Tag Archives: Teilhard de Chardin

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.

February 2 – – Relating to God, Part 7: Loving God, Part 2 

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  Today’s Post

Last week we addressed how Teilhard saw love as the latest energy to become effective in the long list of energies that have powered evolution: the strong and weak atomic forces, gravity as a force which changes simple atoms into complex atoms, atoms into molecules (with chemical forces), and natural selection effecting more and more complex aggregations of cells.  He saw evolution as eventually forging an entity, aware of its awareness, which could now unite with other entities to effect its own maturation, and through it the maturation of society.  In summary, an entity emerged which was now susceptible to the energy of love.

The Action of Love

Teilhard addresses how this new energy plays out in human relationships.  (This was addressed in more detail in the May, 2015 Posts, http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=201505.)

In a nutshell, he saw that our personal evolution, our personal growth, is the same as our continued ‘complexification’.  Teilhard sees our complexification as occurring in two basic steps, repeated over and over, as we ‘become persons’.

He refers to the first step as ‘ex-centration’, in which we become more aware of our environment, and of other persons, and begin to lose the self-centeredness that framed our infancy.  As we become more adept at this, we become more open to others, and are able to allow our relationships to mature.  (See http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?p=305 to see how Carl Rogers articulates our maturation)  As these relationships develop, we become aware of the regard which others hold for us, which prompts us to see ourselves more clearly, less subjectively.  This results in the second step of ‘centeredness’, in which we become more ‘the person that we are’, and less ‘the person that we thought we were’.  And as we saw with the clinical observations of Dr. Rogers, the more authentic and less centered person that we become, in addition to being more capable of self-management, the more we are able to engage in deep, personal relationships.  Thus the cycle continues in a spiral fashion, leading us always towards deeper maturity.

This spiral of ex-centration and centration has another effect as well.  Even as we are changed in a love relationship, this same evolving union changes those who we love even as it is changing us.  Each cycle has the potential of raising the ‘abundance of life’ (articulated by Dr. Rogers) of the two individuals involved.

Thus love is indeed a powerful force for our continued evolution:  As we grow, we become more able to love and thus more complete as persons.  As in the case of every step of evolution from the big bang to the present, we as entities unite to effect an entity which is more capable of uniting and thus becomes more ‘complexified’.

Loving God

So how does this approach to human love and evolution lead to a relationship with this universal force which is active in us?  How can we ‘love’ the ground of being?

In the past few weeks we have been exploring how our recognition of this agent of evolution is only the first step.  In order to flourish and grow, to evolve, we must learn not only to be aware of it but how to cooperate with it.  We must learn to trust it.

If we take Teilhard’s two-step process as basic to the operations of the energy of love, the answer is simple.  As Rogers points out, and nearly all religions teach, all personal growth requires a loss of ego.  It is always necessary for us to understand what beliefs, practices, and fears are part of the scaffolding, the shell, that we have erected on ourselves to protect us.  The act of trusting that we can survive the disassembly of this scaffolding requires our belief that the person who will emerge will not need them.

This inner trust is not something that another person can give us, it can only be accepted, and then only if we can acknowledge that it is innate, granted to us as our birthright, unearned and inextinguishable.  This inner realization is our connection with ourselves.  It can only be described as our love for ourselves, and hence is a love for the source of ourselves.  Such love isn’t necessarily an emotional state, but more the recognition, the confident belief that the energy of the universe flows through us, trustworthy and ever-present.  It is the energy of the universe made manifest in human life.

To love God is to love ourselves, not in the vernacular of western culture as a superficial emotional or sentimental state, but to recognize, value and eventually learn to trust the principle of life as it is allowed to change our lives.

The Next Post

Now that we have seen how God can be understood, and loved, as the sum total of all the forces of the universe including that which effects beings conscious of their consciousness, we can go on to take a look at how such an understanding of God can be used to reinterpret the most basic precepts of Western religion.  Next week we will sum up how we got to such a ‘Secular Side of God’ that would be the basis of this inquiry.

January 19 – Relating to God, Part 7: Loving God, Part 1

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Today’s Post

We have spent the past few weeks following Teilhard’s use of meditation to the finding of God.  We have followed this thread as it appears in the science of Psychology, noting the evolution of Psychology as ‘assisted secular meditation’, and saw how it can lead us to an understanding of the person that Kierkegaard believed “to be that self that one truly is”.

This week we will address how relating to this universal ‘principle of being’ that manifests itself in us can be seen as ‘Love”.  Now that we have identified how God, the principle of existence, can be understood as a principle of life within us, we can explore what it can mean to say that such a ground of being can be ‘loved’.

A Relook at Love

(The subject of Love and evolution is addressed in more detail in the blog “The Phenomenon of Love” (http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?page_id=57) which addressed the concept of love from Teilhard’s evolutionary standpoint.)

In today’s culture, it would seem that few things are less obvious and more ubiquitous than love.  Our culture is rife with references to it: it is used to sell things, explain behavior, understood as a prompt to procreation, as fodder for poems and music, as themes to movies and books, as an emotional, sentimental feeling.  Articulated thusly, it seems to offer a poor mechanism for connecting to the ‘ground of being’ that is active at the basis of our lives.

Even our western religion has problems with it.  For many Christians, the emotional aspect of Love far outweighs the ontological aspect: Love is more a sentimental ‘feeling good’ about God and Jesus than the facet of the universal energy which effects our growth as it brings us together.

Teilhard notes that the systematic and ever repeating act of evolution is the increasing of complexity which results from simple union.  Over and over in evolution, from the big bang to the human person, the same phenomenon can be seen:

Two entities of like complexity unite, and the product is an entity of higher complexity and greater potential for union. 

Science observes this phenomenon as active in the evolution of simple matter from the first bosons to the very complex molecules which underpin life.  Natural Selection observes the continuation of this rise of complexity, at a much higher rate, in the evolution from simple cells to the neurons which underpin the human characteristic which we call ‘consciousness’.  Without such a fundamental principle of existence, evolution as we know it would not be possible.  Without it, the universe would still be a ball of unorganized energy.

Love As The Energy Of Evolution In The Human

As we have mentioned several times in this blog, we can hardly expect such a powerful and inexorable upwelling of complexity to stop with the human person: this agent of evolution is just as active in humans today as it has been throughout the history of the universe.  The question remains: how can we see it as active in our lives?

Teilhard observes that evolution proceeds via the ‘activation of energy’.  The unions of evolution that raise the level of complexity do not occur in isolation: they are influenced and effected by the wash of energy which pervades the universe.  Atoms are unified by the strong and weak atomic forces, complex atoms by the fusion forced by gravity, atoms into molecules under the play of chemical forces.

These energies are manifold, and different types of energy come into play at different rungs of complexity.  For example, gravity was unable to have an effect on evolution until particles acquired mass.   The forces of chemistry were mute until the arrival of molecules.  And the forces of love could not play their part until the entities of evolution became conscious.  Love, therefore is the energy which effects our own ‘complexification”.

Seen through Teilhard’s eyes, the increasing complexity in living things, resulting as it does in the phenomenon of consciousness, results in entities subject to the play of energies so subtle as to be immeasurable yet so powerful as to power the ascent of complexity which is ‘consciousness aware of itself’.

The Next Post

Teilhard addresses how this concept of love is ‘the energy which unites persons in such a way as to continue the rise of complexity in evolution’.   Next week we will take a look at how he sees it at work in our lives, and how we can see cooperation with this energy as ‘loving God’.

January 5, 2017 – Relating to God, Part 6- Freud, Teilhard and Rogers in the Search for the ‘Secular Side of God’

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Today’s Post

In the last two weeks we followed Carl Rogers as he went into some detail in describing his observations of the process of finding the kernel of person-ness within us.  He also describes what emerges when we begin to trust and cooperate with this fundamental energy which Teilhard identifies as the ‘thread of evolution’ as it rises in us.  This week we will relook look at the three approaches we have addressed in the past few weeks, those of Freud, Teilhard and Rogers as they relate to our search for a ‘Secular Side of God’.

From Freud: the Dark Side

Even the most casual study of human history reveals the ‘dark side’ of humanity.  All of the great books of ancient religions recognize it and warn against it.

Sigmund Freud was the first to systematically apply the emerging practices of science to study of the human person, and as we saw a few weeks ago, assembled a magnificent edifice of concepts, terminology and theory which was applicable to diagnosis and treatment of human emotional problems.  Unfortunately, as we also saw, his premise of the dangerous nature of the basic human, combined with his disdain of organized religion, colored this remarkable undertaking with a deep-seated pessimism that was to permeate his ‘school’ of psychology.

Freud’s view of human ontology was surely influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, in which the human evolved from a non-human (animal) ancestor.  He held that this evolution explained the source of our ‘dark’ side, and hence had to be overcome if we were to rid ourselves of our ‘psychoses’.

While Freud (and Darwin) are correct about these roots and how they affect us, they don’t take into account another perspective on such evolution.  Teilhard remarked on the ‘transitional’ states of evolution, such as the formation of atoms from subatomic particles, cells from highly complex molecules, and self-aware persons from conscious animals.  He points out that the first of each of these ‘new’ entities, in every case, initially are virtually indistinguishable from their predecessor.  He refers to the earliest, prokaryotic (non-nucleus) cells as emerging ‘dripping in molecularity’.  If it were possible to see them in a population of highly complex, non-living molecules (such as viruses), it would be very difficult to distinguish them.  In contrast, at the evolutionary level of, say, neurological cells, the uniqueness of living tissue has become obviously different from complex molecules.

He sees the same thing happening with the human.  Were it possible to see the first homo sapiens in a jungle filled with pre-humans, how would we tell them apart?  Today there is no problem with such observation.

We humans have indeed emerged as animals with more brains, but that makes all the difference.  The pre-humans, with their reptilian and limbic brains, are at the mercy of their stimuli.  The reptiles fight or fly, breathe, eat and procreate according to their basic brain stimuli.  Animals add new powers of nurturing offspring, clannish connections and adaption to environment changes.  These new behaviors, due to the new limbic brain are in addition to the stimuli from their reptilian brains, and endow them with more evolutionary fitness.

Even though we humans have a third layer to our brains, the instinctual stimuli of the lower brains is still active, but the neo-cortex provides the capability of modulating them.  I have suggested that the key manifestation of evolution in the human person can be found in the evolving skill of the neo-cortex in modulating the instinctual stimuli of the lower brains.

So, even though Freud’s recognition of the Dark Side is correct, his assumption that the kernel of the person is dangerous does not take into account that it is through engagement with this kernel that the human evolves from emotional immaturity toward personal wholeness.  It’s not that the child’s essence is negative, but that his growth towards maturity is incomplete.

From Rogers: Toward the Light

As we have seen, Carl Rogers takes a view of our personal evolution that is quite different from Freud.  He assumes that each human person comes into the world with a quantum of potency, and that instead of being broken, he is incomplete and capable of personal evolution –growth– towards increased being.

It should be noted that Rogers’ articulation of the emerging characteristics of a maturing person are purely secular.  His methods are those of science: observe, theorize, and test.  They require no adherence to religious belief (and as we saw in the November 24 post above, are often antithetical to some), but rather a basic, fundamental belief in the trustworthy nature of the basic self, and a willingness to cooperate with it.

While there might not be a universally accepted list of the characteristics of human happiness or articulation of human potential, Rogers’ list is not only an excellent beginning but universally applicable.

Combined with the unique (and universal) nature of Rogers’ therapeutic relationship, concepts such as belief, faith and love take on a new, secular, meaning.

Rogers’ approach offers a structure for a true, secular, employment of secular meditation as a means to self-discovery.

From Teilhard: The Light Itself

As we have frequently discussed in this blog, Teilhard starts from the ‘other end’, describing how God is manifest in the very basic and totality of forces which power the evolution of the universe itself.  He describes how these forces combine to effect all that we can see, and not only the human as a species but individual human persons as well.  In his view (and Blondel’s and others), it is impossible to distinguish where God leaves off and where we begin since each act of our ‘becoming’ requires recognition and cooperation with this force as it rises in us.

Freud, Rogers and Teilhard in a Nutshell

Freud applies science to atheism, “It is Id, be very afraid”

Rogers applies experience to science, “It is me, I am trustworthy”

Tielhard applies science to religion. “It is I, be not afraid”

As Teilhard affirms, finding ourselves is finding the universal thread of evolution that rises in us.  As Rogers discovers, the legacy that we receive as human persons can be trusted to power our growth towards more complete being.  God can not only be found, He can be embraced.

The Next 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,

to which we can come in contact

by searching for the kernel of ourselves

using the emerging insights of science

the next post will now go on to the final stage of Relating to God: the secular side of Loving God.