone astray in these pages, an object of unique value to science for two reasons.

(i) (The human person) represents, individually and socially, the most synthesized state of order which the stuff of the universe is available to us.

(ii) Collectively, he is at present the most mobile (in the process of changing) point of the stuff in course of transformation.

   For these two reasons, to decipher man is essentially to try to find out how the world was made and how it ought to go on making itself.  The science of man is the practical and theoretical science of hominisation.  It means profound study of the past and of origins.  But still more, it means constructive experimentation pursued on a continually renewed object.  The program is immense and its only aim is that of the future.”

   In the fifth insight, he recognizes, however, that the emergence of science was not without its seeming competition with religion.  As Steven Pinker outlines in his book, “Enlightenment Now”, the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, while offering great clarification of human affairs appropriate to the ‘articulation of the noosphere’, still placed most of the ills of the noosphere at the feet of religion:

“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.”

This sentiment was strongly evident in the earliest claims of the superiority of empiricism over that of intuition, such as that which appeared in the Enlightenment.  As much as I value the insights of Steven Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”, this biased viewpoint can still be found tucked into the back chapters.

Further, as Pinker undertakes the difficult subject of personal happiness in this book, he is forced to recognize the significant correlation between meaning and life satisfaction.  He does not seem to understand that science does not incorporate meaning at the personal level into its wonderful insights.  As Jonathan Sacks points out:

“Science takes things apart to see how they work.  Religion puts things together to see what they mean.  The difference between them is fundamental and irreducible.  They represent two distinct activities of the mind.  Neither is dispensable.  Both, together, constitute a full expression of our humanity.  They are as different and as necessary as the twin hemispheres of the brain.  It is in fact from the hemispherical asymmetry of the brain that the entire drama of the mutual misunderstanding and conjoint creativity of religion and science derive.”

   In his sixth insight, Teilhard, goes on to envision a future relationship between science and religion in which their viewpoints capitalize on Sack’s potential synergies, and they begin to come into a synthesis in which the manifest structures of human evolution are seen as facets of a single thing:

  “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.“

   And, so, Teihard summarizes his understanding of how the empiricism of science and the intuition of religion, the traditionally understood ‘left’ and ‘right’ brain perspectives that Sacks highlights, can now be seen as potentially two integrated and synthesized human enterprises.  Long envisioned as the opposite sides of a deep-seated duality, Teilhard sees them as destined to bring us to a more complete understanding of ourselves and the noosphere which we inhabit.

In his seventh insight, Teilhard summarizes his belief that such synthesis is necessary for the continuation of human evolution:

“Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge– the only one that can embrace the past and future of evolution so as to contemplate, measure and fulfil them.”

   As we have seen, Johan Norberg, in his book, “Progress”, implicitly agrees when he cites the three factors of freedom, innovation and relationships as essential for the continuation of the human progress (which we have seen is essentially quantification of human evolution).  In showing how these three factors are critical to secular progress, he is in implicit agreement with Teilhard that “neither (science nor religion) can develop normally without the other” and Sacks that “Both, together, constitute a full expression of our humanity”.

These three factors of course are seldom cited as aspects of intuitional thinking, but are addressed in some form in every expression of religious belief.

The Next Post

This week we have completed looking at Teilhard’s seven insights that underlay his assertion that the continuation of human evolution requires a synergy between science and religion if it is to continue.

While this week we cited the belief of Jonathan Sacks on the two ‘domains of thought’ of these two enterprises, next week we will look a little more deeply into his insights of how they can better team to assure this continuation.

December 20 – The Confluence of Religion and Science – Part 1

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Today’s Post

Last week we noted once again that even with the evolutionary progress that can be seen in the secular world, undriven by a singular impetus for advancing evolution per se, but nonetheless effecting a startling increase in human welfare over the past two hundred years, continuation of this trend is not inevitable. It is possible for ‘noospheric risks’ to undermine the continuation of human evolution, but as Teilhard asserts, the potential of science and religion, properly focused, conjoined and applied, are tools which will help us make our way.
This week we will look at the first three of his assertions to understand the potential for religion’s confluence with science to effect a tool for doing so.

The Evolutionary Potential of Religion

In “Human Energy”, Teilhard notes that Christianity, of all the world’s religions, in its fundamental teachings, is well placed for such a partnership with science in overcoming ‘noospheric risks’ and insuring the continuation of the rise of complexity in the human species.

In the first of these assertions, he cites the distinguishing feature which differentiates Christianity from the predominant Eastern beliefs: that of the primacy of the person:
“Like every other form of adherence to a cosmic hope, the doctrine of the personal universe has exactly those characteristics of universality and faith which are, in the broad sense of the term, distinctive of religion. But the religion it introduces has in addition two associated characteristics which seemed, to their mutual detriment, destined to be perpetual opposites in religious systems: personalism and pantheism. (This position) is already virtually realized and lived within Christianity.”
Like Teilhard, Jefferson recognized the personalistic focus of Christianity, but Jefferson saw it as necessary for the success of a democratic governmental progress, and hence as a necessary impetus to continued human evolution. Unlike Jefferson, who lived in a static universe, Teilhard recognized the value of attaching primacy to the concept of the person not only in human affairs, but as necessary for understanding the entire evolution of the universe. Teilhard first identifies complexity as the key metric of universal evolution, then observes how this complexity eventually manifests itself as person-ness in evolution’s most recent stages.

Second, he notes how this primacy of person can be seen in the Christian concept of ‘incarnation’, which can be seen through Teilhard’s insights as an impetus for the personal development that is the cornerstone to continued human evolution:
” The degree to which Christianity teaches and offers a prospect of universal transformation can never be sufficiently stressed. By the Incarnation God descended into nature to ‘super-animate’ it and lead it back to Him: this is the substance of the Christian dogma.”
Here the concept of God as the fundamental agent of the rise of complexity that powers universal evolution overlaps with the core Christian teaching of John that “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”. The Christian claim that the universal agent of life is somehow present in each of its manifestations is remarkable among all the world’s religions, and clearly shows the unique Christian belief that whatever is happening in our lives as we grow is powered by a universal agency for such growth.

Third, Teilhard also takes note of how the major elements of Christian theology are not only compatible with Science’s understanding of the ‘natural’ world, they can be enhanced by it. Teilhard, like Blondel before him, understood how the concept of evolution offered religion a more complete understanding of their ancient teachings:
“In itself, (Christian) dogma can be reconciled with many representations of the empirical world. So long, for example, as the human mind saw the universe only as a fixed arrangement of ready-made elements, the Christian had no serious difficulty in introducing the mysterious process of his sanctification into this static assemblage. But was not this, to some extent, a second best? Was a fundamental immobility of the cosmos the best imaginable framework for the spiritual metamorphosis represented by the coming of the kingdom of God? Now that the dust of early battles is dying down, we are apparently beginning to perceive that a universe of evolutionary structure- provided that the direction of its movement is truly located- might well be, after all, the most favorable setting in which to develop a noble and homogenous representation of the Incarnation.”
“Christianity would have been stifled by a materialist doctrine of evolution. But does it not find its most appropriate climate in the broad and mounting prospect of a universe drawn towards the spirit? What could serve as a better background and base for the descending illuminations of a Christogenisis than an ascending anthropogenesis?”
“Drawn towards the spirit” of course invokes Teilhard’s reinterpretation of ‘spirit’ as ‘increased complexity’, with Christogenisis as the personal aspect of this increased complexity. With this observation, Teilhard ‘closes the loop’ between a science which struggles to understand the fundamental force of evolution by which the intensity of its complexity is increased (“drawn towards the spirit’) and a religion loosed from its moorings of superstition, hierarchy and a spirituality which has become detached from the noosphere.

The Next Post

This week we have taken a first look at the possibility of bringing science and religion into a coherence which strengthens both of them and thus permits a clearer understanding of the noosphere; one which provides us with more effective tools for mitigating its risks and insuring the continuation of human evolution.
Next week we will continue this inquiry by seeing how Teilhard addressed this subject in his cornerstone book, “The Phenomenon of Man”.

December 13 – Religion and Science: Noospheric Tools?

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Today’s Post

In the last several weeks, we have been looking at religion’s concept of morality, ending in a look at how Teilhard’s five insights into morality offer a rethinking of traditional religion’s concept from proscription to prescription as we begin to recognize religion’s potential as a tool for insuring our continued evolution.  We saw how 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.

This week we turn our focus to the other great human enterprise, science, to begin exploring how a revitalized religion, better focused on an evolving noosphere, might better work with an obviously effective science in effecting such ‘maximization’ of potential. 

Evolution Everywhere

In this series, we have frequently noted that, as asserted and quantified by Johan Norberg (‘Progress’), it is possible for us, with properly focused eyes, to recognize threads of this evolution happening all around us.  Norberg offers, as the Economist identifies, “A tornado of facts” which quantify the many ways that human welfare proceeds by the correct application of human freedom, innovation and relationship throughout the world.  These examples of increased human welfare are without a doubt evidence of the ways the human species can be seen to continue its evolution.

We have also seen that Norberg considered human freedom, innovation, and relationships to be essential for such progress to proceed, which is why the earliest examples of this progress appeared in the West, with its unique emphasis on the three.

By the same token, we have noted that these three characteristics are treated poorly by science, and its companion secular ‘disciplines’ such as economics and politics.   Norberg’s three cornerstones of progress initially only occur in the West, as a slowly building consequence of society influenced by its Christian roots in the uniqueness of the person (more on this subject next week).

Jefferson’s claim that

 “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves”

was a claim to such uniqueness, and not derived from any empirical source.  His inspiration for such an unprovable concept was none other than the ‘teachings of Jesus’:

 “We all agree in the obligation of the moral precepts of Jesus, and nowhere will they be found delivered in greater purity than in his discourses.”

   Thus our claim that in religion, for all its creaky hierarchy, superstitions and contradictions, and even the many instances of hostility to Norberg’s three building blocks of freedom, innovation and relationships, we can still find threads of the current which must be maintained if it is to  carry us forward.

We have Jefferson to thank for both a clearer understanding of the noosphere, and how its structure in human affairs has evolved from Enlightenment principles intermixed with Christian values, initially “dripping” with the accouterments of medieval worldview.

As Norberg quantifies at length, this clearer understanding has given rise to the success of the West in providing a mileu which has effected a degree of stability not only unprecedented in Western history, but which has slowly permeated into the rest of the world.

Steven Pinker (“Enlightenment Now”) recognizes how this mileu is unfolding in the West in the form of a “tide of morality” which is pushing against “the historical erosion of racism, sexism and homophobia”.  It is not coincidental that these three negative aspects of society have all, at one time (and even continue today) been paramount in all religions.  Pinker sees in this tide the effect of ‘empiricism’s superiority over intuition’, a sentiment underpinning the beliefs found in the Enlightenment.  As do many thinkers influenced by the Enlightenment, he fails to recognize that in the essential beliefs of Jefferson, and thus of Jesus, the key kernel of belief which makes such a tide possible is the recognition of the essential goodness of the human person.  Without this belief, essentially unprovable and thus ‘intuitive’ rather than ‘empirical’, the tide would not surge, it would ebb.

Enter Religion

And this, of course, is where religion comes in.  We have taken a long look at ‘risks’ to the noosphere, and saw that even with the unconscious ‘tide’ that Pinker cites, there’s no guarantee that it will ultimately prevail over the ‘risks’ to the noosphere that we identified back in September.

At the basis of these ‘risks’ is the necessity for us to choose to continue to power this tide.  We saw that it is possible for humans to simply allow fear, pessimism and disbelief to weaken their will to continue.

Pinker notes, for example, that although the rate of suicide is declining everywhere across the world, it is increasing in the United States.  Increased welfare, it would seem, is no bulwark against despair.  This, of course, is the ultimate duality:  Faith in human progress seems to be declining in the first society to provide an instantiation of the progress itself.

We have looked at examples of how evolution is proceeding through contemporary secular events, as prolifically documented by Norberg and Pinker, but as many of their critics observe, they spend little time addressing the downside, the ‘evolutionary risks’ of these examples.  While this does not diminish the reality of the progress that they describe, neither does it address the risks.

Teilhard believed that religion, properly unfettered from its medieval philosophical shackles, its overdependence on hierarchy, and its antipathy towards science, is well suited to address these ‘downsides’.

We noted last week that Teilhard saw the need for religion, if it is to indeed rise to its potential as a tool for dealing with these ‘noospheric risks’, to enter a new phase of contribution to this process:

“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.”

We have taken a look at a key facet of religion,  that of ‘morality,’ to understand how this concept can be reinterpreted in terms of building blocks for continued human evolution.  How can religion itself be seen in this same way?  Teilhard’s answer to this question was to see that there is a way for religion and science to overcome the traditional religion-science duality:

“Religion and science are the two conjugated faces of phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge- the only one that can embrace the past and future of evolution so as to contemplate, measure and fulfil them.”

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at science and religion as ‘tools’ for managing the noosphere, particularly in managing the human-initiated risks to it, but recognizing that traditionally, they have been understood as opposites in a long-standing duality.

Next week will look a little deeper at how Teilhard understood the potential confluence between these two powerful modes of thinking, and how they could be brought into a fully and integrated human response to the challenges of evolution.