Tag Archives: Teilhard de Chardin

June 23 – So, Who and What Was Jesus? – Part 2

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Today’s Post

In last week’s post, we began to move from the scriptural depictions of Jesus to seeing him in the light of the insights of Teilhard.  We saw how the scriptural treatment of Jesus shows a distinct evolution, as he is shown first as a very human teacher of wisdom, then as ‘the Christ’, who was ‘exalted by God’ due to his sacrificial act, and finally to Jesus, the Cosmic Christ, who was so integrally a part of God that he had coexisted with him through eternity.

John’s Bold Step

As we have seen, John sees Jesus in a way that is quite different from Paul and the authors of the synoptic gospels.  While Jesus’s teachings certainly address how it is that we should behave, and Paul goes on to describe such proper behavior, John sees Jesus’ teachings as addressing how we should be if we would be whole.  This moves from a prescription for salvation to one for being fully human.   John then goes on to explore God from an ‘ontological’ perspective.

The idea of ‘The word made flesh’ is much more than a ‘metaphor’, and goes well beyond seeing God using Jesus to communicate to us what we must do to get to heaven.     In his innovative insight, John is showing us how God manifests himself in human form to show us how we should be if we would be whole.   By insisting that ‘God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God and God in them’, John is not saying that we should love God because he loves us, or as a prerequisite for salvation.  Effectively, John is saying that when we love we are cooperating with the principle of life that flows through us when we love, and thus are borne onward to a more complete state of personhood.

John does not tell us to love God, he tells us that we must ‘abide in love’, essentially to immerse ourselves in the fundamental energy of the universe, which is now seen as love itself.  This requires openness, trust, and effectively cooperation with the basic energy of the universe that even an atheist such as Richard Dawkins can acknowledge, “raises the world to an increasing level of complexity”.

In Teilhard’s words

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

   So in just a handful of years, a single lifetime, we see the Christian understanding of Jesus evolving from a teacher whose morality seemed grounded in preparation for ‘the coming’, to one who offers a sacrifice to an angry, judgmental God who has withheld his love to humans due to an ancient sin, to one rewarded (“exalted”) with divinity for his sacrifice, to one whose ‘divinity’, whose ‘oneness with God’ was in place before the creation of the universe.   At the same time, we see an evolution of the understanding of God as well, from a God whose primary characteristic was ‘judgment’ to one whose very nature was ‘Love’.

So, Who and What Was Jesus?

So, how do we reinterpret the ‘religious’ understanding of Jesus into one which fits into our ‘secular’ perspective?  The heart of evolution finally pulled from the shadows and revealed ‘in full light’, is less a group of metaphors than a recipe for human evolution.

As Teilhard points out, the long sweep of evolution from the big bang to the present time, from pure energy to entities become aware of their awareness, is punctuated by ‘changes of state’.  In order for complexity to increase, evolution must constantly find new ‘modes of being’ in which extraordinary changes in form and function occur.

This can be clearly seen in each such critical point of evolution:

– energy to matter

– simple granularities (bosons, quarks, electrons) to atoms

– atoms to molecules

– molecules to cells

–  cells to neurons

– neurons to awareness

– awareness to consciousness

– consciousness to awareness of consciousness

To this progression we can now add another critical point: from awareness of consiousness to evolution become aware of itself.  In Jesus, through the insights of John, we see the beginning of the awareness that our personal growth is the continuation of the agent of being that powers all evolution, from the big bang onwards.  And as John points out, the energy which powers this growth can now be understood as love.  John pulls the heart of evolution from the shadows and reveals it ‘in full light’.  In John, God, Jesus, personal fulfillment and love are less a group of metaphors than a recipe for human evolution.

We have seen in several posts how the fundamental nature of love strongly differs from the romantic or sentimental emotional attraction so often celebrated in our culture.  Teilhard calls it for what it is: the current manifestation of the universal attraction between entities that causes them to grow.  And in Jesus, as chronicled by John, we can see the first stirrings of such an understanding of this basic principle.

God, to John, is not a ‘creator’, ‘out there’, over and against mankind, but the universal set of agents which, as Dawkins observes, “raises the world to an increasing level of complexity”.

So, just as we offered a reinterpretation of God from a ‘divine person who rewards and punishes’ to the cohesive agent which underlies evolution as it progresses from pure energy to the human person, we can reinterpret Jesus from the holy person, even divine person who shows us how we should love God and each other in order to merit salvation, to the personal manifestation of the fundamental energy by which we come to be and grow as a result of this thread of evolution which rises in us.

Indeed, even as Jesus is ‘evolution become aware of itself’, he also represents the point in human history where the universal power of love as the creative force which powers our continued evolution is first recognized as such.

The Next Post

This week we took a look at a way that the person of Jesus can be reinterpreted from traditional understanding to the secular understanding of him as being the critical point in history in which evolution can seen to become ‘evolution become aware of itself’.  Next week we will look at how this secular approach can be seen to offer insights into the human condition and how evolution can proceed through both the human person and society at large.

June 13 – So, Who and What Was Jesus? – Part 1

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Today’s Post

In the last two posts we saw how the understanding of Jesus, as depicted by Paul, the synoptic gospels and John, represents an evolution of the understanding of Jesus.  Jesus, the teacher of wisdom becomes Jesus, the Christ, who was ‘exalted by God’ due to his sacrificial act, and finally to Jesus, the Christ, who was so integrally a part of God that he had coexisted with him through eternity.   As we will see, this evolution continues further as Christianity gets to development of God as ‘triune’: the trinity.

Today we will begin to put these insights on Jesus into the perspective of our search for the secular God.

The Second Dimension of Duality

As we have seen, the concept of ‘the Christ’ evolves in the New Testament.  The synoptic gospels depict Jesus as a teacher who believed that he was living in the end of times, and insisted on preparation by way of moral behavior.  Paul, while not denying this humanistic portrait of Jesus, expanded on his teachings (for example, in his treatise on Love), and goes on to see him tasked with the sacrifice required for reconciliation of sinful man with divine God.  The claim to divinity, in Paul’s mind, comes about as God’s ‘exaltation’ of Jesus as a result of this task.  Jesus is born a human, but raised to a divine level by God because of his sacrifice.

John goes one step further, as he identifies Jesus as part of the fundamental basis by which creation was effected.  Jesus, as ‘the Christ’, had always existed, along with God, and collaborated with God in the act of creation.

On the surface, these two facets of Jesus, the human and the divine, appear as just another type of duality, along with body/soul, this life/the next, good/evil, in which two opposing and orthogonal concepts are juxtaposed and contrasted.  In the ‘atonement’ theory, for example, Jesus is placed into history to re-establish the connection between God and his creation that was intended, but failed due to Adam’s ‘original sin’.  In argument against the ‘theory of atonement’, Richard Rohr notes:

”The ‘substitutionary atonement theory’ of salvation treats Christ as a mere Plan B. In this attempt at an explanation for the Incarnation, God did not really enter the scene until God saw that we had screwed up.”

   In the “cosmic Christ” theory of John, Jesus, as the Christ, is co-substantial with God, and therefore had always existed as part of the creation process.

These two theories are orthogonal in that the first posits a somewhat ‘deistic’ God whose creation process ends with the appearance of man, and man is a finished product free to turn against him.  In the second, the ‘cosmic Christ’ is an agent essential to the rising of man’s understanding of God, becoming manifest in human history as the recognition of God’s continuing presence in human existence.

Church history describes many disagreements among leaders of the early church on how Jesus could be man and God at the same time, with many different ‘heresies’ debated.  Was Jesus ‘only’ human, ‘only God’ and appearing in human form, or both at the same time?  The final solution, that Jesus was indeed God and man, was presented as a ‘mystery’ to be believed, not to be understood.  Essentially, although it could not be explained, it became an article of faith, requiring a sort of ‘cognitive dissonance’, with the appearance of yet another duality.

We have seen how many such dualities can be resolved through application of our secular principles of reinterpretation, and this one is no exception.  As we have seen, many of the concepts associated with God, such as those addressed in earlier posts, can fall into coherence, and the dualities fall away, by understanding God as the ‘ground of being’, active in both the principles of being (physics) and the principles of becoming (evolution via the ‘axis of evolution’).  In the same way we should be able to re-look at the person of Jesus.

Making Sense of Jesuswere

Thomas Jefferson was one of the first thinkers to attempt such a relook.  Jefferson understood that the teachings of Jesus, stripped of their supernatural and miraculous content, had much to offer the construction of a secular set of laws to underpin a new nation.  In doing this, Jefferson was one of many who attempted to ‘articulate the noosphere’.

As an eighteenth century Deist, of course, Jefferson’s ideas of God were limited to ‘source’ and without recourse to the nineteenth century findings of Physics and the emerging science of natural selection.  Without these insights, he could not conceive of this ‘source’ continuing as an active agent to power the increasing complexity which would eventually manifest itself in the human person.

With the insights of Teilhard in hand, however, we can understand God as not only the ‘source’ but the ‘agent’ of a universe which comes to be over long periods of time.  This agent powers evolution, first through the complexification of matter, then through the appearance of ever more complex living entities, and eventually to the appearance of conscious entities who are aware of their consciousness.

As history has showed, it’s not enough to be aware of our awareness, we must also seek to understand it well enough to cooperate with whatever it is that powers our being to be able to move our evolution forward.  To be able to continue to move forward, we must both understand the ‘laws of the noosphere’ and learn to cooperate with them.

And this is where Jesus comes in.

The Next Post

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

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

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Today’s Post

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

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

The Second Perspective: John

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cosmic Christ

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

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

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

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

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

John, Love, God and Jesus

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

May 11 – Jesus: Part 1- Paul and the Synoptic Gospels

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Today’s Post

In recent posts we have addressed traditional Western concepts of God, and reinterpreted them to illustrate how the concept of a God can be understood from a secular perspective.  We have seen that this reinterpretation does not necessarily contradict the underlying kernels that lie at the basis of these traditional expressions of belief.  In fact, as we have seen in the previous posts on ‘God’, these secular reinterpretations seem to resolve many of the dualities that are embedded in the traditional statements.

We have also looked at the ‘Perennial Tradition’, which sees all religious expression as inclusive of such basic fundamental insights.

This week, we’ll begin to focus our inquiry into the cornerstone of Western theology: Jesus, the basis of Christianity.

The Duality of Christianity

We have addressed many of the manifestations of ‘duality’ that appear in Western theology, as found in Judaism, Christianity and the Greek influences on the continuing evolution of Christianity.  Dualistic concepts such as body/soul, this life/the next, sacred/profane, divine/human, good/evil and many others can be found in much of the ‘holy scripture’ which underlies Western religious thinking.

Such appearances of duality can be found in both the scriptural references to Jesus (the ‘new’ testament) and in the theological development which has continued to unfold as Christianity assimilated Greek thought and became established as an agent for stability in Western society.

These threads of duality have persisted during the evolution of the West, and can be seen as late as the twentieth century in the appearance and inevitable branching of the new science of psychology.  These traces were discussed in the post on the history of psychology (http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=201611) which pointed out how Freud’s negative theories of ‘the self’ were heavily influenced by the European Protestant emphasis on ‘man’s sinful nature’,  while mid-twentieth century psychology leaned towards a more positive basis.

These contradictions can be seen today in the ongoing tension between protestant fundamentalism and mainstream liturgical expressions of Christianity, as well as the wide divide between the extremes of liberal and conservative politics.

And, as we shall see, another dimension of duality also rose as Christianity began to develop a ‘Christology’, a philosophical approach to understanding Jesus in a universal context, and how this new dimension gave rise to the idea of a “Trinity”.

What Do We Know Of Jesus and How Do We Know It?

The actual dates of the life of Jesus are not certain, and the first person to write about him seems to be Paul, some years after Jesus’ death.  All the other authors of the ‘New Testament’ seem to have come later, so it seems that no one who wrote of Jesus actually knew him but depended on stories which were prevalent in the many new churches which sprung up after his death.  We don’t seem to know much about these different churches other than that they represented a very diverse collective memory of Jesus.  Much of this diversity reflected the duality which was present in the legacy Jewish scripture, (known by Christians as ‘Old Testament’ and by the Jews as ‘The Torah’), but many new dualisms emerged with the new thinking.

The ‘stories of Jesus’ that glued these early communities together all reflected the dualism of their Jewish history, such as:

–          Was God responsible for evil or was the source of evil elsewhere?

–          Was God’s creation ‘good’ or ‘evil’?

–          Was God a ‘loving father’ or a ‘vengeful judge’?

–          Was scripture “God’s Word”, and hence to be followed literally, or a perspective to be refined by the teachings of Jesus?

Then there were the new dualisms:

–          Was Jesus God?  Man?  God and man?

–          What, specifically, was his relation to God?

–          Was he ‘killed by God’ to atone for human sins?

The writings of Paul clearly show the diversity of belief that had appeared in the few years between Jesus’s death and Paul’s writing.  He consistently critiques beliefs found in the new churches, and his New Testament ‘letters’ are lists of instructions for ‘correct’ interpretations.

The First Perspective: The Synoptic Gospels

The first three Gospels, known as the synoptic gospels, by Mark, then Matthew and Luke, seem to have been written some ten years after Paul.  They depict Jesus as a Jewish man who was not considered to be more than a man during his lifetime, who offered often unpopular interpretations of the law of Moses (the Torah), ended up on the wrong side of the law, was condemned for political treason against Rome, was tortured and put to death by crucifixion, rose from the dead and ascended into heaven.

The synoptic gospels often depict Jesus as a ‘millennialist’, who predicted that God would soon intervene in human history and establish a kingdom on Earth, which would be led by the ‘Son of Man’.

Bart Ehrman notes that the ‘miraculous’ depictions of the synoptic gospels, such as the virgin birth, healing the sick and resurrection, are not uncommon in the many myths of the ancient world, and appear in many stories of other ‘God Men’ born to virgins who ascended to heaven.  He goes as far as to suggest that these events in the synoptic gospels were proclaimed by the post-Jesus church to overcome the shame of the nature of Jesus’ execution as a common criminal, and to appeal to those who followed the ancient myths.

The Next Post

The writings of Paul and the authors of the synoptic Gospels offer a picture of Jesus which emerged shortly after his death, but as we will see next week, many years later a radically different picture of Jesus was to appear.  Next week, we will take a look at this new picture.

April 27 – At The Root Of Everything, Part 2

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Today’s Post

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

From Articulating the Noosphere to Regulating Human Behavior

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

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

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

o   Each person exists with worth apart from their social position

o   Everyone deserves equal status under secular law

o   Religious belief cannot be compelled

o   Individual conscience must be respected

 

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

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

The Perennial Philosophy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s the Alternative?

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

“At this point, then, where men’s affairs reach the scale of potential disruption of the global ecosystem, he invents precisely those conceptual and physical technologies that may enable him to deal with the magnitude of a complex planetary society.”

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

April 17 – At The Root Of Everything, Part 1

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Today’s Post

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

What’s At The Bottom of It All?

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

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

The Common Threads of Religion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

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Today’s Post

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

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

Omniscience

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

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

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

Chance and Necessity

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

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

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

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

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

Transcendence and Immanence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

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

Today’s Post

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

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

   without recourse to

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

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

God as the Ground of Being

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

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Apologies

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

Today’s Post

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

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

Teilhard’s Evolutionary Insight

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

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

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

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

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

From Evolutionary Insight to Finding God

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

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

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

Finding God Through Finding Ourselves: Psychology as Secular Meditation

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

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

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

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

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

Summing Up ‘Connecting to God’

Adding to our steps from the January 5 post:

-After identifying God as an agent of evolution,

by which things increase in complexity over time,

through which the process of evolution is possible,

from the big bang to the human,

as products of evolution: even in our lives,

with which we can come in contact

by searching for the kernel of ourselves

using the emerging insights of science

understanding love as the energy which unites and completes us

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

but loving  God

The Next Post

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

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

   without recourse to

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

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

March 16 – So, With All This, Who or What is God? – Part 2

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Today’s Post

Last week we began to look at how God can be understood in our ‘secular’ approach, which finds God as the critical agent in the unfolding of the universe.  This week we will address some of the traditional characteristics ascribed to God as Christianity unfolded under the influence of Greek philosophy.

These characteristics, of course, include examples of the ‘dualism’ which was discussed last week.  As Oliver Sacks observes, they don’t exist in Jewish thinking, which doesn’t speculate on the nature of God but rather treats God as present in the affairs of men.  This understanding is one of the clearest threads in the ‘Old Testament’, but represents one of the many dualities (God ‘as he is in himself’ vs ‘God as he is to us’) that arose as Christian theology evolved under the shadow of Greek thinking.  This example of duality was addressed in “The Evolution of Religion, Part 7, The issue of Concepts” (http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=20151).  Sacks sees such ‘other-worldliness’ as a factor in the failure to experience God in the here and now, and hence contributing to an increasing sense of irrelevance of religious teaching.  That said, let’s move on to looking at them in the light of the reinterpretation principles which we have developed.

Immutability and Divinity   

The traditional Christian understanding is that God is “Being itself, timeless, immutable, incorporeal”.   Augustine goes on to interpret the statement ontologically, seeing God as “that which does not and cannot change”.  Aquinas, in his metaphysics, sees God as “true being, that is eternal, immutable, simple, self-sufficient and the cause and principal of every creature”.  These teachings, although not in themselves antithetical to our concept, have nonetheless led to the understanding of God as ‘supernatural’ in contrast to reality being merely ‘natural’.

Sacks see these interpretations as the “God of Aristotle, not Abraham and the prophets”.  The Greek translation of God’s self-identification to Moses is, “I am who am”.

The Jewish translation of God’s identification to Moses is, “I will be where or how I will be”, adding a ‘future tense’ omitted in the Greek translation.

As Sacks points out, the concept of the ‘purely spiritual’ does not exist in Judiasm, which rarely speculates on the nature of God.  This teaching surfaces another dichotomy which crept into Christianity with the Greek perspective: that of form vs matter, and body vs soul.

Our secular point of view goes a little further, and is more in line with the essential thinking of Augustine and Aquinas.  As God can be found in the sum total of forces that, as Dawkins claims, “..eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence”, God is not only not supernatural, as the ‘ground of being’, is supremely natural and therefore so intimately involved in evolving reality as to be virtually inseparable from it.

Omnipotentiality

This traditional teaching asserts that God is ‘all-powerful’, and can do anything that he desires.  It forms the basis for the conundrum:  if God can do anything he desires, and if he is ‘good’, he should be able to correct all the bad things that are so obvious in reality.  This points to all the suffering that can be seen, both human-caused and ‘acts of nature’ such as droughts, sickness and genetic evils.  It asserts that the only conclusion possible is that either God causes evil (in which case he is not ‘good’) or that he is powerless to stop it (in which case he is not ‘all-powerful).

Both Sacks and scriptural scholar Bart Ehrman (‘God’s Problem’) acknowledge that traditional Christianity does not offer a solution to this dichotomy.  In the story of Job, for example, all the traditional treatments of evil are addressed, but in the end none are held up as ‘the answer’.

Sacks goes on to address further the contradiction in the assertion of ‘God’s power’.  If we assume that God does not create evil, then we must assume that it comes from somewhere (or someone) else.  Assuming a second source, of course, moves belief from monotheism to polytheism.  Sacks points out that both threads of thought can be found in scripture, and that a tendency toward seeing an independent source for evil is one of the bases for dualism.  He sees the danger of such a dualism very strong in human history, with our ever-present tendency to demonize our opponents, which so often has led to victimization in the name of moral superiority.  The Nazi “Final Solution” is one of the most striking examples of this thinking, and such trends are troublingly present in contemporary American politics.

Our secular approach, which sees the action of God in the thread of increasing complexity, approaches the issue of power quite differently.  As God is not perceived as a ‘person’, much less an incredibly powerful potentate, God’s ‘power’ lies in the inexorable lifting of the universe to Dawkins’ “present complex existence”.  In order to become what it is possible for us to become, it is necessary for us to recognize and learn to cooperate with this very real universal force that lies at our core.

The Next Post

Next week we will continue our look at traditional descriptions of God, by addressing Omniscience, Chance, Transcendence and Immanence.