Overcoming the barriers to a partnership between science and religion

Today’s Post

Last week we once again noted the evolutionary progress that can be seen in the secular world, effecting a startling increase in human welfare over the past hundred fifty years. We also noted that the continuation of this trend is not inevitable. It is possible for ‘noospheric risks’ to undermine the continuation of human evolution. As Teilhard asserts, however, the potential of science and religion, properly focused, conjoined and applied, can emerge in the form of tools which will help us make our way. He sees this potential in eight insights.

This week we will look at four of his assertions to understand the potential for religion’s confluence with science.

The Evolutionary Potential of Religion

Teilhard notes that Christianity, of all the world’s religions, in its fundamental teachings is well placed for such a partnership with science to overcome ‘noospheric risks’.

His first observation is that Christianity differs from other religious perspectives in its primacy of the person:

“.. the (Christian) doctrine of the personal universe … is already virtually realized and lived within Christianity.”

Like Teilhard, Jefferson recognized this personalistic focus of Christianity, and saw it as necessary for the success of a democratic form of government. Teilhard recognized the value of attaching primacy to the concept of the person not only in human affairs, but as necessary for understanding the entire evolution of the universe. Teilhard first identifies complexity as the key metric of universal evolution, then goes on to trace how this complexity eventually manifests itself as person-ness in evolution’s most recent stages on this planet.

Second, he notes how this primacy of person is captured in the Christian concept of ‘incarnation’, which can be seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ as an impetus for the development of ‘the person’ that is the cornerstone to continued human evolution:

” The degree to which Christianity teaches and offers a prospect of universal transformation can never be sufficiently stressed. By the Incarnation God descended into nature to ‘super-animate’ it and lead it back to Him: this is the substance of the Christian dogma.”

Here Teilhard’s concept of God as the fundamental agent of the rise of complexity that powers universal evolution expands and quantifies John’s core Christian insight that “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”. The Christian claim that the universal agent of evolution’s increasing complexity is somehow present in each of its products is unique among all the world’s religions. It clearly reflects the belief that whatever is happening in our lives as we grow is powered by a universal agency for such growth.

Third, Teilhard also takes note of how the core elements of Christian theology are not only compatible with science’s understanding of the ‘natural’ world, but they can also be enhanced by it. Teilhard, like Blondel before him, understood how the scientific concept of evolution offered a more complete understanding of religion’s ancient teachings:

“… we are apparently beginning to perceive that a universe of evolutionary structure… might well be…the most favorable setting in which to develop a noble and homogenous representation of the Incarnation.”

“… does not (Christianity) find its most appropriate climate in the broad and mounting prospect of a universe drawn towards the spirit? What could serve as a better background and base for the descending illuminations of a Christogenisis than an ascending anthropogenesis?”

“Drawn towards the spirit” of course invokes Teilhard’s reinterpretation of ‘spirit’ as the agent of ‘increased complexity’. Through his ‘lens’, Christogenisis can be seen as the personal aspect of this increased complexity. With this observation, Teilhard ‘closes the loop’ between a science which struggles to understand the fundamental force of evolution by which the intensity of its complexity is increased (“drawn towards the spirit’) and a religion loosed from its Medieval moorings of superstition, hierarchy and a spirituality which has become detached from the noosphere.

In his fourth insight, Teilhard addresses science with his belief that to live the noosphere we must understand it.

“Man is… an object of unique value to science for two reasons.

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

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

For these two reasons, to decipher man is essentially to try to find out how the world was made and how it ought to go on making itself. The science of man is the practical and theoretical science of hominisation. “

The Next Post

This week we saw our four of Teilhard’s insights illustrate how his ‘lens of evolution’ can be used to explore the potential for a partnership between science and religion.

Next week we will look at four more of Teilhard’s insights to see how he understood the potential confluence between these two powerful modes of thinking, and how they could be brought into a fully and integrated human response to the challenges of evolution.

How can religion’s ‘morality’ be reinterpreted as a set of tools to help us move forward?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw two examples from Teilhard’s essay, “The Phenomenon of Spirituality”, in which he saw the need for the continuing evolution of religion’s concept of morality if it is to emerge as an ‘evolutionary tool’.

This week, we will see three more examples .

Rethinking Morality as a Tool for Human Evolution

The Morality of Balance (appropriate to a static universe) vs the Morality of Movement (appropriate to an evolving universe)

“The morality of balance is replaced by the morality of movement.

… (As an example) The morality of money based on exchange and fairness vs the goodness of riches only if they work for the benefit of the spirit.(advance human evolution)”

A secular example of such a shift in perspective can be seen in the examples of human evolution in human affairs today, as enumerated by Johan Norberg in his book, “Progress”. One of the facets that Norberg identifies is a distinct correlation between the rise of human welfare in developing countries and their increase of GNP. This is a concrete example of Teilhard’s insight into the potential of secular wealth to improve human welfare as a metric of human evolution. Norberg echoes Teilhard’s belief that ‘the morality of money’ can evolve from seeing donated money as a measure of morality (charity) to understanding the application of personal freedom and improved relationships as necessary for a society to increase its wealth (GNP) and as a result, increase the welfare of its citizens.

As a direct corollary of this insight, Teilhard reinforces his assertion that morality must evolve from proscription to prescription if it is to fulfill its potential in fostering our personal evolution towards more completeness (autonomy and personness). Effectively he sees the need to move

“Individual morality (from) preventing him from doing harm (to) working with the forces of growth to free his autonomy and personality (personness) to the uttermost.”

In Teilhard’s new insight, morality must now be recognized as a tool for increasing personal freedom and enhancing relationships, not as a hedge against evil to ensure our salvation.

Religion, Morality and Complexification

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

Here Teilhard is delving into the most fundamental role of religion. As technology certainly can be seen to improve human welfare, it has no expertise at improving the unique human characteristics of personal freedom and personal relationships which are necessary to insure the innovation and invention necessary for our continued evolution. He goes on to say,

“At the first stage, Christianity may well have seemed to exclude the humanitarian aspirations of the modern world. At the second stage its duty was to correct, assimilate and preserve them.”

The most appropriate role for religion Is as a tool for management of the noosphere. The deepest claim to authenticity for a religion is to be recognized as a tool for the evolutionary advancement of the human person, and through him the advancement of humanity.

Morality As A Basis For Dealing With The Noosphere

“So long as our conceptions of the universe remained static, the basis of duty remained extremely obscure. To account for this mysterious law (love) which weighs fundamentally on our liberty, man had recourse to all sorts of explanations, from that of an explicit command issued from outside to that of an irrational but categorical instinct.”

Here Teilhard is succinctly stating one of his basic tenets of the understanding of human evolution: Once put in an evolutionary context, all concepts which are pertinent to the continuation of human existence begin to present themselves as aspects of the single, unified and coherent thing that they truly are.

The Evolutionary Tool Set

In the same way that government must establish and safeguard the building blocks of society, such as Jefferson’s assertion of the person as the basis for society…

… in the same way that medicine must understand physiology to diagnose illness to be able to prescribe treatment…

… in the same way that technology must understand metal structure to build a bridge…

… religion must recognize its role as a tool for understanding the noosphere to be able to assist us in living life in such a way that we maximize our potential for being fully and authentically human.

The Next Post

In the past two weeks, we have looked at Teilhard’s insights into religion’s concept of morality to see how it can serve as a tool for continuing our evolution as humans.

Next week we will begin to look at how human history following “The Enlightenment” shows the potential for science and religion to begin to converge as ‘evolutionary tools’.

Religion is based on ‘morality’. How can Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help see it as a tool necessary to our evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we began a look at religion as a tool for managing the noosphere, particularly in dealing with the risks that arise with evolution of the human. We acknowledged the traditional ills that can be seen in various expressions of religion over its six or so thousand years of manifesting itself. We also opened the door to re-seeing it through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, as simply an attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’; the ‘right brained’ counterpart to the ‘left brained’ perspectives of science.

The question remains, of course: how can such an approach to religion be developed, weighted as it is with its historical attachment to such things as found in the radical and fundamentalist expressions of Islam in the Mideast, as well as the fundamentalism, excessive hierarchical structures and dogmatism seen in the West? Is there a way that the teachings that have led to such obvious ‘noospheric risks’ can be reinterpreted into teachings that can mitigate them?

This week we will begin to look at the roots of Western religion to begin rediscovery of principles which will move us forward.

Rethinking Morality

It was in this vein that Teilhard, along with other thinkers such as Maurice Blondel, began to look at the tenets and structure of religion, particularly Western religion, in terms of the new insights offered by science. Blondel was one of the first theologians to recognize that science’s discovery of both the depth of universal time and the nature of evolution provided an insight which could be applied not only to the universe but the human person as well. This new insight showed the universe as ‘dynamic’, as opposed to the medieval worldview which understood both as ‘static’. Teilhard substantially expanded this insight, understanding how this new thinking not only could bring a new, secular, empirical and more relevant meaning to religion’s ancient teachings, but that Christianity, as one of the first attempts to see religion and reason as sides of a single coin, was well suited to do so.

In his essay on “The {Phenomenon of Spirituality”, Teilhard offers five insights into the key religious concept of ‘morality’ which can not only increase the relevancy of religious teaching, but in doing so increase its value to science. Not only can religious teaching be better grounded by the findings of science, but in doing so can provide a much needed ‘ground of humanity’ to science.

This week we will address the first two.

The Evolutionary Basis for Morality

“If indeed, as we have assumed, the world culminates in a thinking reality, the organization of personal human energies represents the supreme stage (so far) of cosmic evolution on Earth; and morality is consequently nothing less than the higher development of mechanics and biology. The world is ultimately constructed by moral forces; and reciprocally, the function of morality is to construct the world.”

Here Teilhard asks us to recognize that what religion has been trying to accomplish, with its topsy-turvy, ‘noosphericly-risky’, ultimately very human efforts, has simply been to ‘make sense of things’ so that we can relate to them more effectively. In this attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’, religion has used the slowly accumulated noosphere provided by intuition, metaphors, and dreams, but impeded by egos, fears, and ambitions.

He is unconcerned by the fact that we’re already some two hundred thousand years into human evolution, and still not ‘there yet’. While considering that evolution is ‘a work in progress’, he sees morality as a tool to ‘construct the world’. Conversely this calls for us to ‘construct morality’ even as we ‘articulate the noosphere’.

Properly understood, morals are the building blocks of the noosphere, by which we ourselves are ‘built’.

The Evolution of Morality

“Morality has until now been principally understood as a fixed system of rights and duties intended to establish a static equilibrium between individuals and at pains to maintain it by a limitation of energies, that is to say, of force.

Now the problem confronting morality is no longer how to preserve and protect the individual, but how to guide him so effectively in the direction of his anticipated fulfillments that the ‘quantity of personality’ still diffuse in humanity may be released in fullness and security.”

Here Teilhard introduces two insights: First, the most tangible way that morality ‘constructs the world’ is by clarifying the structure of the universe so that we can better understand it. Secondly, it offers a clearer understanding of how we are to make the best use of it as we unlock the fullness and security that is still diffuse in us.

Put another way, as we better understand morals, we better understand the noosphere, and become more skilled at cooperating with its forces to actualize our potential.

The Next Post

This week we applied Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to two aspects of religion’s concepts of morality as a tool for helping us understand the structure of the noosphere as a step to managing its risks.

Next week we’ll continue this theme, taking a look at three more such ‘facets’.

How can seeing universal evolution through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ enhance our confidence in life?

Today’s Post

Last week we explored how a shift in perspective in the search for meaning in traditional science and religion can open a more positive stance towards understanding and living out the ‘articulations of the noosphere’. As reflected in the sacraments, values, and morals, we have addressed this stance from

Teilhard’s evolutionary perspective. We saw last week how the concept of Paul’s ‘Theological Virtues’ expresses three key such attitudes which underlay our employment of these articulations.

In the series of posts on discovering the thread of evolution within each of us, which we saw as ‘finding God by finding ourselves’, we examined the thoughts of Carl Rogers, whose optimistic approach to psychology was infused with a secular approach to faith. In this series, we saw how the virtues of Faith, Hope and Love are strongly woven into his insights on human evolution

This week we will explore this weaving as it can be seen in the virtue of ‘Faith’.

The Traditional Approach to Faith

Faith is the first of the virtues to be addressed by Paul and has been traditionally expressed as a ‘belief in things unseen’. As interpreted by the Christian church, it asserts that we must believe in ‘revealed truths’ (eg ideas that appear in our ‘sacred’ texts and as interpreted by the church) which we do not (even often cannot) understand, and that such belief is necessary for a successful eventual passage from this world to the next. In the more conservative Christian expressions, ‘understanding’ is unnecessary for salvation as long as ‘belief’ is present. Since belief is pleasing to God, by this interpretation, it will therefore insure one’s salvation: the entry into ‘the next life’. At the extreme, the more difficult the ‘truth’ is to understand (eg the virgin birth), the higher the value of belief.

Karl Rahner was one of the theologians who influenced the changes of Vatican II. His acute theological insight into identifying issues facing the church as it progressed into the future was resonant with Pope Francis’s current project of ecclesialreform and sharply critiqued this approach to faith.

“We are often told that it is difficult to believe, and by this is meant that the truths revealed by God are beyond human understanding, that they demand the sacrifice of the intellect, and that the more opaque they are to human understanding, the greater the merit in believing them.”

Gregory Baum expands on this critique in his book on Maurice Blondel, “Man Becoming”:

“When Christians have difficulties with certain dogmatic statements, for instance with the those on the Trinity or the eucharist, they are sometimes told by ecclesiastical authorities that there is a special merit in not understanding, in being baffled by a teaching that sounds unlikely, and in obediently accepting a position that has no other link with the human mind than that God has revealed it to men.” “Faith in this context appears as the obedient acceptance of a heavenly message, independently of its meaning for man and its effect on human life.” (Italics mine)

Reinterpreting Faith

As we developed our ‘principles of reinterpretation’, we saw how Maurice Blondel considered that this inability of religion to bring “meaning for man and its effect on human life” was one of the great failures of modern religion, as it severely limited the relevance it could afford to human life. As he saw it:

“Faith in this context appears as the obedient acceptance of a heavenly message, independently of its meaning for man and its effect on human life Man cannot accept an idea as true unless it corresponds in some way to a question present in his mind.”

And, presaging both Teilhard’s recognition of God as manifest in the threads of evolution which are at the core of each life, as well as a principle of reinterpretation of traditional religion, Blondel goes on to say:

“To the man who accepts the Gospel in faith, it is not a message added to his life from without; it is rather the clarification and specification of the transcendent mystery of humanization that is gratuitously operative in his life.” (Italics mine)

As we have discussed earlier, such reinterpretation in terms of human life is necessary for religion to regain its lost relevancy.

On a purely secular level, there are few things more fundamental to human action than ‘faith’. Surely, we act only to the extent that we believe in both our capacity to act and success of the outcome, and this has nothing to do with religion. Our history is filled with ‘acts of faith’ which lead to actions profoundly affecting the evolution of society. We earlier saw, for example, how the evolution of the belief in human equality leads to the West’s practice of democracy.

The difference between secular faith and religious faith can be seen in the question: what is the basis for the act of faith? Why should we believe what we believe? Or as Blondel asks, “what difference does a belief make in our lives?”

In the secular case, faith is built up over time, in a trial-and-error approach in which the consequences of beliefs can be evaluated as positive or negative. Those seen as positive can be filtered through society and passed forward as laws, standards, or practices through the mechanism of culture. An example is those recognized and adopted by society at large. The U.S Constitutional Bill of Rights is the result of such an approach.

The many laws of science are themselves based on secular faith. Science is based on two unprovable beliefs: that the universe is intelligible and that humans are capable of understanding it. Over time, this belief has led to the ‘scientific method’, a sort of set of secular virtues which has proved successful in building our understanding of the universe. Without adherence to these elements of faith, neither Western society nor its pillar of scientific endeavor would survive.

Teilhard’s perspective recognizes that in each of us there is a continuation of the fourteen or so billion years of universal activity that has brought us to this moment. Secular faith is the intuitive, unprovable sense that not only is evolution carrying us along with it, but that its direction is from a past simplicity of the earliest components of matter to a yet unknown future state of complexity and completeness. It is the expectation that while we are as yet unfinished, we are nonetheless embraced by a current that will carry us to future wholeness.

The Next Post

This week we began our look at the stance we can take if we are to live out Teilhard’s ‘articulations of the noosphere,’ beginning with that of ‘faith’. We saw how the religious attitude of faith acquires new relevance if we reorient it from ‘belief in the unbelievable as a condition for being eligible for the afterlife’, to the recognition and trust that the energy of evolution flows through each of us and carries us on to a future state of wholeness.

Next week we will address the second of the ‘Theological Virtues’ that of ‘hope’.

How can religion be reexamined through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’?

Today’s Post

Last week we took a second look at Teilhard’s first step of managing the noospheric risks to human evolution by better understanding it from the perspectives of religion and empiricism. We saw how a deeper understanding of the structure of the Noosphere, the milieu of human enterprise, involves recognition of and cooperation with the universal agent that for fourteen billion years has invested itself in the continuing rise of complexity that has eventually, at least on this planet, given rise to humans.

As we have seen over the past several weeks, with the human person, this rise is no longer solely based on biological and instinctual processes, it must now be consciously grasped and capitalized upon if it is to continue in the human species. The ‘noospheric risks’ which we have identified must be consciously overcome if human evolution is to continue.

A major step in understanding the noosphere so that those risks can be managed, as Teilhard suggests, is to ‘articulate’ it, to understand how it is at work in our continued evolution, both in ourselves as well in our societies.

One such tool is, properly understood, religion. This week we will begin to use Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to look at religion to understand how it can be seen as a tool to achieve such a goal.

Why Religion?

One of the foundational concepts of the great Western awakening known as “The Enlightenment” was the diminishment of religion’s role in society and government. One of the results of this diminishment was the rise of atheism, which placed many of the world’s ills (e.g., ‘Noospheric risks’) at the doorstep of organized religion. Both the leading Enlightenment thinkers, and the atheists which followed them, valued objective, empirical thinking over the subjective and intuitive intellectual processes that had informed medieval Western thinkers. As we have discussed last week, the rise in ‘left brain’ thinking began to surpass that attributed to the ‘right brain’ as a method of ‘articulating the noosphere’.

It is obvious that the many ills stemming from religious teachings that can be seen today in the Mideast governments, infused with radical and fundamentalist expressions of Islam, as well as Western religions weighted down by fundamentalism, dogmatism, and excessive hierarchical structures are sources of ‘evolutionary risk’. This suggests that the post-Enlightenment perspectives are indeed superior to traditional religion in helping us make sense of what’s happening in the noosphere, and how to navigate our way through it.

Can there be a way that religion can be seen as a tool for helping us mitigate these risks, or is it destined to end up in the dust bin of history? Is it simply a perspective that has ‘seen its day’ but is no longer relevant in this new and technical milieu?

One way to look at this question is to see in religion the evidence of many deep seated ‘dualities’. Jonathan Sacks, like Teilhard, saw such dualities as seeing different facets of a single reality as opposites, such as ‘this world’ vs ‘the next’, or ‘natural’ vs ‘supernatural’. Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, most dualities simply reflect an inadequate understanding of such concepts, resulting in ‘cognitive dissonance’, and can be overcome with the application of an appropriate context.

From the traditional perspective, science and religion are often seen in terms of such a duality. Dualities often reflect a mode of seeing in which ‘right brained’ and ‘left brain’ perspectives, empiricism, and intuition, are understood as ‘opposites’. To see them thusly is to overlook the fact that there is only a single brain, although it may have many modes of operation.

Teilhard’s method of resolving ‘dualities’ is simply to put them into a single context, as he does with his ‘lens of evolution’. In such a context ‘opposites’ now appear as ‘different points in a single integrated spectrum’. From this perspective, the underlying coherence that exists in the two ‘opposites’ can now be understood.

So, applying this insight to the question above allows us to reframe it: “How can the legitimate aspects of the ‘right brained’ perspective offered by religion be seen to help us make sense of the human person in the same way that the ‘left brained’ perspectives of the Enlightenment helped us to understand the cosmos?”

As we saw in our series on Norberg’s ‘Progress’, the human actions of innovation and invention, obviously the fruit of ‘left brain’ activity, nonetheless turn on the pivot points of personal freedom and human relationships, which are much more the domain of the ‘right brain’. So, on the surface, it would seem essential that these two modes of human thought operate less like the commonly understood ‘opposites’ than as the two facets of the single thing that Teilhard’s ‘lens’ shows us that they are.

I have suggested that one measure of increasing human evolution is the skill of using the neocortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of the lower (reptilian and limbic) brains. Just as important is the corollary of using the whole neocortex, both left and right lobes, intuition, and empiricism, in making sense of things.

As the above example from Norberg shows, the skill of articulating the ‘right brained’ concepts of personal freedom and relationships, while essential to our continued evolution, is not something we can learn from science. Religion, as it is commonly understood, is not up to the task either. Traditional Western religion has only slightly evolved from its medieval perspectives, and as such would seem to offer little to a partnership with science in the enterprise of ‘articulating the noosphere’. For religion to be relevant to the task of extending Teilhard’s approach of understanding difficult questions by putting them into an evolutionary context, it must itself evolve. Contrary to conventional wisdom, a closer relation to science can aid in the recovery of such relevance, as John Haught asserts.

“…every aspect of religion gains new meaning and importance once we link it to the new scientific story of an unfinished universe.”

A similar challenge can be made to science: for science to expand its reach to the human person, it must recognize the phenomenon ‘spirit’, as understood in Teilhard’s context. ‘Spirit’, to Teilhard, is simply the term we use to address the agency by which matter combines in evolution to effect products which are increasingly complex. As Teilhard puts it,

“…spirit is neither super-imposed nor accessory to the cosmos, but that it quite simply represents the higher state assumed in and around us by the primal and indefinable thing that we call, for want of a better name, the ‘stuff of the universe’.

Haught sees the opposite side of the coin as he takes note of

“…how little illumination materialistic readings of nature have shed not only on religion but also on life, mind, morality and other emergent phenomena.”

The Next Post

This week we have seen how putting human history into a context of evolution helps us to begin to see how what have been traditional and deep seated ‘dualisms’ can be put into a single integrated context and begin the process of using both our human modes of thought to better understand who we are and how can continue to move ourselves forward.

Next week we will look at this process.

What can happen as we learn to use both sides of our hemispheric brain?

Today’s Post

Last week we used Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to see how the oft kaleidoscope of history can be fit into a continuous and homogeneous spectrum when placed into Teilhards context of universal evolution.

This week we will begin a look at the great human modes of thought, religion and science, to see how the ‘dualisms’ and ‘contradictions’ of history can be sorted into a focused perception of the threads of this evolution

From the Religious Side

One way to understand Teilhard (or any such ‘synthetic’ thinker, such as Blondel or Rohr) is to apply their concepts to such traditional ‘dualisms’. We saw two weeks ago how Teilhard’s thoughts on spirituality show one such application, and how in just a few words, the traditional dualism of spirit and matter is overcome.

Thus, we can see that approaching traditional science and religion concepts through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ can move us unto a mode of thinking which sees things much more clearly and less self-contradictory than as seen in the past. Teilhard saw this as ‘articulating the noosphere’.

So, we can see how Teilhard’s approach illustrates that one thing necessary for continued human evolution is a continuation of right/left brain synthesis by which science and religion can move from adversaries into modes of thinking which allow our intuition to be enhanced by our empiricism, and in which our empiricism can build upon our intuition. We effect our own evolution by use of both sides of our brain.

This approach also, to some extent, recovers much of the optimism contained in the Christian gospels, such as the recognition that, as Blondel puts it, “The ground of being is on our side”, and as John articulates the intimacy of this ground, “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”.

Such recognition of the positive nature of the agent of increasing complexity, and the awareness that such an agent is alive and empowering each of us, is another example of Teilhard’s “clearer disclosure of God in the World”. It also repudiates the natural Greek pessimism that had such influence on Christian doctrine emerging in the Christian Protestant ontology by which Luther could see humans as “piles of excrement covered by Christ”.

From the Empirical Side

By the same token, Norberg’s rich trove of facts, which document how ‘progress’ is powered by increased human freedom and improved relationships, can be seen as evidence that we are indeed evolving.

The facets of empowerment which he documents, personal freedom and improved relationships, also happen to be the cornerstones of Western religion. This strongly suggests that the continuation of human evolution is based on enhancement of them, requiring continued empowerment fostered and strengthened by our increased understanding of them, of how they work and of how to enhance them.

Something else is necessary as well. Putting these concepts, ‘persons’ and ‘love,’ into an evolutionary context may well be necessary for us to overcome the profoundly influential dualisms which have thus far forged our world view, but this same evolutionary context also offers yet another aspect: Time.

Considering that the human species is some two hundred thousand years old, and only in the past two or so centuries have we begun to unpack these dualisms and recognize them less as contradictions than as ‘points on a spectrum’, we need ‘patience’. Such an integrated insight of humanity emerged only two hundred years ago in a civic baseline in which it would be stated by Thomas Jefferson that:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Two hundred years is an evolutionary ‘blink’, to be sure, but by ordinary human standards, represents many lifetimes. It also represents an incessant search for how this ideal of human freedom and relationships should be played out (or in some cases, if we’re not careful, can be stomped out) in human society.

Thus, the pace of evolution must be appreciated. Certainly, it is not fast enough for most of us, especially if we live in ‘developing’ countries, watching our children suffer from curable diseases, hunger, war, or born with the ‘wrong’ skin color or ‘sinful’ dispositions. On the other hand, as Norberg reminds us, evolution has never unfolded as quickly as it is unfolding today.

The Next Post

This week we have seen how putting human history into Teilhard’s ‘evolutive’ context helps us to begin to see how what have been traditional and deep seated ‘dualisms’ can be put into a single integrated context and begin the process of using both our human modes of thought to better understand who we are and how can continue to move ourselves forward.

Next week we will employ Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to see how such a relook at religion can help us to do so.

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Teilhard de Chardin places ‘spirit’ into the context of evolution, in which context it can be seen not as the ‘opposite’ of matter but an essential aspect of what causes ‘the stuff of the universe’ to energize the development of matter into increasingly complex arrangements. We also saw how Johan Norberg, who in articulating how such ‘matter-spirit’ combinations can be seen to increase human welfare, provides substantiation for Teilhard’s recognition of the necessary elements of human evolution and his audacious optimism.

This week we’ll continue exploring what’s involved in managing ‘Noospheric risks’ by seeing them through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.

Seeing Human History in an ‘Evolutionary’ Context

Teilhard ‘lens’ provides a way to understand who and where we are by placing ourselves into the context of universal evolution. This includes understanding the roles played by our two great human enterprises, religion, and science in the flow of human history.

As many thinkers, notably Jonathan Sacks, point out, religion began as a very early human activity characterized by ‘right brain’ thinking (instinct and intuition). As such, these enterprises were employed to help us to make sense of both human persons and their groupings. Stories such as ‘creation narratives’ provided insights for a basis for societal conduct and were eventually coded into the first ‘laws’ as humanity began to emerge from clans to social groups, then cities, then states.

Sacks sees a record of the rise of human ‘left brain’ thinking (empiricism and reason) in the Greek development of philosophic thought.

An example of the first movement toward some level of synthesis between the ‘right’ and ‘left’ modes of thought, (intuitional and empirical) can be seen in the New Testament. Paul, with his Greek roots, then John, began to incorporate left brain ideas such as Paul’s “Fruits of the Spirit” and John’s ‘ontological’ articulation of God (“God is love…”) as an essential aspect of ‘the ground of being’ as it is active in each of us. While demonstrating a clear difference from the traditional right-brained Jewish approach of the Torah, they mark less of a departure than an evolution from it.

Thus, as Sacks points out, Christianity can be seen as possibly the first attempt to synthesize right- and left-brain thinking modes.

Science is born from such an early application but was initially seen as competitive with the prevailing right brain concepts of the time, and hence threatening to the established church hierarchy. Many of the traditional dualisms, which then accepted the cognitive dissonance between right and left brain thinking, can still be seen today.

Science in its own way is also stuck. Thinkers of the Enlightenment, ‘threw the baby out with the bath’ when they attributed human woes to religion. Not that this was totally incorrect, since the ills of the secular aspect of all religions can be seen in their need for ‘hierarchies’, which have traditionally required adherence to absolute and dogmatic teachings to maintain control over their followers. However, by neither recognizing the primacy of the person nor his need for such things as freedom, faith, and love (as understood in Teilhard’s context), science is hard pressed to find a place for the human person in its quest for understanding of the cosmos.

As Sacks puts it,

“To understand things, science takes them apart to see what they are made of while religion puts them together to discern what they mean”.

This is often referred to as the ‘hermeneutical paradox”: we can’t understand a complex thing without understanding its component parts, but the component parts make no sense when removed from their integrated context.

The Next Post

This week we have seen how putting human history into a ‘evolutive’ context helps us to begin to see how what have been traditional and deep seated ‘dualisms’ can be put into a single integrated context and begin the process of using both our human modes of thought to better understand who we are and how can continue to move ourselves forward.

Next week we will focus Teilhard’s ‘lens’ on where we are today in this process.

How can science and religion, our two great modes of thought, be rethought to help us evolve?

Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at managing the ‘noospheric risks’ that we can see as evolution rises through the human species. We boiled down the essential approaches to ‘building the noosphere’ that we saw last week:

“…that human persons must be free to capitalize on their ‘interiority’ and be given the ‘liberty’ to continuously rearrange both their personal perspectives to identify enterprises which can be either used as steppingstones to new arrangements or corrected if they do not effect an improvement, and to engage with other persons to freely form ‘psychisms’ to perform them.”

But we noted that these approaches themselves need to be continually improved if they are to reflect true ‘articulations of the noosphere’.

This week we will continue this look, by exploring science and religion, our two great systems of thought, as they attempt to help us ‘make sense of things’.

Spirit and Matter: The Bones of Reality

We have noted that, as Teilhard postulates and Norberg articulates, no movement forward (towards Johan Norberg’s continued improvement in human welfare, powered by Teilhard’s increased complexity) occurs without some unplanned and unwanted consequence. Religious skeptics of ‘secular progress’ see such progress as meaningless if unwanted consequences ensue. As we have seen, such negativity compromises progress in favor of superficial improvements. They see such consequences as illustrations of the futility of humans to overcome their ‘sinful nature’. From this point of view, the ills of the world are evidence of our innate ‘broken ness’. We are not, they assert, ‘spiritual enough’. This perspective is well countered by Teilhard in his understanding of spirituality as simply a facet of ‘the stuff of the universe’.

“…spirit is neither super-imposed nor accessory to the cosmos, but that it quite simply represents the higher state assumed in and around us by the primal and indefinable thing that we call, for want of a better name, the ‘stuff of the universe’. Nothing more, and also nothing less. Spirit is neither a meta- nor an epi- phenomenon, it is the phenomenon.”

Spirituality is not a recent accident, arbitrarily or fortuitously imposed on the edifice of the world around us; it is a deeply rooted phenomenon, the traces of which we can follow with certainty backwards as far as the eye can reach, in the wake of the movement that is drawing us forward. “

In this unique perspective, Teilhard offers a totally new perspective on the traditional ‘spirit/matter duality’ so common to a religious perspective which sees them as opposites, requiring divine intervention into ‘lower’ matter in order to ‘save’ it, much as Luther envisioned humans as “piles of manure covered by Christ”.

In the same breath he also counters the prevalent materialistic position of many scientists that ‘spirituality’, as understood by most ‘believers’ is simply a mental illusion use to salve the pains of daily life.

Recognizing this, as Teilhard does so succinctly, bridges the gap between the ‘spirituality’ so prized by Religion and the ‘progress’ equally prized by Science. He does not seem them as opposites, but simply two facets of a single integrated reality. Both Teilhard and Norberg would agree that, properly understood, such spirituality is embodied not only in every cosmic step towards increased complexity, but also in all progress by which human welfare is advanced.

More succinctly, and essential to the core of Teilhard’s insight, spirituality is the agency by which matter becomes more complex, therefore more evolved. From his perspective, it can be seen as essential to every cosmic act of unification, from bosons all the way up to humans: Unification effects complexification which effects consciousness. John Haught, in his book, “The New Cosmic Story’, restates this perspective.

“Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ has been part of the universe from the start. So hidden is this interior side of the cosmos from public examination that scientists and philosophers with materialist leanings usually claim it has no real existence.”

Thus, the religionists are correct: the world needs more spirituality if it is to succeed. However, with Teilhard’s more universal understanding of ‘spirituality’ we can now see that spirituality is that which underlies the evolution of the ‘stuff of the universe’ (e.g.: matter, e.g.: humans). With this understanding, the idea of spirituality is freed from the ‘otherworldly’ nature which requires us to disdain matter, to one in which matter is dependent on spirit for its evolutionary rise in complexity and spirit depends on matter as a vehicle for this rise.

With this new approach, Teilhard’s ‘lens’ human welfare can now be seen as not only just as important as ‘spiritual’ growth, but also actually a result of it. And seen in this light, Norberg’s metrics of ‘progress’ also provide evidence of the continued rise of spirituality in human evolution.

This perspective doesn’t suggest that the human species will be ‘saved’ by all forms of religion or science; the ills of both are commonly enough reported. However, the successes of both are embodied, as Teilhard, Norberg and Richard Rohr point out, in the freedom of the individual, the recognition of the importance of relationships, and in the trust that stewardship of these two facets of existence will lead to a better future. Compromising any of these three will undermine the continuation of human evolution.

As Richard Rohr succinctly puts it:

“The first step toward healing is truthfully acknowledging evil, while trusting the inherent goodness of reality.”

The Next Post

This week we continued our look at managing the risks of continued human evolution by relooking at how Teilhard offers a perspective in which spirituality and human progress aren’t in opposition to each other, they represent two facets of a single thing, increasing complexity. Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, spirituality is expanded from human ‘holiness’ to a universal agency of ‘becoming’ on the one hand, and Norberg’s list of how such ‘becoming’ plays out in human affairs on the other, permits us a fuller appreciation of how evolution is occurring in our everyday lives.

Next week we will see how this new perspective can lead to a better understanding of where we can go from here.