Monthly Archives: October 2018

October 25 – Managing the Noospheric Risks, Part 3

Leave a reply

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Teilhard  places ‘spirituality’ into the context of evolution,  in which context it can be seen not as a ‘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 Norberg, who articulates 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 optimisim.

This week I’d like to 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 both religion and science occur in human history.

As many thinkers, particularly Johathan Sacks, point out, religion originally began as a very early human activity characterized by such right brain activities as instinct and intuition as enterprises which helped to making sense of both themselves and their groupings.   Stories such as ‘creation narratives’ provided 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 from September, 2015,The History of Religion , a record of the rise of human left brain thinking began with Greeks

The first movement toward some level of synthesis between the right and left modes of thought can be  seen in the New Testament  Paul, then John, who 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 departure 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 such application, but was initially seen as competitive with the prevailing right brain concepts of the time, and hence threatening to the established church hierarchy (which is still stuck in many of the traditional dualisms which accept the dissonance between right and left brain thinking).

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 that the primacy of the person and his freedom require more than ‘permission’, they also require such things as faith and love (as understood in the Teilhardian context), which science is hard pushed to articulate.

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”.

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 can disappear.  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 in which our intuition is enhanced by our empiricism, and in which our empiricism can build upon our intuition.  We effect our own evolution by use of both modes of thinking.

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 extrement 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 fact that the facets of empowerment which he documents:  personal freedom and improved relationships also happen to be the cornerstones of Western religion, strongly suggest that the continuation of human evolution is based on enhancement of them: an empowerment fostered and strengthened by our increased understanding of them,  of how they work and of how to deepen  them.

Something else is necessary.  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 200K 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 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.”

occurred only two hundred years ago.  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 an appreciation of the pace of evolution must be learned.  Certainly it is not fast enough for most of us, especially if we live in ‘developing’ countries, watched our children suffer from curable diseases, hunger or war, or born with the ‘wrong’ skin color or ‘sinful’ dispositions.   It’s less important to rue the pace if human evolution than to appreciate its ‘axis’.

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 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 move ourselves forward.

Next week we will continue this line of thought further.

October 18 – Managing the Noospheric Risks, Part 2

Leave a reply

Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at managing the ‘noospheric risks’ that we can see as evolution rises through the human species.  We boiled down the essential approaches to ‘building the noosphere’ (from the Post of October 4)

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

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

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

Spirit and Matter: Spirituality and Progress

We have noted, as both Teilhard and Norberg show, that no human movement forward (towards continued improvement in human welfare, toward increased complexity) occurs without some unplanned and unwanted consequence.  Skeptics of ‘secular progress’ decry the fact that such progress is meaningless if unwanted consequences ensue, and therefore decrease true spirituality in favor of 9simply) materialistic improvements .  Such critiques highlight what is seen as the futility of humans to overcome their ‘sinful nature’ and grow spiritually.  This criticism is well countered by Teilhard in his understanding of spirituality as simply a facet of ‘the stuff of the universe’.

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

And

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

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

Recognizing this, as Teilhard does so succinctly, bridges the gap between the ‘spitituality’ so prized by religionists and the ‘progress’ equally  prized by secularists.  In his view, they are not opposites, but simply two facets of a single integrated reality.  Both Teilhard and Norberg would agree that, properly understood, spirituality is embodied in any progress by which human welfare is advanced.  More succinctly, spirituality is the agency by which matter becomes more complex, therefore more evolved.

Thus the religionists are correct: the world needs more spirituality if it is to succeed.  However, with Teilhard’s more universal  understanding of ‘spirituality’ we can now see that spirituality is that which underlies the evolution of the ‘stuff of the universe’ (eg: matter, eg: us).  With this understanding, the idea of spirituality rises from the ‘otherworldly’ nature which requires us to look down on matter to one in which matter and its evolutionary rise in complexity are equally important to the spirituality which underpins it.

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

This perspective doesn’t mean that the human species will be ‘saved’ by all forms of religion or science; the ills of both of them are commonly enough reported in the free press, but the successes of both are embodied, as Teilhard, Norberg and Rohr point out, in the freedom of the individual, the recognition of the importance of relationships, and in the trust that these two facets of existence will

lead to a better future.  Compromising any of these three will compromise the continuation of human evolution.

As Richard Rohr succinctly puts it:

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

The Next Post

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

Next week we will take a third look at this new perspective so we can better understand how it can make a difference in where we go from here.

October 11 – Managing the Noospheric Risks, Part 1

2 Replies

Today’s Post

Last week we took another look at ‘articulating the noosphere’, this time in the light of Teilhard’s insights and the many facts which Johan Norberg cites in his survey of exactly how evolution can be seen to proceed in the human.  We saw how well the forecasts for the future that were posited by Teilhard early in the last century are being borne out with Norberg’s contemporary statistics.

We also saw how, Teilhard asserts, that  to continue the rise of complexity in the human species, which is the same as continuing its evolution, we must increase our knowledge of the noosphere so that we can learn to cooperate with its ‘laws’.  This increasing understanding is also necessary for us to deal with the ‘risks’ to continued human evolution .  This week we will take a look at how both religion and science , properly understood, are up to this task.

The Axis of Evolution

Almost every scientific approach to biological evolution uses the metaphor of ‘a tree’, as in “The Tree of Life”.  The metaphor is obviously sound, in that it shows that every living thing comes from a previous form, and with the new science of DNA available, each new branch reveals details of the form from which it came.

Unfortunately, the Darwinist approach to how such forms emerged is the predominant explanation for biological evolution.  As such, it assumes a ‘trial and error’ approach subject to a wide range of random events and thus relies on a causation popularly known as ‘survival of the fittest’.  Therefore, most scientists adhere to the belief that there is no underlying causation for the continuation of evolution:  it is ‘random’.

Teilhard notes how such an approach falls very short of providing an understanding of evolution at the universal level.  He cites scientific discoveries in the last century that describe how the fundamental universe has unfolded from pure energy, progressing through stages including the precipitation of matter from this initial state of energy through stages in which these initial primordial infinitesimal granules of ‘the stuff of the universe’ grow slowly but steadily from simpler to more complex entities until the cell appears.  It is not until this point, some four billion years ago, that the ‘trial and error’ phase of evolution can begin.

Teilhard refuses to admit some sort of divine intervention in this story, insisting that matter and energy, in their initial manifestations, contain a ‘coefficient of complexity’ by which each stage of evolution occurs as a result of this implicit factor, including the step from molecular to cellular entities.  Hence, this ‘coefficient’, while acting in all previous stages, necessarily takes new forms as the complexity of the entities increases.

From this perspective, the orderly ‘tree of life’ can now be seen to have a core element that links it to the preceding ten billion years in which complex molecules emerged from pure energy.  Teilhard refers to this core element as providing an ‘axis of evolution’, and recognizing that it affords us with a metric which unites all three eras of evolution: pre life, life and reflective life.  (Teilhard uses the term ‘reflective life’ to demark conscious life from life conscious of its consciousness.)  While this approach recognizes the impacts of random events, both in the form of cosmic radiation which modifies the DNA of living tissue as well as in the form of interplanetary collisions such as the K-T extinction, Teilhard points to the fact that in spite of them, evolution still can be clearly seen to proceed in the direction of greater complexity over time.

Continuing Evolution in the Human Species

Recognizing this phenomenon of ‘universal complexification’ allows us a starting place to continuing our ‘learning curve’ about the noospheric ‘laws’, a process that is necessary if we are to insure that such complexification continues in our species.

While science sees ‘learning the rules’ as digging deeper and further in the past for clues to how the universe operates, religion has assembled a complex and frequently contradictory set of guidelines for human behavior.  The ‘continuation’ that we seek must rest on both foundations, but only as they are ‘reinterpreted’ in the light of both Teilhard’s forecasts and Norberg’s statistics.

These two perspectives, of course, represent the two most significant human undertakings: science and religion.  Often seen as opposites, and an instance of a profound human ‘duality’, a more appropriate approach might be to see them as simply enterprises  which are influenced by the two modes of human thinking represented by the ‘right’ and ‘left’ brains, and reflected by instincts and intuition on the first side, and empiricism and analysis on the left.

Seen thusly, an integrated understanding of the noosphere requires a synthesis of these two venerable enterprises.  Such a synthesis, in turn, requires a shift of the understanding of God on the one hand, from the anthropomorphic, Greek-influenced model which evolved in the West to Blondel’s ‘ground of being’ and Teilhard’s ‘principle of evolution’.  Teilhard understood the goal of his thinking as “a clearer disclosure of God in the world”.

On the side of Science, Norberg’s identification of the objective measures of human evolution move the process of evolution from a random series of meaningless consequences to a recognition that not only is evolution not random, but in the articulation of its movement, there are indeed guidelines for its continuation.  Norberg implicitly recognizes underlying principle of human evolution, Teilhard’s ‘axis’, as it manifests itself as a necessary ingredient in the increase in human welfare that he documents so thoroughly in his book, “Progress”.  While there are many other causations at play, such as weather catastrophes, even cosmic accidents, which are indeed random, more important to human evolution are the freedoms and relations that he documents.

This brings us back to the focus of the Blog, “The Secular Side of God”.  We can now see that a fresh understanding of the ‘noosphere’ requires a relook at both Science and Religion, and this relook offers the potential of seeing these two great enterprises as two sides of a single coin, and not as history would have it, systems in opposition.

Returning to the ‘sphere’ as a metaphor, but in a different way than we have seen with his explanation of increasing population over decreasing available space, Teilhard notes that Religion and Science can be seen as parallel longitudes which decrease their distance as they approach the pole.  At the equator, they are at their maximum distance, but as evolution proceeds, they approach one another with an eventual coherence at the pole.

Just as we saw the ‘laws of the noosphere’ becoming clearer as we crossed the equator (with the ‘knee in the curves’ that begin to manifest themselves beginning two hundred years ago), we are now beginning to see (as both Teilhard and Norberg evidence today) a similar demarcation in the systems which energize this movement manifest themselves.

The movement of these systems toward such coherence marks the evolution of both enterprises towards their application to  the inevitable risks to human evolution that we have charted, and insure our continued ‘march toward the future’.

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at how the approaches represented by Teilhard and Norberg can be seen to ones which permit us to see how Science and Religion can ‘team up’ to insure our continued evolution.

Next week we will take a second look at how could be made to happen.

October 4 – Where Have We Got to?

Leave a reply

Today’s Post

Last week we took a final look at the risks that Teilhard saw in the continuation of human evolution. This post concluded the part of the Blog which has seen how Teilhard understands human evolution, and how it can be objectively assessed.

Beginning last summer we summed up Teilhard’s perspective on Articulating the Noosphere and Living the Theological Virtues.  We went on to explore his metaphor of evolution as the advance of humanity over an imaginary sphere, and how as we come to the equator, everything begins to change as the increase in human population no longer finds empty space to pour into, and consequently begins to fold in on itself.

We then began to address how this new phenomena effects a change in human evolution by starting with the question,  Is Human Evolution Proceeding and how Would We Know?, and proceeded to answer the question with evidence from Johan Norberg which quantifies such metrics.  We also saw how his quantification (beginning with July 26- Fuel as a Measure of Human Evolution) illustrates how Teilhard’s insights are being borne out today, but as we saw, not without risks.

This week we’ll begin to address how all this fits into our focus of “The Secular Side of God”.

A Relook at ‘Articulating the Noosphere’

Teilhard believed that understanding how evolution proceeds both in our lives and in our societies depends on developing an understanding of the structure, the warp and woof, of the ‘noophere’:  the ‘mileu’ which appears in cosmic evolution with the appearance of the human.  Without denying science’s understanding of evolution as seen in the stages of pre-life and biological life, he offers a perspective on not only how such evolution can continue on in the human species, but how the ‘articulations’ of the spheres of ‘pre-life’ and ‘life’ as described by science can be seen to continue in the ‘noosphere’.   His straightforward observation that ‘evolution effects complexity’ is just as valid in the noosphere as it was realms of Physics and Biology.  This observation, then, is the key to beginning to understand the structure of the ‘noosphere’.  To understand how evolution works in the human is to understand how such ‘complexification’ can be understood as acting in both our personal lives and in the unfolding of society.

As we saw last week, Teilhard summarizes the unfolding of such complexity in the human species as we

“…continually find new ways of arranging (our) elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space” by “a rise in interiority and liberty within a whole made up of reflective particles that are now more harmoniously interrelated.”

   And as we have seen in the past few weeks, Johan Norberg offers “A tornado of evidence” on how Teilhard’s projections of how “a rise in interiority and liberty” constantly effect “new ways of arranging ourselves” but requires “harmonious interrelations”.  Effectively, in Norberg’s evidence we see how Teilhard’s approach to understanding how the classical duality, “The one vs the many” plays out as we get better at ‘articulating the noosphere’.

And, as the subject of the blog has taken shape, the ‘reinterpretation of religion’, we can see more clearly now why such an undertaking is important for our continued evolution.  Classical Western religion, entwined as it has become with superstition, mythology and weighted down by medieval philosophy, nonetheless contains within it nuggets of true understanding of those ‘articulations’ which Teilhard asserts we must uncover and follow if we are going to continue to move forward.  Western religion is rife with teachings which address Teilhard’s  three essential elements of human evolution:

–          New ways of arranging ourselves (our cultural/social structures and how they expand across the globe through ‘globalization’)

–          A rise in interiority (our person) and liberty (our autonomy)

–          Harmonious interrelations (relationships which are capable of forming ‘psychisms’ capable of employing increases in our person and our liberties to effect new arrangements)

but as we have seen, require reinterpretation to uncover their relevance and focus to the job at hand.  Such reinterpretation of religion is necessary for it to provide signposts to the future.

Continuing the March to the Future

So, Teilhard asserts, to continue the rise of complexity in the human species, which is the same as continuing its evolution, we must increase our knowledge of the noosphere so that we can learn to cooperate with its ‘laws’.  As Teilhard forecasts and Norberg cites, in the past two hundred years we have seen distinctive examples of both.  Since the mid-1800s, as Norberg maps in detail, the speed at which we better understand what works and what doesn’t in an increasingly tight spiral of ‘trial and error’,  is ever increasing.   While Norberg and Teilhard both address this phenomenon, they also address the underlying evolutionary ‘physics’ which underlies it.

Norberg essentially agrees with Teilhard that human persons must be free to capitalize on their ‘interiority’ and be given the ‘liberty’ to continuously rearrange both their personal perspectives to identify rearrangements which can be attempted and either used as stepping stones to new arrangements or corrected if they do not effect an improvement, and to engage with other persons to freely form ‘psychisms’ to perform these tasks.

This should come as no surprise to many of us, put into these terms.  For the past hundred years, scientists and those in technical fields have experienced increasing participation in ‘psychisms’ as well as the satisfaction of using their innate skills and education to design, develop, field and deal with the consequences of their products.  They were not necessarily explicitly aware of how they were ‘articulating the noosphere’, nor always conscious of how their participation in their work groups contributed to their personal growth, but grew into an appreciation of the contributions of others as well as of the limited autonomy of those groups which bore fruit.  They were effectively participating in small ‘Teilhardic’ rearrangements.

The Next Post

For the last few weeks we have been exploring both the mechanism of increasing complexity in the human as well as the many examples of how this mechanism is playing out.  We’ve looked at both examples and risks- while progress is being made, how can we insure its continuation?

Next week we will return to address how religion, ‘divested’ of Dawkins’ ‘baggage’ can be reinterpreted to provide both relevance and functionality to such insurance.