Understanding the ground of being from three perspectives provided by Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’

Today’s Post

Last week we summarized the history of the last facet of the complex God that emerged in just a few hundred years after the death of Jesus: the ‘Trinity’.  We also noted how this concept emerged at the same time that the new church began to become part of Roman society and how it began to evolve into a hierarchical institution which became increasingly dependent on adherence to dogma.  As its teachings became more articulated, truth became more ‘an object of faith’ required to assure salvation than a collection of insights for living.  It didn’t help that the new church was now becoming an essential part of the Roman structure which in turn required a new level of adherence to dogma to ensure a unified and therefore stable society.

Yet, as we saw from Karen Armstrong’s observation, the teaching of ‘Trinity’ was “simply baffling”, and from Richard Rohr that this teaching seems “furthest from human life”.

With all this, what sense can be of an assertion that God is “Three divine persons in one divine nature”?

The Secular Side of the Trinity

Once the Trinity is put into Teilhard’s evolutionary context it becomes possible to see it as not only much simpler but more importantly, more relevant to human life.  From Teilhard’s perspective we have seen how God can be reinterpreted from a supernatural being which is the ‘over and against of man’ who creates, rewards, and punishes; to the ‘ground of being’, the basis for the universe’s potential for evolution by way of its increase in complexity over time.  In applying this perspective to Jesus, we saw how he can be reinterpreted from a sacrifice necessary to satisfy such a distant judgmental God, to the personification of this increase in complexity as it rises through the human person: a ‘signpost to God’.  In the same way we can see a third manifestation of this ‘axis of evolution’, the ‘Spirit’, in the energy which unites products of evolution in such a way as to effect this increase in complexity.

More specifically, we can begin to see how this ‘triune God’ can be seen to be ‘personal’.   The synthesized collaboration of these three principles of evolution effects what we know as the product of evolution that we refer to as ‘the person’.

Christianity puts names to these three aspects of the ground of being:

‘Father’ as the underlying principle of the becoming of the universe in general, understood as the potential of the ’stuff of the universe’ to ‘make it make itself’

‘Son’ as the manifestation of the potential for the products of evolution to eventually become increasingly complex, and thus ‘conscious’, and therefore ‘personal’; a potential which is active in every step of evolution

‘Spirit’ as the ‘energy’ by which particles of matter unite in such a way as to result in increases in complexity

   As we have noted frequently, Teilhard describes this third ‘person’, this third manifestation of the ground of being as it exists in the human, as ‘love:

“Love is the only energy capable of uniting entities in such a way that they become more distinct.”

   And, as he sees it, the essential function of the rise of complexity in the convergent spiral of cosmic evolution:

“Fuller being results from closer union and closer union from fuller being”

   In addressing this last agent of becoming, we can now see more clearly how John’s astounding statement begins to make secular sense:

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

  Thus, Teilhard locates the ’Spirit’ squarely in the axis of evolution, as the manifestation of the energy which powers evolution through its rising levels of increased complexity.  We have seen in physic’s ‘Standard Model’ how the energies which are manifest in forces such as the atomic strong and weak forces, electricity and magnetism, gravity and chemistry all collaborate in raising the universe from the level of pure energy at the ‘Big Bang’ to that of matter sufficiently complex to provide the building blocks of life.  With the addition of the concept of the ‘Spirit’ we can now see how this enterprise continues to raise reality into manifestations of complexity which are aware of their consciousness.

A purely empirical approach to ‘spirit’ can be seen in the new scientific subject of ‘information’.  To Paul Davies, information is simply the quantum in each particle of matter which guides its unification with other particles.  His analogy is that this ‘quantum’ can be seen as the ‘software’ contained in each grain of matter, the ’hardware’.

An example of this action can be seen in the potential of Hydrogen to unite with Oxygen to form the molecule of water.  The ‘information’ of the Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms is not simply passed on to the new offspring, water, it itself is enriched by becoming more complex in the process.  The evolved quantum of information contained in the molecule of water has a new and enriched potential of unifying with many other molecules, and the resultant molecules also have new characteristics and potentials not found in their less complex components.  Thus, the three ‘triune’ aspects of evolution are evident in this simple example:

A component of matter has the potential to unite with other components (quantified by its ‘information or ‘software’’)

The process required to perform the connection is mapped in its ‘information’

The resultant new component (with new characteristics and potentials absent in its predecessor components) emerges with its new and more complex quantum of ‘information’

   In this very simple but purely empirical example we can see a reflection of the Trinity:

The ‘Son’ is reflected in the ‘information’, effectively the ‘software’ of the component

The ‘Spirit’ is reflected in the ‘energy’ necessary to effect unification according to the ‘information’

And the ‘Father’ is reflected as the ‘potential’ of the components to unite

   In addition to how the Trinity can be seen in these examples, we can also return to Teilhard’s image of the ‘convergent spiral’ of cosmic evolution.   As we saw when we looked at Teilhard’s model of the structure of universal evolution, the three aspects of the Trinity can be understood as the human manifestations of the three basic steps by which the universe proceeds at all stages in its journey toward increased complexity.

We can also see how this energy continues to manifest itself in raising the complexity of living matter through the process of Natural Selection.  Natural Selection, first identified by Charles Darwin, offers a partial explanation of how species change as they move from one stage of evolution to another.  It does not address how the products of evolution at latter stages show evidence of increased complexity, but it does explain how the ramification of species offers many avenues of for ‘complexification’.

Human persons are clearly located on one of these avenues of evolution.  Understanding the ‘Spirit’ at the level of the human person is simply understanding how evolutionary products aware of their consciousness (these human persons) can consciously cooperate with this energy to be united in such a way as to advance their individual complexity (their maturity) and therefore continue to advance the complexity of their species.

We have noted many times that Richard Rohr decries how the increasing hierarchy and dogmatism of the Christian church increased the distance between man and God by decreasing the relevance of its essential message.  Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, we can now see how it is possible to understand the Trinity in terms relevant to personal life.

Rohr offers a reinterpretation of the traditional Christian trinitarian terms as an integrated understanding of the Trinity which is directly relevant to human life:

“I believe that faith might be precisely that ability to trust the Big River of God’s providential love, which is to trust the visible embodiment (the Son), the flow (the Spirit), and the source itself (the Father). This is a divine process that we don’t have to change, coerce, or improve. We just need to allow it and enjoy it.  Faith does not need to push the river precisely because it is able to trust that there is a river.”

The Next Post

This week we saw how adding the concept of ‘Spirit’ to those of the ‘Father’ and the ‘Son’ completes an understanding of the ‘the ground of being’, the basis of the universe’s ‘coming to be’ in general.  More importantly, we saw how we can begin to understand how this agent of evolution which has “raised the world to its current level of complexity” (Richard Dawkins) is active in our individual lives, as we begin to understand ourselves as personal offspring of the ‘axis of evolution’.

Over the past several weeks, we have addressed three of the fundamental beliefs of Christianity: God, Jesus, and The Trinity, by seeing them through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.  The ‘reinterpretation’ that results from this perspective can refocus their relevance to human life.

Christianity, however, piles many layers of belief and practices on top of these three precepts.  In order to, as Richard Dawkins suggests, ‘divest them of the baggage’ that they carry, is it possible to use our principles of reinterpretation to achieve a similar refocus on them?

Next week we will begin to do this, first addressing the underlying concept of ‘spirituality’, and how it can be seen in the light of such ‘reinterpretation’.

   How can Teilhard’s ‘lens’ aid in reinterpreting the Theological Language of Jesus?

Today’s Post

Last week we took a sixth look at aspects of Christianity’s traditional treatment of Jesus and ‘the Christ’, noting how our principles of interpretation permit new insight into religious concepts such as the relation between the two.  We have also seen how such reinterpretation can not only increase the relevance of ancient beliefs to human life but also decrease their distance from the findings of science.

This week we will take a last look at Jesus, focusing on the theological concepts that evolved along with the concept of Jesus and ‘the Christ’ in the many years of Western theological development, and explore them through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.

The ‘Incarnation’

In our look at Jesus from the perspective of the New Testament, we saw how the subject of Jesus evolved in a few short years from a holy man preaching about preparation for the immanent end times, to the human manifestation of an agency by which the universe can be seen to unfold.  In John’s vernacular, Jesus was ‘the word made flesh’, introducing a concept of this universal agency by which it finds human expression in the person of Jesus.

The traditional Christian approach to the appearance of Jesus in human history saw him as ‘the Son of God’, suggesting a unique manifestation of divinity among the human species.  But if we understand Jesus from Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ as the ‘fruit’ of universal evolutionary growth, the sap of which is the rising of complexity (‘the Christ’), then Jesus is simply one of such flowerings.  From this perspective, this ‘sap’ makes itself known in all humans who rise above their circumstances to see things in a more integrated, and hence more efficacious way.  Confucius is a good example, with his insights into human unity and the behavior which unites us in such a way that we mature.  Thomas Jefferson is another example when he asserts the existence of a common wisdom in a human society which is capable of self-government.

Teilhard carries this insight one step further.  He painstakingly documents the rise of complexity in universal history in his book, “The Phenomenon of Man”, calling attention to its many ‘changing of states’ of complexity.  Such changes illustrate how, if complexity is to rise in the universe, it must always find new and more complex ways of doing so.  These changes of state can be seen in such phenomena as the arrival of matter from pure energy, the emergence of ‘matter which makes itself’ in the form of complex molecules such as DNA, the appearance of the cell, then neurons, then brains then consciousness.  The latest change of state can be seen in the new ability of conscious products of evolution to be aware of their consciousness.

Each change of state is indeed an ‘incarnation’, a flowering of capacity and capability resulting from the rise of complexity from their predecessor states.  As we have seen, Jesus is the manifestation of this rise which has most effected the continuation of evolution through the human species.

Jesus, as the manifestation of this agency of increasing complexity, ‘the Christ’, also shows us how matter and spirit (as understood by Teilhard as the two essential properties of ‘the stuff of the universe’ and by Paul Davies as the ‘hardware and software’ of matter) are more clearly understood as being combined in the human.  As Richard Rohr puts it

“Incarnation literally means enfleshment, yet most of Christian history has, in fact, been excarnational–in flight from matter, embodiment, physicality, and this world. This avoidance of enfleshment is much more Platonic than Christian. Incarnation means that the spiritual nature of reality (the immaterial, the formless, the invisible) and the material (the physical, the forms, that which we can see and touch) are, in fact, one and the same!”

Rdemption and Salvation

A critical area for the reinterpretation of religion is the understanding of ‘redemption’ as essential to ‘salvation’.  In the development of Christianity through medieval history, the structure of heaven was seen as an ideal of human structure: hierarchal, static, orderly, and predictable.  God was recognized as the underlying creator and ultimate regent, all powerful and all knowing, humanlike and judgmental.  Even after the assertions of John, the association of the idea of ‘love’ with God was diminished with the increased understanding of ‘him’ as supernatural and remote.  The idea of salvation became based more on escaping from our natural milieu so that we could live in a supernatural one which was more suitable to our longings.

With this perspective, religion was seen, as Richard Rohr phrases it, as a “high premium fire insurance for the afterlife”.  In this mindset, most liturgical prayers were less “a lifting of the mind and heart to God”, as the Baltimore Catechism puts it, and more focused on how to get to heaven or how to get what we want in this life.

Again, from Rohr

“If it is true that lex orandi est lex credendi, (the way you pray is the way you believe), then it is no wonder Christians have such a poor record of caring for the suffering of the world and for the planet itself, and the Church has fully participated in so many wars and injustices. We have been allowed to pray in a rather self-centered way, and that fouled the Christian agenda, in my opinion.”

  Thus, as goes the traditional approach, if we are going to be ‘saved’ we must first be ‘redeemed’ from sin.  The traditional church teaching has been that, therefore, salvation is denied to those who die ‘in the state of sin’.  This belief can be seen in the flocking of congregations to church seeking the sacrament of ‘Confession’ when rumors of the ‘end of the world’ have been announced.  Going one step further, church teaching has included the belief that not only sinners, but all humanity, is at birth denied salvation due to the ‘sin of Adam’, better known as ‘original sin’.  As we saw three weeks ago, this view crept in during the controversy over the humanity/divinity arguments of Jesus which required the Council of Nicaea for resolution.  Although the final resolution decided that Jesus was both, the rationale for the resolution required Jesus to die to ‘atone’ for Adam’s sin and thus open the door to salvation closed by God due to the failure of his creation.

But if Jesus was to be the ‘door’ to salvation, the process itself was still open for debate.  Thus, the teaching that for humans to benefit from Jesus’s sacrifice, to be ‘saved’, the elaborate Church teachings which evolved required Baptism to open the door for babies, and Confession to reopen the door closed by sin.  This in turn led to many dualisms, such as the beliefs that there was no salvation outside the Church, and that dead unbaptized babies were not saved.

The recognition introduced by John that God is active in each one of us sheds new light on the idea of ‘sin’.  In it, sin can now be seen as a refusal to acknowledge and cooperate with this spark, and the whole of religion therefore seen as attempt to articulate how this spark can be seen and what human actions will enlarge this perception.  This is not a modern concept, as it can be seen clearly in the sayings of Jesus and the writings of Paul and John.

Reflecting Teilhard, Richard Rohr offers his insight:

“I am convinced that the reason Christians have misunderstood many of Jesus’ teachings is because we did not understand his pedagogy. Jesus’ way of education was intended to situate his followers to a larger life, which he called his “Father,” or what we might call today God, the Real, or Life. When we could not make clear dogma or moral codes out of Jesus’ teaching, many Christians simply abandoned it in any meaningful sense. For this reason, the Sermon on the Mount—the essence of Jesus’ teaching—seems to be the least quoted by Christians. We sought a prize of later salvation, instead of the freedom of present simplicity.

   Going to heaven is not the goal of religion. Salvation isn’t an evacuation plan or a reward for the next world. Whenever we live in conscious, loving union with God, which is eventually to love everything, we are saved.

Salvation is not a magical transaction accomplished by moral behavior or joining the right group. The only salvation worthy of the name is a gradual realization of who we are already in this world—and always have been—and will be eternally.”

Thus, the facets of incarnation, redemption and salvation can be seen as active in the human journey of human life from birth to death.  Life is ‘incarnated’ in human birth, gratuitously implanted in each human person as the potential for greater ‘possession of self’, then not only ‘redeemed’ from the failures that befall in this search for fullness, but moved forward, ‘saved’ in the success which occurs as such fullness is seen to unfold.  These three steps are recursive, as the wisdom that can emerge from the failures of experience fosters the confidence that new experience will lead to fuller being.

But they are not unique to human evolution.  As we saw when we looked at the structure of universal evolution, they are human manifestations of the three basic steps by which the universe proceeds in its journey toward increased complexity.  Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, the religious term, ‘incarnation’ references the evolutionary aspect by which matter comes into being with the potential to grow, ‘Redemption’ to the reaction to this potential by which increased complexity is accomplished, and ‘Salvation’ to the increased potential for growth which results from the increase in complexity.  Religion simply glimpses these underlying currents in human life, and ‘intuits’ how they are active long before science can begin to address them.

And this completes the picture of Jesus as the human manifestation of this energy of complexification.  As our principles of reinterpretation can be brought into play, as seen in the last several posts, the subject of Jesus indeed can be seen as a ‘signpost to the future’.

The Next Post

Next week we will move to yet another historically new perception of God, one that is to be found in the concept of ‘the Trinity’.  We have seen how the subject of Jesus can be reinterpreted into a signpost to a human future filled with the potential of ‘fuller being’.

Next week we will once again employ Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ to see how the concept of ‘the Trinity’ effects a synthesis of our reinterpreted Jesus with the other two Christian concepts of the three facets of ‘the ground of being.’

   How can Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help to focus the concept of the ‘second coming’ of Jesus?

Today’s Post

Over the last six weeks we have addressed the subject of Jesus from five perspectives, seeing how this subject itself evolves from the somewhat conventional understanding found in the three synoptic gospels in which Jesus is seen as one of the many ‘holy men’ that would have been familiar to the Jews of the time, to the unprecedented understanding of him as somehow ‘one with the Father’:  divine, eternal, and yet still human.

We then saw how such an audacious claim matured from one requiring ‘cognitive dissonance’ to one which falls naturally and cohesively into the concept of an evolving universe in which the key aspect can be seen as ‘increasing complexity’.

We then saw last week how the evolution of thinking about Jesus, found in the theological development following his death, eroded the immediacy of both Jesus and God, as well as minimizing the concept of ‘the Christ’ as the ‘axis of evolution’ found in Paul and John.

This week we will look at a sixth facet of the ‘Jesus story’, that of the idea of his ‘second coming’, one which appears several times both in the Old Testament as well as the New.  Can this cryptic forecast also be re-interpreted by employment of Teilhard’s ‘lens’?

 The ‘Coming’

The idea that Jesus would literally ‘return’ is found in several places in the Old Testament.  Many read Isiah’s prophesies as suggesting not only the coming of Jesus, but a later literal appearance by him in which he would assume control over humans who will have once again lost their way.

Matthew seems to address this concept more than the other synoptic gospel authors, citing Jesus as saying in Chapter 12

“For the Son of Man will come in His Father’s glory with His angels….  Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.”

   In Chapter 24, he follows with a description of the event. Cool

”At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory.”

   Of course, the most famous treatment comes in Revelation, which provides a colorful and dramatic description upon which many of the more conservative Christian expressions focus as they frequently see ‘signs’ of this coming in reports of today’s events.  Some, disgusted with the state of the world as seen in these events, are reported to engage in activities which they believe would stimulate this event, effectively ‘forcing God’s hand’.

Much argument has ensued in the history of Christianity on how such lines of scripture are to be understood, with the Liturgical expressions leaning toward a metaphorical understanding, and the Evangelical expressions toward one which sees them as literal forecasts.

How can they be seen when viewed through Teilhard’s ‘lens’?

Teilhard, the Noosphere and the ‘Second’ Coming

The approach we have taken thus far is to consider making ‘sense of things’ from Teilhard’s perspective of universal evolution.   In keeping with our insights into Jesus as the human face of the rising sap of complexity in the tree of universal evolution (‘the Christ’), Teilhard offers his concept of the ‘noosphere’.  As we have seen, the noosphere is simply the accretion of insights and inventions which occurs as humanity evolves. Beginning with the transmission of oral traditions thousands of years past, signs of the continuation of evolution can be seen today in the tight swaddling of data contained in, for example, our educational systems and global communication media.  In such things our evolution as a species is escorted beyond the instinctual trappings of our mammalian ancestors into ever new ways to ‘be human’.  As we evolve, this ‘noosphere’ evolves in a way that continuously fosters the growth of our understanding and in doing so refocuses our navigation of human life.

As we saw in our series on the evolution of human welfare from August, 2022, Johan Norberg documents examples of such ‘growing of understanding’ and ‘refocusing of navigation’ in nine distinct and empirically articulated facets of life on our planet.  Each one of these reflects a facet of how the noosphere both becomes enriched by and in turn enriches the human species.  How can such examples be seen in the light of in our reinterpretation of the stories of Jesus?

A clue to such insight can be seen in Luke’s report of Jesus’ reply to queries from followers of John the Baptist.

“Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor.”

   The signs that Jesus chooses to identify himself to John are ones which are focused on human welfare.  He makes no reference to ‘salvation’ or to ‘right behavior’, but instead identifies those things in which benefits to human welfare can be seen.  This suggests that a manifestation of the ‘presence of Jesus’ can always be found in instances of increased human welfare.

This brings us back to Teilhard’s insight that that the appearance of Jesus in history, as the human manifestation of the underlying spark of creation by which the universe ‘complexifies’, constitutes a distinct turning point in history.  As we have seen, from his perspective Jesus focusses on the twin concepts of the importance of the human person and the value of relationships, and hence their function as cornerstones of human evolution.  This turning point initiates a slow accretion in human history of the painful but inexorable rise of the human desire for an autonomy which is ballasted by harmony, and which therefore eventually leads to the concepts of person and equality so critical to Western society.

As we have seen in Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress”, he carefully and objectively documents nine facets of human welfare which have significantly improved in just the past hundred fifty years (February 10- February | 2022 | Science, Religion and Reality (lloydmattlandry.com).  As he points out, this exponential increase did not spring from thin air, it was presaged by the long, often agonizing, efforts of humans when, as Karen Armstrong says, “Enlightened persons would discover within themselves the means of rising above the world”.  And, as Norberg points out, it required a collective valuing of two critical aspects of humanity: the importance of the person, (requiring the formal codification in civil legal systems of ‘human freedom’} on the one hand, and the necessity for viable and productive ‘human relationships’ (enforced by objective and efficacious laws) on the other.  All nine of Norberg’s improvements in human welfare appear more frequently in countries which embrace democratic civil norms, and the number of such countries has significantly increased during this period.

So, how does this data reflect a ‘coming of Jesus’?  As the passage from Luke suggests, the presence of Jesus can be found in the things he lists.  Citing Norberg’s list of worldwide human improvements, we might paraphrase Jesus:

“Go back and report to what you have seen and heard: More of the hungry are fed, they have less disease, they are more educated, they live longer and are less destitute, they are subject to less violence and fewer wars, they are becoming more sensitive to their environment and more subject to laws which grant them more autonomy while fostering increasing harmony.”

   Thus, the ‘coming of Jesus’ does not constitute a single event, but is tangible in the rise of human complexity which is manifest in its improvements in human welfare.

The Next Post

This week we addressed Jesus from a sixth perspective, that of the ‘Second Coming’.  We have seen, through John, Paul, Teilhard, Rohr, and now Norberg, how ‘the Christ’ is a continually active agent in the evolution of the cosmos, present in the ever-continuing increase of complexity seen in all stages of the universe’s coming to be, and Jesus as the manifestation of this agency as it flowers in the human person.  The ‘Second Coming’ is less an event than it is a process, and the fruits of this process can be seen in the increase in human welfare which springs from its acknowledgement.

Building on this new view of Jesus, next week we will look at Jesus from a seventh and final perspective:  That of the traditional church concepts of Incarnation and Redemption.

   How can human evolution be seen in the improvement of ‘lifespan’?

Today’s Post

   In the last two weeks 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 improvements in human welfare 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.

We saw last week how these evolutionary trends substantiate Teilhard’s insights into the positive direction of human evolution.

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.  As 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 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 20^th 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’.

Seeing Lifespan Through Teilhard’s ‘Lens’

As we saw with the subject of ‘food’, these statistics prove out Teilhard’s insights,

• 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 appeared first in the West.
• Such innovation and invention require 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 cultures 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 saw 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”.

From the evolving perspective of the New Testament

Today’s Post

Last week we looked at the earliest writings about Jesus: the beginnings of the ‘New Testament’ as seen in Paul and the ‘synoptic’ gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. We saw how these gospels did not necessarily depict a Jesus who considered himself divine, and instead reflected a teacher whose ‘millennialist’ beliefs led him to preach correct moral behavior in preparation for the ‘coming’.
This week we’ll take a look at Jesus through the perspectives of Paul and John, in which Jesus is depicted as not only divine, but in some way, eternal.

Paul’s ‘Cosmic Christ’

As we saw last week, the three synoptic gospels depict Jesus as a gifted teacher executed for his beliefs but ‘exalted’ by God after his death. While Paul’s insights seem to have preceded these authors, his ’letters’ focused less on stories of Jesus’s life and more on summarizing them and showing how Jesus was more than just a human person. Paul introduces the concept of ‘the Christ’.
As Richard Rohr reflects Teilhard’s ‘lens’ in his book, “The Universal Christ”, ‘Christ’ is not Jesus’s last name but a recognition of the presence of a universal phenomenon which preceded Jesus in time, but which was ‘personified’ in him.
Bart Ehrman addresses this aspect of Jesus in his book, “How Jesus Became God”, starting with the insights of Paul and proceeding through the development of Christian theology that was to follow. Ehrman notes how, as Paul introduces the concept of ‘the Christ’ he sees the ‘exaltation of Jesus’ by God occurring during his life, as opposed to after his death as claimed by the synoptic gospels. This suggests to him that somehow Jesus must have been present in God’s creation from the beginning. This insight is the beginning of the concept that Jesus was in some way “divine”, and represents Paul’s initial attempt to see how such an overlap between ‘human’ and ‘divine’ was possible given the traditional Jewish dualistic understanding of these two concepts. In this, Paul is addressing the contrast between ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’, subjects which were to engage the new church for many years without successful resolution.

The Second Perspective: John

John seems to have written the fourth Gospel as many as thirty years after Paul, and surely had access to both the letters of Paul and the three synoptic gospels. We have seen how the synoptic gospels stressed the teachings of Jesus, his interpretations of the Torah and his millennialist beliefs, and how Paul summarized and expanded his message while seeing his presence somehow as eternal. John delves deeper into the nature of God and how it could be that Jesus himself could be understood as divine. In doing so, he carried Paul’s potentially dualistic insight one step further into the first integrated insight of God as both ‘immanent’ and ‘transcendent’.
As we saw last week, Bart Ehrman doesn’t consider the concept of a ‘God-Man’ as necessarily audacious during Jesus’ time due to the many similar and familiar myths of the day. John, however, goes into unprecedented detail of how Jesus was divine, indeed co-extensive with God, laying the groundwork for the doctrine of ‘the Trinity’ which would emerge later in church history.
With John we see a significantly different depiction of Jesus’ life and death from that of the synoptic gospels. Some examples, as listed by Ehrman:
– Jesus’ claims to divinity are much stronger, including self-identification with the ‘Son of Man’.
There are more stories of miracles, and the nature of the miracles is more supernatural
In the synoptic gospels, Jesus hesitates, often even refuses, to perform miracles as a sign of his identity. He even downplays miracles, and notes that they are also performed by others. In John, Jesus not only performs miracles frequently, but does so as signs to compel belief.
– Where the synoptic gospels see divinity as ‘awarded to Jesus after death’, and Paul sees Jesus as a human who is ‘exalted by God’ during his life, John sees Jesus as having somehow been ‘one with the Father’ from the beginning of time. It is this aspect of Jesus, ‘the Christ’ that John asserts.
– Where Paul and the synoptic gospels treat ‘love’ as the correct form of behavior necessary to earn salvation, John goes on to depict ‘love’ as an aspect of God ‘Himself’ and hence ‘ontological’.
– Where Paul identifies Jesus as ‘The Christ’ prophesied in the Old Testament, John goes much further, stressing his eternal kinship with God. He introduces the concept of ‘The Word’, which is an aspect of God by which creation proceeds and which is ‘made flesh’ in the human person of Jesus.

John’s Cosmic Christ

This last new concept in John’s depiction of Jesus is the most significant of all. It goes well beyond positing a close kinship between Jesus and God: visualizing Christ as eternal, as having always existing even as God has always existed and being present in the act of creation itself. To John, Christ is both ‘immanent’ as manifest as an aspect of God and ‘transcendent’ in Christ’s presence in Jesus.
John reflects the influence of Greek thinking with the idea of Jesus, as the human manifestation of ‘the Christ’, as “the Word”. As Ian Barbour (“Religion and Science”) states:
“The term word merges the logos, the Greek principle of rationality, with the Hebrew image of God’s Word active in the world. But then John links creation to revelation: “And the Word became flesh.” “
With this concept, John locates ‘the Christ’ as part of the same ontology in which creation itself was effected. Jesus, as ‘the Christ’, had always existed, along with God, and collaborated with God in the act of creation. Christ, in this context, represents the ‘blueprint’ for creation, in the same way that God represents the ‘act’ of creation. While the terms ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ are used to distinguish between these two facets, John doesn’t see this as reflecting a hierarchical ‘order’ in which one comes from the other, but an ontological ‘equality’ in which they are ‘co-temporal’. One is simply a facet of the same whole as is the other.
So, in John’s view, Jesus ‘the man’ is simply the inevitable appearance of the human aspect of the ‘word’, the personal aspect of creation as it unfolds. Jesus is indeed, “The Word become flesh.”

John, Love, God and Jesus

As we have seen, the idea of love has been generally addressed throughout history as a manifestation of emotion in human relationships. From this perspective, love is an ‘act’, or an emotion that underpins the act.
John overturns this common approach by identifying love as the very nature of God. He does not say that God loves, nor even that God loves perfectly. John says that God is love; that the very nature of God is love itself. By distinguishing the phenomenon of love from an action of God (found in the many lines of scripture that describe God as ‘loving’), John goes one step further and describes God as love itself, which opens the door to an ontological engagement with God that occurs in the act of loving.
From John’s perspective, we don’t love God so we can merit improvements in our life, or so that we can earn a position in the afterlife, we love God (and we love in general) because it is ultimately essential to our growth as human persons.
To John, we ‘become’ through a relationship with God which effects our personal growth.
We have seen this passage from John several times, but it’s worth reviewing in the light of his ‘Christology’:

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

In this simple, succinct statement, John offers a highly integrated and intimate perspective on not only who or what God is, but how ‘He’ is active in human life.
This ‘hermeneutic’, while burning brightly in John, seems to have dimmed with the Church’s development of a Christology which concentrated on such things as rationalizing Jesus’s death, identification of rules for life that insure a ‘salvation’ after death, and building a complex hierarchy that could serve as a stabilizing agent to society as it continued its expansion into new parts of the globe.
Instead of celebrating the incredible intimacy of ‘God’ as active in the very root of ‘Person’, God became further remote from life, first requiring Jesus as an intermediary to God, then saints as an intermediary to Jesus, and the Church as an intermediary to the saints. Today’s dilution of the influence of religion in Western society shows how dangerous such an evolution has become.

The Next Post

We have seen in the last two weeks how the person of Jesus has been depicted in the Christian ‘New Testament’, and how this depiction evolves over the three (Paul, Synoptic Gospels, John) groups of texts.
Next week we will take a look at how this emerging portrait of Jesus can be seen as we employ Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.

      From the Perspective of Paul and the Synoptic Gospels

Today’s Post

When we took a first look at religion through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ we viewed it as a potential tool for making sense of things and therefore as a resource for managing human evolution.
We went on to address traditional Western concepts of God and saw how using Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ permits the concept of God to be reinterpreted from its ‘supernatural’ hermeneutic into the recognition of and cooperation with the ‘cosmic spark’ that his ‘lens’ shows to be active in each of us.
We saw that this reinterpretation does not necessarily contradict the underlying kernels that lie at the basis of traditional Western expressions of belief.  In fact, as we have seen in the previous posts on ‘God’, these reinterpretations seem to resolve many of the dualities that are embedded in traditional religious tenets.  In doing so, it also begins to infuse religious concepts with insights which are more relevant to human life.
This week, we’ll begin to focus our inquiry into the cornerstone tenets of Western theology, beginning with the subject of Jesus, the basis of Christianity.

The Dualities in Christianity

We have addressed many of the manifestations of ‘duality’ that appear in Western theology, as found in Judaism, Christianity, and the Greek influences on the continuing evolution of Christianity.  Dualistic concepts such as body/soul, this life/the next, sacred/profane, divine/human, good/evil and many others can be found in much of the ‘holy scripture’ which underlies Western religious thinking.
Such instances of duality can also be found in both the scriptural references to Jesus (the ‘New’ testament) as well as the theological development which has continued to unfold as Christianity assimilated Greek thought and became established as an agent for stability in the Roman empire as it expanded into Northern Europe.
These threads of duality have persisted during the evolution of the West and, as we saw a few weeks back, can still be found in the appearance and inevitable branching of the new science of psychology.  These traces were highlighted in our history of psychology, which pointed out how Freud’s dystopian theories of ‘the self’ were heavily influenced by the Luther’s Protestant duality between ‘man as the image of God’ and ‘man’s sinful nature’.  We also saw how branches of mid-twentieth century psychology leaned towards a more positive basis, in resonance with the more positive of these two Christian perspectives.
These contradictions can still be seen today in the ongoing tension between Evangelical fundamentalism and Liturgical expressions of Christianity, as well as the wide divide between  the extremes of liberal and conservative politics.
And, as we shall see, another dimension of duality also rose as Christianity began to develop a ‘Christology’, a philosophical approach to understanding Jesus from Paul’s universal perspective, and how this new dimension gave rise to the novel idea of a “Trinity”.

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

The actual dates of the life of Jesus are not certain, and the first person to write about him seems to be Paul, some years after Jesus’ death.  All the other authors of the ‘New Testament’ seem to have come later, so it seems that no one who wrote of Jesus actually knew him but depended on stories which were prevalent in the many new gatherings which sprung up after his death.  We don’t seem to know much about these different ‘churches’ other than that they represented a very diverse collective memory of Jesus and his teachings.  Much of the diversity found in these churches reflected the dualities already present in the legacy Jewish scripture, (known by Christians as ‘Old Testament’ and by the Jews as ‘The Torah’), but many new dualisms emerged with the new thinking.
The ‘stories of Jesus’ that glued these early communities together all reflected the dualisms of their Jewish heritage, such as:
• Was God responsible for evil or was the source of evil elsewhere?
• Was God’s creation ‘good’ or ‘evil’?
• Was God a ‘loving father’ or a ‘vengeful judge’?
• Was The Torah “God’s Word”, and hence to be followed literally, or a perspective to be refined by latter teachers, such as Jesus?
Then there were the new dualisms, such as:
• Was Jesus God? Man?  God and man?
• What, specifically, was his relation to God?
• Was he ‘killed by God’ to atone for human sins?
The writings of Paul clearly show the diversity of belief that had appeared in the few years between Jesus’s death and Paul’s writing.  He consistently critiques beliefs found in the new churches, and his New Testament ‘letters’ contain instructions for ‘correct’ interpretations.

The First Perspective: The Synoptic Gospels

The first three ‘gospels’, stories of Jesus as formally accepted by the Christian church, are known as the synoptic gospels.  Thought to be authored by Mark, then Matthew and Luke, they seem to have been written some few years after Paul.  They depict Jesus as a Jewish man who was not considered to be more than a man during his lifetime, who offered often unpopular interpretations of the law of Moses (the Torah), ended up on the wrong side of the law, was condemned for political treason against Rome, was tortured and put to death by crucifixion, rose from the dead and ascended into heaven.
The synoptic gospels often depict Jesus as a ‘millennialist’, who predicted that God would soon intervene in human history and establish a kingdom on Earth, which would be led by the ‘Son of Man’.
Bart Ehrman, biblical historian, in his book, “How Jesus Became God”, notes that the ‘miraculous’ depictions of the synoptic gospels, such as the virgin birth, healing the sick and resurrection, are not uncommon in the many myths of the ancient world, and appear in many stories of other ‘God Men’ born to virgins who ascended to heaven.  He goes as far as to suggest that these events in the synoptic gospels were proclaimed by the post-Jesus church to overcome the shame of the nature of Jesus’ execution as a common criminal, and to appeal to those who would have been familiar with these myths.
However, for all the commonality of the Jesus story with other such stories, Paul introduces a unique facet which is entirely new: that of ‘the Christ’. The writings of Paul and the authors of the synoptic Gospels offer a picture of Jesus which emerged shortly after his death.   However, the writings of Paul surface a perspective on Jesus that is only lightly addressed in the synoptic gospels.  These writings open the door for a perspective of Jesus that will take the new church’s impact on human evolution far past that suggested as a ‘holy man’.

The Next Post

Next week we will how this perspective, first posed by Paul, was expanded significantly by the Gospel author, John, and then further evolved as the new church began to develop its ‘Christology’.

What can it mean to ‘love God?’

Today’s Post             

In the past several weeks we have focused Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ on the use of meditation from the finding of God to the use of ‘secular meditation’ (psychology) in finding ourselves.  We have followed this thread as it appears in the science of psychology, noting its evolution as ‘assisted secular meditation’, and saw how it can lead us to an understanding of the person that Kierkegaard believed “to be that self that one truly is” and in so doing, move toward ‘fuller being’.

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

A Relook at Love

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

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

Teilhard notes that in the systematic and ever-recursive action of evolution, from the big bang to the human person, the same phenomenon can be seen:

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

Teilhard’s ontological insight to this evolutionary phenomenon can be summarized as

“Fuller being results from closer union, and closer union emerges from fuller being.”

   Science observes this phenomenon as active in the evolution of simple matter from the first bosons which emerge from the initial pool of undifferentiated energy to the very complex molecules which constitute the building blocks of life.  In its focus on biological evolution as ‘replication’ the theory of Natural Selection assumes but fails to explain the continuation of this rise of complexity in living things.  Not only does complexity continue to rise in living things, it does so at a much higher rate.  This can be objectively traced in the evolution from simple cells to the neurons which underpin the human characteristic which we call ‘consciousness’.  Without such a fundamental principle of existence, evolution as we know it would not be possible, and the ‘stuff of the universe’ would remain forever at its initial featureless state.

Love As The Energy Of Evolution In The Human

Science documents an example of this upwelling of complexity in the ‘K-T’ event, some 65M years ago.  In this event, the fossil record shows the most evolved species on the planet as reptilian with the distinct increase in brain capacity found in the later reptiles.  After their extinction, the flow of increased complexity, active in the reptiles for millions of years, began to rise anew in the increasing evolution of mammals.  This phenomenon is echoed in the assertion by Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science, that

“If the tape of evolution were rewound, it would result species different from those seen today.”

    As we have seen, we can hardly expect such a powerful and inexorable upwelling of complexity, acting and increasing for over fourteen billion years, to stop with the human person.  There is every reason to recognize this agency of evolution as just as active in humans today as it has been throughout the history of the universe.  If we concur with Teilhard that humans are “evolution become aware of itself”, the question remains: how can we see it as active in our lives?

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

These energies are manifold, and different types of energy come into play at different rungs of complexity.  For example, gravity was unable to influence evolution until particles acquired mass.  This effect precipitated the gravitational compaction of Helium and Hydrogen atoms into stars which in turn effected complex atoms which in turn enabled molecules.  The forces of chemistry were mute until the arrival of molecules.  And the forces of love could not play their unifying role until the entities of evolution became conscious.  Love, seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, is therefore the latest manifestation of this energy: the one which effects human ‘complexification”.

Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, the increasing complexity of living things results in the phenomenon of consciousness.  This subjects entities to the influence of energies so subtle as to be immeasurable yet so powerful as to energize the ascent of complexity to a level which is ‘consciousness aware of itself’.

John Haught provides a very succinct insight into this phenomenon.

“Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ (the human person) 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.”

The Action of Love

Teilhard addresses how this new manifestation of cosmic energy plays out in human relationships.

In a nutshell, he saw that our personal evolution, our personal growth, is the manifestation of the continuation of ‘complexification’ in the human species.  Teilhard sees this complexification as occurring in two basic recursive steps as we engage in the process of ‘becoming persons’.

He refers to the first step as ‘ex-centration’, in which we become more aware of our environment, and of other persons, and begin to lose the self-centeredness that framed our infancy.  As we become more adept at this, we become more open to others, and are more able to allow our relationships to mature.

We saw three weeks ago how Carl Rogers observes the evolving characteristics of maturation in therapy.   Rogers echoes Teilhard’s ‘ontological’ insight into love when he states that

“Change appears to come about through experience in a relationship”.

   As our relationships deepen, we can become aware of the regard which others hold for us, which in turn offers us a clearer, more objective, and more holistic vision of ourselves.

This results in the second step of ‘centration’, in which we become more ‘the person that we are’, and less ‘the person that we thought we were’.  And as we saw with the clinical observations of Dr. Rogers, we can become the more authentic and less centered person that we are capable of becoming.  As we become more adept at self-management, we are more able to engage in deep, personal relationships.  Thus, the cycle continues in a convergent spiral, increasingly focused on deeper maturity through closer relationships by which we enable deeper maturity.

Teilhard sees this convergent spiral acting within us as

“Fuller being from closer union.  Closer union from fuller being.”

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

Thus love, understood now as more ontological than emotional, is indeed a powerful force for our continued evolution.  As we grow, we become more able to love and thus more complete as persons.  As we become more complete, we are able to love more deeply.  As in the case of every step of evolution from the big bang to the present, we as entities unite to effect an entity which is more capable of uniting and in doing so thus becomes more ‘complex’.

Loving God

So, how does this approach to human love and evolution lead to a relationship with this universal force which is active in us?  What does it mean to say that we ‘love’ the ‘ground of being’?  How does Teilhard’s recursive dynamic of love play out in our relationship with God?

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

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

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

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

Seen thusly, God isn’t engaged as a supernatural person who requires our adoration, but rather in the recognition of the action of a universal force in each of us as clearly expressed by Teilhard as he tells of

 “…hearing the voice of the Gospel, guaranteed by divine success, speaking to me from the depth of the night:

              “It is I, be not afraid.”

Even more to his point, he tells of what can happen such recognition arrives within us:

”..I doubt that 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.”

The Next Post

Having seen over the past few weeks how God can be understood, even recognized, even ‘loved’, as the sum total of all the forces of the universe brought to bear on that which effects our beings which are conscious of our consciousness, we can go on to see at how such an understanding of God can be found in a reinterpreted version of the most basic precepts of the Western systems of science and religion.