Tag Archives: X Religion and Evolution

June 18, 2020 – How Can We Rethink Religion?

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Today’s Post

For the past several weeks we have been looking at the two great systems of thought that have emerged as humanity has attempted to ‘make sense of things”. In this series we have noted that both science and religion clearly have developed ‘tools’ for dealing with our evolution, but that these tools, effective as they have been shown to be, are still a work in progress.
Last week we addressed how the activities of our ‘left’ and ‘right’ modes of thinking, properly synthesized, can offer great potential to ensure our continued evolution. In the course of our discussion, however, we noted the necessity of both to continue to evolve from their current incomplete states to one in which this partnership can mature.

This week we will take a look at how religion’s side of this relationship must evolve if is to hold up its side of such potential synthesis.

Why Should Religion Evolve?

As Jonathan Sacks sees it, the secularization of Europe happened not because people lost faith in God, but because people lost faith in the ability of religious believers to live life peaceably together. More gradually, but also more extensively, Western Christianity had to learn what Jews had been forced to discover in the first century: how to survive without power.

– no religion relinquishes power voluntarily

– the combination of religion and power leads to internal factionalism, the splitting of the faith into multiple strands, movements, denominations and sects

– at some point, the adherents of a faith find themselves murdering their own fellow believers

– it is only this that leads the wise to realize that this cannot be the will of God

What is needed, therefore, is for religion to continue to evolve, to recognize that many of the criticisms of the more well-spoken atheists are on target, and that most of the new findings of science only threaten the least reasonable aspects of religion as seen in such things as superstition, biblical literalism, dualism and focus on the afterlife. The fundamental belief in a principle of reality that is ‘on our side’ and an evolutionary process in which we can realize our potential and a recognition of the need for love are only found in religion, and need to be stressed anew for it to recover its relevancy to human life.

How can Religion Evolve?

What inhibits religion’s potential as a tool for ‘making sense of things’? It was only a few generations ago that religion was at the focus of all societies, but most respected polls today show a trend of decline in religion’s importance to society.

Although still clearly in the minority, the atheist voice has in contrast risen strongly in this same time frame. One consistent thread of this voice sees the religious viewpoint being completely replaced by an objective, materialistic and atheistic worldview in the near future. Popular, learned and eloquent voices, such as Richard Dawkins, Oxford professor of “Public Understanding of Science”, is one of many who have written copiously of the many contradictions and fantasies that can be found in Western religion as well as a signigicant lack of grounding in the physical sciences. Science itself contributes to this trend as modern medicine and technology continue to extend their power to improve human welfare.

So, given these trends, how can religion effect a move back to the center of human enterprise, equal to science in its application to the human need to ‘make sense of things’? Maurice Blondel, an early twentieth century French philosopher, addressed the problem of relevance in religion:

“A message that comes to man wholly from the outside, without an inner relationship to his life, must appear to him as irrelevant, unworthy of attention and unassimilable by the mind.”

   With this succinct assertion Blondel not only identifies the heart of the problem, but also opens the door to a path to returning relevance to religion. His observation suggests that this path requires religion to understand and express its beliefs in terms of human life as opposed to providing information about the ‘supernatural’, that which is “wholly from the outside”.

We have discussed religion as a ‘tool’ for us to continue our evolution at both a personal and societal level. Blondel proposes a ‘tool’ by which religion can realize its potential to improve its capability of helping us do just that.

The tool is ‘reinterpretation’.

Reinterpreting Religion

Blondel is difficult to read today, but Gregory Baum offers a clear summary of his insights in his book, “Man Becoming”. He notes that Blondel saw an impediment to the relevance of Christian theology in its tendency to focus on ‘God as he is in himself’ vs ‘God as he is to us’. Jonathan Sacks echoes this tendency, noting that the main message of Jesus focuses on the latter, while the increasing influence of Plato and Aristotle in the ongoing development of Christian theology shows a focus on the former. Both writers point out that this historical trend in the development of Christian theology is reflected in a focus of what and who God is apart from man. This results, as Sacks notes, in the introduction of a new set of dichotomies which were not present in Judaism, such as body vs soul, this life vs the next and corruption vs perfection. Such dichotomy, they both note, compromises the relevance of the message.

An example of this dichotomy can be seen in the ‘Question and Answer’ flow of the Catholic Baltimore Catechism:

“Why did God make me?

God made me to know, love and serve Him in this life so that I can be happy with Him in the next.”

   This simple QA reflects several aspects of such dichotomy.

    • It presents the belief that ‘this life’ is simply a preparation for ‘the next’.   This life is something we have to endure to prove our worthiness for a fully meaningful and happy existence in the next. Therefore our purpose in life is simply to make sure that we live a life worthy of the reward of heavenly existence when we die.
    • As follows from this perspective, we can’t expect meaning and the experience of happiness in human life.
      • Ultimate meaning is understood as ‘a mystery to be lived and not a problem to be solved’. Understanding only happens in the next life.
      • Happiness is a condition incompatible with the evil and corruption that we find not only all around us, but that we find within ourselves
      • Life is essentially a ‘cleansing exercise’, in which our sin is expunged and which, if done right, makes us worthy of everlasting life.

As both Blondel and Sacks noted, the increasing Greek content of this perspective in Christian history slowly moves God from the intimacy reflected in Jesus, Paul and John into the role that Blondel called the “over/against of man”. It is not surprising that one of the evolutionary branches of Western belief, Deism, would result in seeing God as a powerful being who winds up the universe, as in a clock, setting it into motion but no longer interacting with it.

Dichotomy and Reinterpretation

So, where does this leave us? The majority of Western believers seem to be comfortable living with these dichotomies (not to mention the contradictions) present in their belief systems in order to accept the secular benefits of religion such as:

    • a basis for human action
    • a contributor to our sense of place in the scheme of things
    • a pointer to our human potential
    • a contributor to the stability of society

While these benefits might be real, many surveys of western societies, especially in Europe, show a correlation between increasing education and decreasing belief. Is it possible that (as the atheists claim) the price for the evolution of human society is a decrease in belief? That the increasing irrelevancy of religion is a necessary byproduct of our maturity?

Or is it possible that solutions to the ills of Western society require some connection to the spiritual realm claimed by religion? Put another way: is it possible to re-look at these claims to uncover their evolutionary values? How can the claims of religion be re-understood (‘re-ligio’) in terms of their secular values; to look at them, as Karen Armstrong asserts, as “plans for action” necessary to advance human evolution? Certainly, if so, religion has the potential to recover the relevancy that is necessary for any tool with the potential of moving evolution forward.

In order to move toward such re-understanding, we will look at the idea of ‘reinterpretation’ itself, to explore how we can best apply the perspectives of Teilhard, Blondel, Armstrong, Rohr and Sacks to the process of re-interpreting our two thousand years of religious doctrine development.

The Next Post

Considering that our lives are built on perspectives and beliefs that are so basic as to be nearly instinctual, how can we come to see them differently? Our histories, however, contain many stories of such transformations, and the unfolding of our sciences and social structures are dependent upon them.

Next week we will take a look at some different approaches to how our perspective of the basic things in our lives can change, how we can ‘reinterpret’.

June 11, 2020 –How Do Science and Religion Need Each Other?

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Today’s Post

Last week we looked at Teilhard’s eight ways of seeing the natural confluence between religion and science. As we saw, Teilhard understands them to be natural facets of a synthesized understanding of the noosphere, and therefore potentially of benefit to continued relevance to human life.

This week we will take a look at how another thinker sees this potential for a closer and more beneficial relationship. Jonathan Sacks, former British Chief Rabbi, comes at this subject from a slightly different perspective. While Teilhard situates traditional dualities into an evolutive context to resolve them, Sacks understands them in the context of the two primary modes of human understanding intuition and empiricism.

Sacks On the Evolution of Religion

Teilhard of course placed religion (as he does all things) into an evolutionary context as one strand of ‘universal becoming’. His understanding of the mutual benefit of a synthesis between science and religion is focused on their paired value to the continuation human evolution.

Sacks, in his book, “The Great Partnership”, stays closer to home, focusing on religion’s potential to help us to become what we are capable of becoming. From this perspective, religion, properly understood and applied, is a mechanism for our personal growth in the context of our collective growth. As discussed previously, Sacks sees the evolution of human thinking in the unfolding of religion and the evolution of language, and thus as a slow movement towards a balance between the ‘left’ and ‘right’ hemispheres of the human brain. In this way, the cooperation between religion and science can be seen as simply a more balanced and harmonious way of thinking in which the traditional ‘dualities’ (as seen by both Teilhard and Sacks) can be resolved.

Science’s Need for Religion

With this in mind, Sacks agrees with Teilhard’s insight on the unique understanding of the person as the cornerstone of its success in improving human welfare. Like Jefferson, he also recognizes the role that religion has played in the evolution of society:

“Outside religion there is no secure alternative base for the unconditional source of worth that in the West has come from the idea that we are each in God’s image. Though many have tried to create a secular substitute, none has ultimately succeeded.”

   The ‘none’ to which he refers can of course be seen in those countries which tried to create a “social order based on materialistic lines”. These examples can be seen in Stalinist Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and the Kim family’s North Korea.

As he sees it, the problem arises when an alternative to religion’s value of the human person is sought. Sacks locates the failure of such searches in science’s inability to address human freedom. As he sees it:

“To the extent that there is a science of human behavior, to that extent there is an implicitly denial of the freedom of human behavior.”

   He sees this duality at work in Spinoza, Marx and Freud, who argued that human freedom is an illusion, but notes that “If freedom is an illusion, so is human dignity”. Hence when human dignity is denies, the state no longer viable.

Sacks agrees with the success of science in overcoming the superstitions that so often accompany religion, but notes that it does not replace the path to ‘meaning’ offered by religion. He summarizes these two facets of human understanding:

“Science takes things apart to understand how they work. Religion puts things together to show what they mean.”

   For science to be effective, its statements must be objectively ‘proved’, and the means of doing so are accepted across the breadth of humanity. Both the need for such rigor and the success of its application can be seen in the many aspects of increased human welfare (effectively advances in human evolution) as seen in our series on Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress”.   Clearly the ‘scientific method’ is a significant root of human evolution.

However, as we noted in this series, Norberg recognizes the cornerstones of human evolution as human freedom, innovation and relationship. These three facets of the human person are not ‘provable’, and which existence, as we saw above, is even denied by many ‘empiricists’. Since they are active in the sap of evolution, they also must be in the root.

At the level of the human person, Sacks observes that “Almost none of the things for which people live can be proved.” He offers the example of ‘trust”:

“A person who manages the virtue of trust will experience a different life than one to whom every human relationship is a potential threat.”

     Therefore, any group in which all the members can trust one another is at a massive advantage to others. As evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has argued, this is what religion does more powerfully than any other system.

Religion’s Need for Science

Just as the left- brained perspectives of science are in need of the right-brained balance of religion, as implicitly recognized by Norberg, so the perspectives of religion are in need of balance from science.

The claims of all forms of religion are based on metaphorical beliefs, many of which cannot be held by those who are powering the ‘progress’ curve outlined by Norberg. As we saw in the case of Thomas Jefferson, he systematically stripped the gospels of such ‘miraculous’ teachings to reveal what he considered to be the bedrock of “The Teachings of Jesus” which he in turn applied to his underlying (and unprovable) assertions of the value and dignity of the individual human person.

Many educated persons believe that scientific insight will eventually replace religion as the basis of human action. It is certainly true that in the past two hundred or so years, many religious teachings have become unacceptable due to the rise of empiricism, such as the formal blaming of the Jewish race for the death of Jesus, the seven literal days of creation, and so on. The continuing influence of religion in many parts of the world is due more to its ability to push back on state corruption and savagery than its teachings on reincarnation and virgin births. But with the increasing evolution of state structures more benign to the human person, such as that found in democracies, the underlying importance that religion places on the individual human person plays a larger role.

For religion to continue to play a role in this evolution, it must be seen as relevant. As Sacks sees it:

“Religion needs science because we cannot apply God’s will to the world if we do not understand the world. If we try to, the result will be magic or misplaced supernaturalism.” 

The Road to Synthesis

So, how do we get to the point where right- and left- brain process are balanced? Sacks addresses what happens when we don’t:

“Bad things happen when religion ceases to hold itself answerable to empirical reality, when it creates devastation and cruelty on earth for the sake of salvation in heaven. And bad things happen when science declares itself the last word on the human condition and engages in social or bio-engineering, treating humans as objects rather than as subjects, and substitution of cause and effect for reflection, will and choice.”

   He recognizes that science and religion have their own way of asking questions and searching for answers, but doesn’t see it as a basis for compartmentalization, in which they are seen as

completely separate worlds. Like Teilhard, he sees the potential for synergy “..because they are about the same world within which we live, breathe and have our being”.

He sees the starting point for such synergy as “conversation”, in hopes that it will lead to “integration”. From Sacks’ perspective:

“Religion needs science because we cannot apply God’s will to the world if we do not understand the world. If we try to, the result will be magic or misplaced supernaturalism.”

   By the same token, he goes on:

“Science needs religion, or at the very least some philosophical understanding of the human condition and our place within the universe, for each fresh item of knowledge and each new accession of power raises the question of how it should be used, and for that we need another way of thinking.”

   Even though Sacks doesn’t place his beliefs in an explicitly evolutionary context, he does envision a more whole human person which emerges as a result of a more complete balance between the influence of the ‘right’ and ‘left’ brains (modes of engaging reality). In this sense, he echoes Teilhard’s belief of ‘fuller being’ resulting from ‘closer union’.

The Next Post

This week we have seen how Jonathan Sacks approaches Teilhard’s call for a fresh approach to the potential synergy between religion and science. Like Teilhard, he concludes that the success of the West requires a balanced synergy between science and religion if it is to continue.

Next week, in keeping with Teilhard’s expressed need to rethink religion, we will look at how religion must continue its own evolution in order to hold up its end of the relationship with science.

June 4 – Religion and Science: Bridges to Partnership

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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.

This week we will look at eight 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.

Second, he notes how this primacy of person is captured in the Christian concept of ‘incarnation’, which can be seen through Teilhard’s insights 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 overlaps with 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, they can 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 ‘increased complexity’, with ‘Christogenisis’ as the personal aspect of this increased complexity. With this observation, Teilhard ‘closes the loop’ between a science which struggles to understand the fundamental force of evolution by which the intensity of its complexity is increased (“drawn towards the spirit’) and a religion loosed from its moorings of superstition, hierarchy and a spirituality which has become detached from the noosphere.

Science and Religion: Getting From Here To There

In the 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. “

   In the fifth insight, he recognizes, however, that the emergence of science was not without its seeming competition with religion.

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

   This sentiment was strongly evident in the earliest claims of the superiority of empiricism over that of intuition, such as that which appeared in the Enlightenment and addressed by Stephen Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”

However, as Pinker undertakes the slippery subject of personal happiness in this book, he is forced to recognize the significant correlation between meaning and life satisfaction. He fails to note that the empirical nature of science prevents incorporation of personal ‘meaning’ into its insights.

Jonathan Sacks addresses this meaning/understanding dichotomy:

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

   In his sixth insight, Teilhard, goes on to envision a future relationship between science and religion in which their viewpoints capitalize on Sack’s potential synergies, and they begin to approach a synthesis in which the ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ content of human evolution are finally recognized as two facets of a single thing:

“But, as the tension (between science and religion) is prolonged, the conflict visibly seems to be resolved in terms of an entirely different form of equilibrium- not in elimination, nor duality, but in synthesis. And the reason is simple: the same life animates both. “

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

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

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

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

In an eighth insight, Teilhard notes that ‘the person’, the current manifestation of universal evolution, is poorly addressed by science:

“Up to now, Man in his essential characteristics has been omitted from all scientific theories of nature. For some, his “spiritual value” is too high to allow of his being included…in a general scheme of history. For others his power of choosing and abstracting is too far removed from material determinism for it to be possible, or even useful, to associate him with the elements composing the physical sciences. In both cases, either through excessive admiration or lack of esteem, man is left floating above, or left on the edge of the universe.”

   For such an oversight to be corrected, science must widen its scope to include the universal agency of ‘complexification’ including its manifestation in both human and social forms.  The progress of human evolution cannot wait for such phenomenon to become ‘objectively’ understood and empirically quantified, it must somehow continue with enough ‘subjective’ understanding for us to be able to move forward. This recursive dance of intuition and empiricism is necessary for both science and religion to move towards the synergy envisioned by Teilhard

The Next Post

This week we saw eight of Teilhard’s insights that underlay his assertion that the continuation of human evolution requires a synergy between science and religion.

We also cited Jonathan Sacks’ insights on these two ‘domains of thought’ and next week will look a little more deeply into how they can better team to assure this continuation.

May 28– Religion and Science: Different But Compatible Evolutionary Tools?

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Today’s Post

Last week, we looked at religion’s concept of morality, and saw how these insights offer a rethinking of traditional religion’s potential as a tool for ‘stitching together’ the fabric of society. Teilhard sees morality evolving from proscription to prescription for religion to realize its potential as a tool for insuring our continued evolution. He saw how rethinking morality is one way for religion to recognize its role as a tool for understanding the noosphere, and by doing so to be able to assist us in living it in such a way that we can become fully and authentically human.

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

Evolution Everywhere

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

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

By the same token, we have noted that these three characteristics are addressed poorly by science, and its companion secular ‘disciplines’ such as economics and politics.   Norberg’s three cornerstones of progress initially only appear in the West, as a slowly building consequence of society influenced by its Christian roots in the uniqueness of the person.

Jefferson’s claim that

“I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves” was a recognition of such uniqueness, but it was not an insight derived from any empirical source. His inspiration for such an unprovable concept was none other than his own excerpts from the New Testament, known as the “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth”:

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

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

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

As Norberg quantifies at length, this clearer understanding of the unfolding of human evolution clearly articulates the success of the West in providing a milieu which has effected a degree of stability not only unprecedented in human history, but which has slowly permeated into the rest of the world.

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

Enter Religion

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

At the basis of these ‘risks’ is the necessity for us to choose to continue to power this tide. We saw that it is possible for humans to simply allow fear, pessimism and disbelief to weaken their will to continue.  When this happens, the ills of “racism, sexism and homophobia”, always lurking in the background, will resurge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

May 21, 2020 – Religion’s Tools for Human Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week be 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 as a way to make sense of things, but opened the door to re-seeing it, at least in its Western manifestation, as simply an attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’. In this sense, it can be seen as just the ‘right brained’ counterpart to the ‘left brained’ perspectives of science, which, too, does the same.

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 fundamentalism, excessive hierarchical structures and dogmatism in the West? Is there a way that the teachings that have led to such obvious ‘noospheric risks’ can be reinterpreted into teachings that will lead away from 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 Catholic theologians to recognize that science’s discovery of both the depth of universal time and the nature of evolution provided an insight which understood not only the universe but the human as well 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.

Teilhard offers five insights into morality as opportunities to 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 in empirical facts, but in doing so can provide a much needed ‘ground of humanity’ to science.

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’. In this attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’, it has used the slowly accumulated understanding of the noosphere provided by intuition, metaphors and dreams, but impeded by egos, fears, and ambitions.

He attaches no particular stigma to the fact that we’re already some two hundred thousands of years into human evolution, and in no way are we ‘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 in unlocking 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 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 Norberg. One of the facets that he 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 person-ness). 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 (person-ness) 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 at the basis of its expertise. 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 as 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 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 it in such a way that we maximize our potential for being fully and authentically human.

The Next Post

This week we took a look at Teilhard’s insights into the concept of morality andhow it can be seen as a tool for continuing our evolution as humans.

Next week we will begin to look at what is needed by religion if it is to begin to realize its potential as ‘co-creator’ of the future with science.

May 14, 2020 – Religion as a Tool for Understanding the Noosphere

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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. 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 given rise to humans.

As we have seen over the past several weeks, 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 works to effect our continued evolution, both in ourselves as well in our societies.

One such tool is, properly understood, religion. This week we will take a first 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 (eg ‘Noospheric risks’) at the doorstep of organized religion. Both the leading Enlightenment thinkers, and the atheists which foll0wed them, valued objective, empirical thinking over the subjective and intuitive intellectual processes that had informed medieval Western thinkers. As we have discussed many times, the rise in ‘left brain’ thinking began to surpass that of the ‘right brain’ as a method of ‘articulating the noosphere’.

Given 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, It would seem that these 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 ‘articulate the noosphere’ or is it destined to end up in the dust bin of history: 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 it as evidence of yet another, very fundamental ‘duality’. We have looked at the concept of ‘dualities’ from the perspective of evolution previously in this blog. Jonathan Sacks, like Teilhard, saw such dualities as a way of seeing things as opposites, such as ‘this world’ vs ‘the next’, or ‘natural’ vs ‘supernatural’. In Teilhard’s insight, 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 ‘evolution’. In such a context, the ‘opposites’ now appear as ‘different points in a single integrated spectrum’. By this method, the underlying coherence that exists in the two ‘opposites’ can now be understood.

So, applying this insight to the question above can now reframe it: “How can the legitimate ‘right brained’ perspective offered by religion be seen to help us make sense of things, 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 for these two modes of human thought to operate less like the commonly understood ‘opposites’ than as the two facets of the single thing that biology shows us that they are.

Earlier in this blog, 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 religion 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. A similar challenge to science also exists: for science to expand its reach to the human person, it must recognize the ‘spirit’.

Note that I am using this term ‘spirit’ in Teilhard’s context. ‘Spirit’ 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’. 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.”

The Evolutionary Roots of Western Religion

Re-reading the Christian New Testament with Teilhard’s evolutionary context in mind offers a starting place for such evolution. There are many unprecedented concepts in the ‘New Testament’ that have been poorly carried forward in the evolution of Christian theology, such as:

  • Understanding the presence of God in all created things (Paul) ,and particularly in the human person (John), which is contrary to a God eventually taught as ‘external’ to both the universe at large and to the individual person as well.
  • Understanding that we are bound together by a force which fosters our personal growth and assures the viability of our society. (Paul)
  • Recognizing that this growth enhances our uniqueness while it deepens our relationships.
  • Recognizing that this uniqueness gives rise to the characteristic of human equality (Paul)), as opposed to the preeminence of hierarchy

So a first step toward maturing religion would be a return to its evolutionary roots, many of which have sprouted anew in secular organizations, as so brilliantly seen in Thomas Jefferson’s reinterpretation of these evolutionary roots in purely secular terms. We must be able to rethink religion.

Rethinking Religion

As we have seen, one of Teilhard’s key insights was that to be able to manage our journey through the noosphere, we must first understand it. The entire history of religion shows it to be our first attempt to do so. Born in an era which depended on intuitive insights and instinctive reactions, the early religions were simply extensions of the clan lore which formed the base for the societal structures that came into being. They all reflected the need to stabilize the ever-increasing size, density, and diversity of human society. All of the early myths and stories reflected the common understanding that the world had always existed, and that it had existed in manifestations that had only superficially changed over the years.

As we have seen elsewhere in this blog, these early noospheric insights held sway for thousands of years until the “Axial Age”, some 700 years BCE. These new perspectives, with their tendrils of early Greek thinking, did not begin to compete with the traditional mode of thinking until the eleventh centrur, when more empirical and objective perspectives began to appear in the West.

When this happened, the highly metaphorical insights into the composition of the noosphere began to change into an increasingly empirical and therefore secular understanding of first the noosphere itself and then the universe which surrounds it At the same time, the universe began to be seen less as static and more as dynamic.

The clash between the neo-think offered by the nascent scientific evidence and the prevalent static and intuitive beliefs which still reflected medieval scholasticism is well documented, and to some extent still goes on today. These beliefs offer profoundly opposed insights into the composition of the noosphere, and reflect the significant dualism that underpins modern attempts to understand it. So it comes as no surprise that today we find it difficult to unravel these two threads to find a way to re-spin them into a single strand.

In such a single strand, the concept of morality moves beyond the dualistic religious basis for a secure society and a roadmap to successful entry into the next life, and into a set of guidelines which ‘articulate the noosphere’ in such a way that we insure our continued evolution into states of greater complexity.

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at religion 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 how religion has traditionally ‘articulated the noosphere’, and how Teilhard sees a shift needed in the religious concept of ‘morality’ to be able to provide ‘seeds’ for a more evolved, and hence increasingly fruitful, articulation.

May 7, 2020 – How Is Human Evolution A Continuation of Cosmic Evolution?

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at a way to deal with the ‘noospheric’ risks, suggested by Teilhard: to better understand the noosphere (the milieu of human thought and enterprise) itself and what part we play in it.

In a nutshell, Teilhard saw that over its fourteen or so billion years of existence, evolution of the universe can be seen to follow the basic principle by which matter enters into more complex (and hence less probable) organizations under the influence of the basic ‘energy of becoming’ which is built into the ‘stuff of the universe’.   He sees this principle manifesting itself explicitly in the increasing complexity of this same ‘stuff’ over time, and therefore sees how this energy is reflected in in human lives as we participate in our own evolution.

Last week we looked at Teilhard’s graphic of the ‘spiral’ as a way of seeing how matter not only evolves, but in doing so it ‘converges’ as its capacity for unification becomes more pronounced through the first eight or so billion years. This week we will see how this convergent rise continues through the ‘life era’, and to its current state of ‘consciousness aware of itself’.

The Conscious Spiral

Last week we saw how evolution proceeds through ‘discontinuities’ in which new and unprecedented functionalities appear at key steps. These new functionalities not only show themselves in their greater potential for union, but also in increased facilities such as influence over environment, mobility, vitality and potential for further increase in complexity through future unions.

While the above manifestations of evolution occur in scientifically verifiable steps, each of them represents a highly discontinuous step from the preceding plateau of evolution. On an evolutionary time scale, the transition to each new state of complexity can be seen to occur at an increasingly rapid pace. This increasing convergence of the spiral can even be seen to be active in the stage of entities aware of their consciousness (humans).

Last week we looked at this phenomenon in the ‘material’ realm of ‘pre-life’. Recognizing that Teilhard makes no sharp distinction between this ‘pre-life’ realm and the ‘life realm’, we can see how this rise of evolution through discontinuous steps spills over into it and continues its rise into the ‘realm of consciousness’.

While the earliest days of humanity are only vaguely understood, it is possible to roughly track this convergence of the spiral of evolution as it morphs into human history (all dates approximate):

  • Very early humans began to invent intuitive modes of thinking, based on instincts and clan relationships some 200,000 years ago
  • The evolution of primitive ‘laws’ of society evolve from clan norms about 15,000 years ago
  • ‘Axial Age’ concepts of person and society emerge from primitive concepts into ‘philosophies’ based on intuitions and instincts 3,500 years ago
  • ‘Left brain’ (empirical) modes of thinking arise in Greece from the traditionally universal ‘Right brained’ (intuitional) thinking of earlier systems some 3,000 years ago.
  • Merging of left and right ‘modes’ of neocortex functions begins with the introduction of ‘left brain’ thinking into the legacy ‘right brained’ mode as Jewish-inspired Christianity becomes more influenced by Greek thinking 2,000 years ago
  • Scientific/empirical thinking emerges from the Christian right-left merge 1,400 years ago
  • The ‘Enlightenment’ emerges from the prevalent right-brained, post medievalism at the same time as establishment of the personal as locus for the juridical (Jefferson) three hundred years ago
  • The abrupt increase in human welfare, documented by Norberg, begins one hundred fifty years ago.

In each of these ‘discontinuous bursts’ we can see Teilhard’s three ‘vectors of increasing complexity’ at work in the human species:

  • Societies are all initially similar to the less complex entities which preceded them
  • They all in turn effect an increase in both the vitality and potential for union from those that preceded them
  • Each new step required a new and more complex way of human relationship, increasing differentiation, and leading to increased vitality and power to unite.

It’s also important to note the timeline: each discontinuity in the above list took less time to effect its step increase in complexity than the preceding.

The Continuity Beneath the Discontinuity

Thus, while Teilhard notes the occurrence of discontinuity in evolution, he also shows how underneath these discontinues lies a basic fundamental, continuous current which powers the ‘axis of evolution’. He notes that at each such step, several things happen no matter which stage of evolution we are addressing:

  • The evolved element of ‘the stuff of the universe’ (atoms, molecules, cells, neurons, humans) rises not only in its complexity, but in its uniqueness. Each new appearance, while initially retaining its similarity to its parent, becomes sharply distinguishable from its precedent.
  • This characteristic is very important to the recognition that human evolution occurs in the same way that all steps have occurred in universal evolution. As Teilhard puts it: “True union differentiates”

This applies to evolution at every phase, from the Big Bang to the human person.

Thus, an important step in understanding the noosphere is to recognize that our lives are powered by a cosmic agent by which, to the extent that we can recognize and cooperate with it, we will be lifted ever upward. In Teilhard’s words:

“..I doubt whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.”

   Understanding this connects us to the fourteen billion year process which has raised the universe, as Richard Dawkins observes, “into its present complex existence”.   So, if we are to understand the noosphere, as Teilhard suggests as a step towards managing its risks, we need the ‘scales to fall from our eyes’ so that we can not only take in the breadth and scope of the universe, but recognize that we fit into it naturally, as a child to a loving parent.

The Next Post                         

This week we took a second look at ‘understanding the noosphere’ in terms of a rising, converging spiral, this week looking at the nature of the spiral as it rises from ‘complexifying matter’ by way of ‘enriching spirit’. Teilhard shows the current state of human evolution to be a stage in a sure and steady continuation of such rise over the preceding fourteen or so billions of years of universal existence. As such, we can now see that the basic nature of our lives is nourished and assured not only of survival but increasing fullness by this personal agent of evolution. All that is necessary, he asserts, is for us only to open our eyes to it, recognize it as active in our lives, and learn to cooperate with it if we are to be successful in dealing with the ‘noospheric risks’.

Having taken a closer look at those risks which can impede human evolution, and looked at a better understanding of the ‘noosphere’ as a start to managing them, next week we will return to the core topic of this blog, ‘reinterpretation of religion’, to see how religion can be employed to build on Teilhard’s “clearer disclosure of God in the world” to assure our future.

April 23, 2020 – Managing The Risks of Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Teilhard de Chardin places ‘spirituality’ 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 matter into increased complexity. We also saw how Johan Norberg, who in articulating how such ‘matter-spirit’ combinations can be seen to increase human welfare, provides ‘proof of the pudding’ 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 placing them (as Teilhard has) into an ‘evolutionary’ context.

Seeing Human History in an ‘Evolutionary’ Context

As Teilhard suggests, one way to understand who and where we are is to place ourselves into the context of universal evolution. This includes understanding how our two great human enterprises, religion and science, occur in in the flow of human history.

As many thinkers, notably Jonathan Sacks, point out, religion began as a very early human activity characterized by such ‘right brain’ activities as 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.

As we saw in posts on The History of Religion , a record of the rise of human ‘left brain’ thinking can be seen in the Greek development of philosophic thought.

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’ 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 from it than 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 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 freedom and such things as 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 which make no sense when removed from their integrated context.

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 in last week’s post 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. We have seen many other examples over the last many posts

Thus, we can see that putting traditional science and religion concepts into a truly ‘universal’ context, such as Teilhard proposes, can move us unto a mode of thinking which sees things much more clearly and less self-contradictory than we could in the past. Teilhard saw such an enterprise as

“A clearer disclosure of God in the world.”

   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 gospels, such as the recognition that, as Blondel puts it, “The ground of being is on our side”, and as John puts it, “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 and emerged 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 show 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’. The morphing of such an integrated insight of humanity emerged only two hundred years ago into 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, and an incessant search for how this ideal of human freedom and relationships should be played out (or in some cases, 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 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 take a look at where we are today in this process.

February 27, 2020 – Life Expectancy and Human Evolution

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Today’s Post

   Last week we took a detailed look at statistics on ‘Food’ as a metric for assessing the continuation of evolution in the human species. Using the statistics found in Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress” three aspects of this movement become clear:

– human evolution can be measured in terms of instantiations of betterment of humankind over time

– the speed of these measures can be seen to be rapidly increasing

– these increases are spreading over the surface of the globe from West to East.

This week we will take the same kind of look at another of Norberg’s facets of increasing human evolution, that of ‘Life Expectancy’.

The History of Life Expectancy

As Norberg notes:

   “Through most of human history, life was nasty, brutish and short. More than anything, it was short because of disease, lack of food and lack of sanitation.”

   Plagues frequently caused massive deaths. The ‘Black Death’ in the fourteenth century is thought to have killed more than a third of Europe’s population. Such plagues continued on a regular basis, and were joined by infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and smallpox, in deadly cycles continuing until the nineteenth century. In Eastern Europe, for example, forty occurrences of plague were reported in the two hundred years between 1440 and 1640. Norberg notes,

“Despite an often more stable supply of food, the agricultural revolution did not improve this much, and according to some accounts reduced it, since large, settled groups were more exposed to infectious disease and problems related to sanitation.”

   Considering all this, it is not surprising that individual life expectancy was not much different in the West by the early 1800s than it had been since antiquity, which was approximately thirty-three years.

The ‘Knee in the Curve”

As Teilhard noted, the evolving universe can be seen to take many ‘jumps’ in complexity as it rises from one state to another, such as in the appearance of the molecule from combinations of atoms, or cells from combination of molecules. Thus he notes that evolution proceeds in a highly nonlinear fashion, with profound leaps in complexity over short periods of time. The phenomena associated with this insight is clearly still in play with the innovations that Norberg chronicles. In each case, the rise of complexity in the human species, and therefore a metric of its continued evolution, can be seen to suddenly burst forth from a relative quiescent past state. Such a ‘knee in the curve’ of data can be seen in the metric of life expectancy, just as we saw in the metrics of fuel and food.

   At the point in which city population increases were exacerbating the spread of diseases, threatening the continuation of human evolution, a startling reversal began to happen. Norberg plots this reversal in the data that shows which, beginning in the early 20th century, life expectancy in the West grew from the historic norm of thirty-three years to seventy years in a span of only one hundred years.

This is yet another example of the trend we saw last week: in the estimated two hundred thousand year history of humankind, some eight thousand generations, startling improvements in human welfare have only taken hold in the past three generations.
As Norberg points out, there are many factors which combine to produce such ‘knees in the curve’. Things such as improved sanitation led to increased access to clean water which reduced water-borne illnesses, which were further reduced by improved medicine and supplemented by increased food supply and multiplied by increasing globalization which not only ‘spread the wealth’ but ‘concentrated the innovation’. Improved medicine massively reduced diseases such as polio, malaria, measles and leprosy, and as a result lowered such things as mother childbirth death rates and children birth mortality rates.

He further notes that such improvements in the West took about a hundred years to achieve these results. As they have been subsequently applied to developing countries, such improvements there can be seen to take place much more quickly. Some examples of improvements over sixty years outside the West:

Asia: Increases from 42 to 70 Years

Latin America: Increases from 50 to 74 Years

Africa: Increases from 37 to 57 Years

We saw an example of this same phenomenon last week in the rapid improvements to food production, and in the previous look at ‘fuel’. 

Putting This Into Perspective

Rather than detailing how these statistics prove out Teilhard’s projections, as we did last week, I’ll just summarize:

  • Innovation and invention are natural gifts of human persons, and will occur whenever and wherever the human person’s autonomy is valued by society. Historically, this has mostly happened in the West.
  • Such innovation and invention requires the grouping of human minds into ‘psychisms’ in which these gifts are reinforced and focused
  • Innovations and inventions have been shown to rapidly increase human welfare elsewhere than their point of invention when globalization is permitted. Almost every Western invention had been at least imagined elsewhere, such as coal in the ancient Chinese and early empires of Islam, but died still- born because restricted from trade.
  • These innovations and inventions arise as they are needed: the ‘compression of the noosphere’ has, as Teilhard notes, “The effect of concentrating human effort to increase human welfare”.

The Next Post

This week we took a look at another of Norberg’s measures of human evolution, with the metric of ‘Life Expectancy’, and saw how it, too, not only confirms Teilhard’s optimistic forecast for the future of human evolution but identifies the critical processes at work in its continued success.

Next week we will take a last look at Norberg’s compilation of statistics, this time on the topic of “Poverty”.

January 30, 2020 – Evolution in Human Life

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Today’s Post

Last week we concluded our look at the secular side of such concepts as God, Jesus and the Trinity by seeing the concept of ‘spirituality’ through Teilhard’s eyes as “ neither a meta- nor an epi- phenomenon, it is the phenomenon” which underlies the steady progression of ‘complexification’ as it rises from inter-atom forces to those forces by which we ourselves continue the process of universal evolution.

This week we go to the other end (at least so far) of evolution as we explore how it manifests itself in our personal lives and in the progression of our societies toward further complexity.

This week’s post summarizes those from June 28 to August 23, 2018.

The Three ‘Vectors” of Evolution in Human Life

Earlier this month we saw Teilhard’s insight of the progression of evolution in the universe as occurring in the form of a ‘convergent spiral’, and how the three ‘vectors’ of this spiral (union, increased complexity, and increased potential for future union and complexity) manifest themselves in different forms at each stage of evolution.

This post also saw how Teilhard mapped these three ‘vectors’ of human life into the three insights of the Apostle Paul: Faith, Hope and Love.

In Teilhard’s reinterpretation of these three vectors, Paul’s ‘Theological Virtues’:

Faith can be seen as an interpolation of the past. From our experience, we begin to better understand our potential, and in doing so we begin to increase our confidence in our capability to live it out.

Hope can be seen as an extrapolation from this experience to an anticipation of what can be accomplished in the future if we but trust in our potential.   Hence Faith and Hope can be seen in the two ever-repeating stages of our lives: our pasts becoming our futures in the evanescent moment of the present.

As Paul asserts, “the greatest of these is Love”.

Love as the Primary ‘Virtue’

Teilhard agrees that Love is the greatest of these three virtues, seeing it as the human manifestation of the energy by which the universe increases in complexity over time.

First, he notes the common perception of Love as a strong emotion, designed by evolution to insure procreation and therefore the continuation of all species in which elements are drawn together by instinct to unite and therefore insure their future. In this light it is an instinct present in the reptilian brain, strengthened by the limbic brain of warm blooded animals whose increased complexity requires increasingly lengthy periods of familial care- an instinct which all humans share. Just as he compares the newly emerged cell to its molecular predecessor by seeing it as “dripping in molecularity”, in the same way the new human can be seen as emerging from the pre-human as “dripping in animality”.

Recognizing that the two layers of ‘lower brain’ in the human provide strong instinctual stimuli, he sees the element of choice, one requiring knowledge of its knowledge, as based in the human neocortex, unique to the human. This new brain capability affords a new dimension to the phenomenon of ‘Love’, one which transcends a ‘simple’ energy of procreation.

Secondly, as such, Teilhard recognizes this new brain capability as the current manifestation of the third ‘vector’ of the universal spiral as it acts in the human person. While not denying its obvious emotional importance in our lives, Teilhard understands love to evolve from relating to becoming, from emotional to óntological.

He sees this perspective as that asserted by John when he asserts:

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

In Teilhard’s insight, to love is to cooperate with the energies of creation in the ongoing increase of energy.

Love in Human Evolution

Considering that, as Teilhard sees it, Love is the human manifestation of the energy that rises in the human species and causes it to continue to evolve, how can we understand this in secular evolutionary terms?

First, a simple look at the history of humans on our planet shows that a key attribute of humans to expand into every possible nook and cranny of the biosphere. In his graphic example of the development of human society, humanity starts out from a pole of an imaginery sphere, and ramifies into many threads: races, tribes, nations. In its march away from the starting pole, it spreads into nearly infinite space: it is possible for many centuries that one arm of the ramification can still be unaware of the other

Second, it is obvious from this simple graphic that eventually the threads will reach the midpoint, the ‘equator’ of Teilhard’s imaginary sphere, and begin to come in contact with each other. The echo of this imaginary sphere with our own very real planet is all too obvious. When we expand eventually into space occupied by others, we cross the imaginary equator where expansion is replaced by compression.

As is obvious from history, the tactics of contact, conflict and conquest that served humanity so well in the expansion phase, work less well in the compression phase, even though they do not phase out very quickly. New paradigms of societal evolution begin to emerge as early as the ‘Axial Age’, (800 BC), during which Karen Armstrong (in her book, “The Great Transformation) sees civilizations across the globe beginning to rethink ‘what it means to be human’. (This evolution in thinking was also accompanied by a shift from ‘right’ to ‘left’ brained thinking, as seen by Jonathan Sacks.)

The adaptation of Christianity by Constantine was an example of this shift. While certainly less religious than practical, it nonetheless reflected the same shift, seeing the integrative potential of Christianity as a political mechanism for insuring the smooth integration of the new Northern European Celts and Franks into his empire.

Third, that this new paradigm was slow to take hold is obvious, considering the ensuing two thousand or so years of human conflict, particularly in the West, frequently among those espousing the new religion. The success of the new paradigm, however, could be seen in the emergence of the new paradigm of democracy, with the belief in human equality first envisaged in the Axial Age.

In this three millennia of world history we can see the ‘crossing of the equator’ and the gradual transition from ‘expansion’ to ‘compression’. This transition from one to another also maps the evolution of human relationships from ones in which the individual is reduced by the contact to one in which the individual is potentially enriched by it.

This is truly an astounding paradigm shift, first asserted by Confucius, and necessary for human survival as it compresses itself:

“If you would enlarge yourself, you must first enlarge others. When you enlarge others, you are enlarging yourself.”

Teilhard recognizes that as humanity enters the compression stage, the historical relationship between conqueror and conquered, common in the expansion stage, will no longer satisfy the need to continue evolution. The historical human enrichment of the conqueror by diminishment of the conquered requires a different paradigm in the compression stage.

Teilhard sees an expansion of the traditional concept of love as the answer: one in which human relationship enriches both sides. In his words

“Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them”.

In such an enhanced interaction, it’s not that the emotional facet of love is lost, but that its lower brained instincts are modulated by the neocortex in a nondual, whole-brained exercise. In Teilhard’s grand scheme, Love becomes a facet of creation.

The Next Post

This week we turned from Teilhard’s reinterpretation of conventional Western religious concepts to the subject of how these reinterpreted concepts are present as they appear in human evolution.

Next week we will address the question, “How can we see such evolution as it unfolds in our lives?”