Monthly Archives: May 2019

May 30, 2019 – The ‘Whole Brain’ Model of Human Evolution

Leave a reply

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Today’s Post 

Last week we continued our decomposition of Teilhard’s ‘convergent spiral’ model of universal evolution into how the dynamic at work in this spiral is manifested in human life as we advance our evolution through the transition from ‘instinctual’ to ‘volitional’ behavior.  We took a look at how the two brain lobes, the ‘left’ and ‘right’ hemispheres, are associated with ‘intuitive’ and ‘empirical’ modes of thinking and how for a fully human approach to such thinking, they must be used in balance with each other.  In the words of Jonathan Sacks:

“Think of ‘right’ and ‘left’ not as precise neuroscientific descriptions, but merely as metaphors for different modes of engagement with the world.”

   As he notes, most human dysfunctionality can be placed at the doorstep of dualities in which existence is understood in terms of opposites (love-hate, life-death, rich-poor, we-they, etc).  Advancing our evolution, therefore, calls for us to overcome these dualities by understanding the ‘noosphere’ as the single, integrated thing that it is, and this requires us to see it in a single integrated manner.

This week we will extend our look at the human thinking system from the neo cortex to the other two brain segments which contribute to our awareness, and thus extend our view to ‘the whole brain’.

Thinking With the Whole Brain

The neo cortex brain is clearly the most recent product of evolution, and one unique to humans, but there is yet another dimension to the task of ‘thinking with the whole brain’.  We have addressed this facet several times in this blog, but to recap: the limbic and ‘reptilian’ brains contribute significant stimuli to the neo cortex brain that we discussed last week.  In the human, the two lobes of the neo cortex brain are located ‘above’ (in evolution as well as vertical position at the top of the spine) the limbic and reptilian brains.  As we have seen many times in this blog, we are never without the stimuli of these ‘lower’ brains, which wield great influence over our ability to make sense of life.  As we saw six weeks ago (April 11), not only are these stimuli powerful, they are active in our personal growth, at work very early in our life and long before our neo cortex brain brains mature.  As a result, their stimuli is in play much earlier than our reasoning process can mature.

Further, their stimuli makes its way to our neo cortex much quicker than our neo cortex can formulate a reasoned response.  Add to this the factor the fact that their stimuli are capable of producing the pleasurable effects of dopamine, and it is easy to understand why it can be difficult to ‘being reasonable’.  This necessity for the neo cortex brain to formulate an objective decision in the face of powerful and more immediate stimuli from the lower brains is an aspect of the long (in comparisons to other animals) gestation of humans.  As we mature, for a comparatively long period of time, our ‘volitional’ skills lag our ‘instinctive’ responses.

It’s not that we have to learn to ignore these two ‘lower’ sources of stimuli, as their activity is essential to human evolution, but it is necessary to develop the skill of consciously and objectively dealing with them for us to be able to effect our own evolution as human persons.  Trusting our instincts, evolved over two billion years, is necessary for a full life, but the ability to modulate them when necessary is essential to the objective thinking that underpins our continued evolution.

As Richard Rohr puts it:

“If we do not move beyond our early motivations of personal security, reproduction and survival (the fear-based preoccupations of the ‘reptilian’ brain), we will never proceed beyond the lower stages of human or spiritual development.”

   As we have noted several times in this blog, the term ‘spiritual’ is not to be understood as other-worldly or supernatural, but as Teilhard understood it as the flow of evolutional energy by which we (and everything in the universe) is lifted up the convergent spiral to a higher levels of complexity.   In his words,

“Fuller being in closer union.”

   So, ‘thinking with the whole brain’ not only involves understanding our ‘noosphere’ in an increasingly integrated manner, using both our instinctual and empirical ‘modes of engagement with the world’, but being able to modulate ‘lower brain’ stimuli (such as the ‘fear-based preoccupations of the reptilian brain’) as well.

 

The Next Post

This week we took a second look at a model of the unique human brain as a step to addressing a more comprehensive skill of using the evolutionary gift of human thought as we go about trying to live our lives in cooperation with Teilhard’s ‘winds of the Earth.”

Next week we will take a deeper look at the skill of using the ‘whole brain’ to assess the ‘noosphere’ and further understand our place in it and how we can develop the skill necessary to cooperate with the flow of evolutional energy as it rises through the human species.

May 23, 2019 – The ‘Two-Lobe Brain’ Model of Human Evolution

Leave a reply

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Today’s Post

Over the past several weeks we have been decomposing Teilhard’s ‘convergent spiral of evolution’ from the cosmic, universal, level to that of ‘ordinary’ human life.  In doing so we saw how we can begin to envision how the fourteen million years of cosmic evolution continues not only in the human species, but in our individual lives as well.

We have navigated this terrain by the use of models.  Teilhard’s spiral model offers an insight into how ‘lesser’ things become things ‘greater’ in complexity over cosmic eons of evolutionary time.  As convergent it also illustrates how this increase occurs ‘exponentially’, how it becomes ‘tighter’ as it continues through the noosphere.

In doing so we have moved from the cosmic spiral model to the personal model of ‘the virtues’, in which we can begin to envision the ‘attitudes’, the three ‘stances’ that we can take as we go about trying to live our lives in cooperation with Teilhard’s ‘winds of the Earth.’  We saw how the three attitudes of Faith, Hope and Love show up in the human as manifestations of Teilhard’s three universal components of the convergent spiral: fruitful unity, resulting complexity and increasing response to the agency of universal ‘complexification’.

This presents a highly unified and coherent concept of how universal evolution ‘changes state’ as it becomes more complex, resulting in an insight into how the human person fits into cosmic evolution, not as imposed from without, or emerging from chance and chaos, but a as a ‘natural’ entity.  Or as the song goes, “No less than the trees or the stars”.

However, as we have also noted, this comes with a price: the need for human ‘volition’ if this tendril of evolution is to continue.  And as so many philosophers have noted, the growth to human maturity is marked with difficulty.

In this blog, we have addressed many of the ‘risks’ to continued human evolution which constitute the locus for this difficulty. We have also noted that many of them present themselves as ‘dualities’ in which human life is depicted as options or positions that we can take which are in significant opposition.  Such dualities are seen in such concepts as ‘this world’ vs ‘the next’, ‘good’ vs ‘evil’, ‘natural’ vs ‘supernatural’, ‘damnation’ vs ‘redemption’, and many more.

These dualities demark the occasions of our maturity that call for us to make choices.  As Teilhard has noted, making the choices which overcome such ‘ontological’ dualities is one of the necessary steps toward our increased personal and social evolution.  And further, one of the steps toward such overcoming occurs when we begin to better understand both the universal process of evolution and our part in it.  As Teilhard notes, understanding evolution in this way permits us to see these ‘dualities’ as simple ‘spectra’: less ‘this vs that’ than ‘this and that’, with both present in some cohesive way.

This week we will continue the ‘decomposition’ of Teilhard’s evolutionary spiral as it manifests itself in the human person.  We will move from the ‘virtues’ to addressing how we can use the gifts of evolution more fruitfully in moving toward a cohesive and integrated mode of being.

Thinking ‘Objectively’: Beyond Duality, Towards Complexity

We have looked at Norberg’s ‘articulations of the noosphere’ which clearly and objectively show an exponential increase in human welfare (and hence human evolution) since 1850, and in which he cites the increased Western value of human freedom as the underlying causality.  This finding illustrates the action of the three virtues discussed last week:

–          Fruitful Unity: Each step of the exponential increase described by Norberg is precipitated by an action of human collective insight, a sharp and clear example of Love as the action of the energy of evolution manifesting itself in the human

–          Resulting complexity: As a result of each step, the complexity of society can be seen to increase in terms of more efficient organization, the reduction of human ills such as wars, famine and disease, and increased human lifespan

–           Increasing response to the agency of universal complexification:  Through the increases in education and communication since 1850, each new step of evolution provides a stage for the next as individual persons become better educated at the same time that collective society is raised to the next level

Norberg also highlights an aspect of this welfare that is less ‘championed’ by Western liberals: the role of wealth in this increase.  Generally, the liberal position calls for a more ‘equitable’ distribution of wealth as a necessary facet of human welfare in opposition to the conservative valuation of capitalism as necessary for the health of society.  Norberg’s extensive and well-cited data shows a different dialectic: Increased wealth as necessary for increased welfare.  Capitalism isn’t, in his view, the opposite of poverty, but rather the underlying solution to it.  Yes, the inequity remains, but not in such a way that poverty increases as a result of the rise of wealth, as if the rich add to their wealth by taking it from the poor.  He sees the rapid (and unprecedented) decrease of world poverty as a direct result of increase of world wealth.

This is an example of the overcoming of a traditional duality: ‘rich’ vs ‘poor’, in which there may be an unequal distribution of ‘rich’, but this is occurring today with an unprecedented decrease in the number of ‘poor’.

This is another example, as well, of Sacks’ observation that to become whole, which implies that we are evolving, we must think with both sides of our brain.  The ability to objectively see both sides of an issue, for example, often requires accessing the issue both intuitively and empirically, from both the left and right brain hemispheres.  Sacks sees such integrated action as looking at a dualism ‘wholistically’.

As he understands such ‘wholism’:

“It is not incidental that Homo Sapiens has been gifted with a bicameral brain that allows us to experience the world in two fundamentally different ways, as subject and object, ‘I’ and ‘Me’, capable of standing both within and outside our subjective experience.  In that fact lies our moral and intellectual freedom, our ability to mix emotion and reflection, our capacity for both love and justice, attachment and detachment, in short, our humanity.”

   In this statement, Sacks is illustrating the overcoming of several traditional dualisms: subject/object, emotion/reason, love/justice, and attachment/detachment.

Sacks offers a highly integrated insight into human evolution as seen in the increasing skill of thinking with both sides of the brain.  He traces the modes of human thinking through the development of written language from the Semitic to the Roman languages, from right-to-left expression and from the appearance of empirical (left-brain) conceptualization as it emerges from the legacy intuitional (right-brain) legacy.   The trick, he notes, is to find the ‘right’ balance between the two human powers of understanding represented by the skills of empiricism and intuition.

While this is one of the ways that we can increase our skill of using the human resources provided to us by evolution, there is yet another aspect to consider.

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at a model of the unique human brain as a step to addressing a more comprehensive skill of using the evolutionary gift of human thought as we go about trying to live our lives in cooperation with Teilhard’s ‘winds of the Earth.”

Next week we will look at an extension of this model which addresses the rest of the human brain system as we consider ‘thinking with the whole brain’.

May 16, 2019 – How Does The Spiral Of Evolution Work in Human Life?

Leave a reply

Today’s Post

In the last two weeks, we have turned our focus to Teilhard’s ‘spiral evolutionary model’ of the sweep of evolution from the beginnings of the universe itself to the current manifestation of complexity on our planet today.  We saw last week in Teilhard’s model of the converging spiral how complexity, his metric of evolution, could be seen as increasing in three facets: the unification of entities, resulting in the increased complexity of their offspring which in turn renders them more responsive to the ‘complexifying energy of evolution’.  As ‘consciousness’ emerges as a measure of complexity, leading to ‘consciousness aware of itself’ (the human person), we can also see how such recognition can eventually lead us to awareness of the process by which we become persons.

The Presence of the Evolutionary Spiral in the Human Person

We noted how Teilhard’s spiral model encompasses the entire sweep of cosmic evolution.  How can this be seen as reflected in the noosphere?

Such complexification can be seen in the phenomenon of personification.  As we become more aware of the energies from which our personal evolution evolves and continues in us, we can become more aware of how cooperation with them can be enhanced.

As Teilhard points out, the energy by which entities move along the spiral unites them in such a way as to:

–           advance their complexity (eg atoms into molecules)

–           become less’ intrinisic’ (eg ‘built into’ the entities as in atoms-to-molecules)

–          become less ‘instinctual’ (eg as in mammalian nurturing)

–          and become more ‘volitional’ (eg as in humans-to-humans).

As can be seen in this brief list, the energy of evolution itself changes state from chemical principles to biological imperatives, to emergence in the human as the ‘energy of relationship’.  In this series of transitions, love emerges as the current manifestation of the cosmic energy by which the universe evolves.  As we saw in the post on love as energy, love is much more than an emotional encouragement for relationship and procreation as it effects not only an increase in complexity of human offspring, but has an ‘ontological’ influence in the evolution of the human person himself.

Hence, we can see the ‘spiral of evolution’ equally at work in the human person as it is in the universe.  Learning to cooperate with the current state of evolutionary energy not only enriches our relationships, (which increases the complexity of our society), but enriches ourselves.  Such enrichment in turn increases our ability to enrich our relationships.  In such a way, the ‘universal spiral’ can be seen to be active in each human life.

However, as we saw, a successful relationship requires us to move from affection as an instinct to one which requires conscious decision.  The practice of ‘centration’ and ‘excentration’ described in the May 10, 2018 post (referenced above) requires us to modulate our lower brain stimuli as well as the resultant egoism that we have seen in our treatment of ‘noospheric risks’.   As the result of the ‘change of state’ seen in the energy of love, love becomes more a ‘decision’ than a response to an emotional imperative.  It becomes more ‘volitional’ in the human than it was ‘instinctual’ in the mammal.

That said, knowing what we know about the universal spiral of evolution, how can we map it into human life so that we can better understand it and respond to its new manifestation of energy?  What sort of ‘model’ can we use as a guide?

The Three Virtues Model

In the series of posts in which we looked at reinterpreting the concepts of Western theology, we addressed the idea of the Theological Virtues.   Just as we addressed the unique quality of the energy of human evolution as ‘spirituality’ in the context of secular phenomenon, we saw these three familiar ‘virtues’ as three ‘stances’ that we can take as we go about trying to live our lives in cooperation with Teilhard’s ‘winds of the Earth.”  Just as Teilhard’s model of the convergent spiral can be applied to better understand universal evolution, the ‘theological’ virtues can be seen as fitting into this model as a secular guide to applying it to human life

As we have seen, the ‘spiral’ model applies equally throughout the process of universal evolution.  It works at the level of the atom just as it does at the level of the human.  The ‘virtues model’, however, only works at the level of the human, but is an example of how universal processes can be seen at work in the ‘noosphere’.  These three ‘virtues’ are the human equivalent of the three universal effects of the spiral:  unity, response to evolutional energy and rise in complexity.

The first of the three human components of this converging spiral is ‘Love’, the component of unity.  As we have addressed in many places in this Blog, Teilhard’s assertion that the idea of love must be freed from its popular understanding as a strong emotion and allowed to flower as the energy of the power of evolution to unite its products in ways that increase their complexity.  Love is less an act of emotion or instinct that encourages our relationships and more one of uniting us in such a way that we become more what it is possible for us to become.  To Teilhard, love is ‘ontological’: to love is to become.  It is the energy which unites in such a way as to move us forward on the spiral.

The second component is that of ‘Faith’.   Faith is the pull of our lives toward the axis of evolution and hence the human response to the universal evolutional principle of complexification.

As we become more adept at ‘articulating the noosphere’, we begin to better understand the structure and the workings of the reality in which we are enmeshed.  Such articulations of the universe will be undermined, however, if they are not preceded by a ‘faith’ that they exist at all.  While this sounds religious, imagine if Newton had not first believed that there was some objective, measurable and most of all ‘comprehensible’ force by which objects moved from their static state.  Faith is the first step toward increasing our grasp of reality and enhancing our response to the energy of evolution.

The third of these three components is ‘Hope’, which encourages us on our journey toward our potential for increased complexity as we move forward on the spiral.  One of the gifts of evolution in the human is the ability to look into the future, as murky and risky as that might be.  If our look into the future is pessimistic and without hope, such negativity inhibits our movement up the spiral, toward a future in which the results of our growth are bleak, the fruit of our love is rejection, and sees us as hopelessly inadequate to build a full life.  Without hope, the evolutionary power of love, itself guaranteed over the fourteen or so billion years of universal becoming, is diminished.   Hope is that component of evolution by which we ‘rise’ as we move forward on the spiral.

The Next Post

This week we took another look at the mechanism of human evolution, and how recognizing and beginning to understand it is key to the important process of replacing ‘instinct’ with ‘volition’ as we begin to consciously take the helm of our evolution at the same time that we are beginning to better understand the winds, waves and tides that constitute our ‘noosphere’.

We saw how the three components of the ‘theological virtues’ can be seen in a purely secular context as the three components of our individual personal evolution.  These three components are the personal instantiation of a cosmic process which takes us ever onward, upward and inward.

Next week we will look at yet another model, one which addresses a different but equally important skill of continuing our evolution as we get closer to understanding how we can begin to consciously respond to its agency.

May 9, 2019 – How Does the ‘Spiral Model of Evolution’ Continue in the Human Person?

2 Replies

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Teilhard envisioned the process of universal evolution as proceeding in the form of a ‘convergent spiral’ in which entities, products of evolution, join in such a way as to produce ‘offspring’ of higher complexity.  We also looked at how, in the human, the evolutionary spiral is slowly taking on a ‘volitional’ characteristic, built on top of the ‘instinctual’ characteristic which has powered it for the past four billion or so years of life.  While the agency of ‘natural selection’ is undoubtedly at play in biological evolution, at the level of the noosphere it is becoming superseded by the human need to consciously choose the future.  Evolution is slowly becoming less ‘something that happens to us’ and more ‘something that we must consciously choose’.

This week we will take a more detailed look at how this ‘spiral of evolution’ is at work in universal evolution as a step toward better understanding of how we can respond to it in order to insure our continued evolution.

A Closer Look At The ‘Convergent Spiral’

We ended last week with Teilhard’s succinct description of cosmic evolution, in which he summarizes the action of a ‘convergent spiral’:

“Everything that rises will converge.”

   This simple statement has many facets of meaning which we will begin to unpack this week.  Each of these facets illustrates some characteristic of Teilhard’s ‘convergent spiral’.

First, the joining of products of evolution can effect an increase in complexity in their offspring.  As Teilhard sees it, this characteristic is the basic thread of universal evolution.  Nowhere in the universe does matter move toward greater complexity without this basic step.  Evolution is complexification, and complexification is the action that moves an evolving entity along the spiral.

Second, this universal phenomena (without which we wouldn’t have a universe or be here to address it) happens under the influence of some sort of implicit energy, which Teilhard understands as radiated by the ‘axis of evolution’ (the center line of his spiral).  While it is common in the scientific community to see this statement as ‘teleogical’, and hence a back door intrusion of religion into the field of science, Paul Davies, secular physicist and astrobiologist, in his book, “The Cosmic Blueprint”, states:

“I have been at great pains to argue that the steady unfolding of organized complexity in the universe is a fundamental property of nature”.  (underline mine.)

   As we saw last week, even the atheistic scientist Richard Dawkins acknowledges the existence of a ‘mainspring of complexity’.

Third, the action of such joining of entities, which results in an increase in the complexity of their offspring, can result in a new entity which, because of its increase in complexity, is more responsive to the energy emanated by the ‘axis of evolution’ and better able to produce yet another level of complexity.

Fourth, the increase in complexity can be seen to occur exponentially over time, which means that as time goes on, products of evolution manifest higher measures of complexity more quickly.  A simple sampling of internet sources will quickly show that the observed interval of time between the appearance of the first atom and that of the first molecule is much longer than the interval between the molecule and the cell.  The intervals leading up to each of evolution’s major milestones (atoms, molecules, cells, single cell animals, neurons, brains and consciousness) are each shorter than the last.  The exponential decrease of the distance from the evolving entity to the ‘axis of evolution’ is a metric of the spiral’s ‘convergence’.

Fifth, each of these transitions appears as a ‘jump’, a ‘discontinuity’, or as Teilhard puts it, “a change of state’.  The resultant new entity of such transitions is radically different from its ‘parents’, and the diversity and volume of new capabilities of the ‘child’ are radically different from those of the ‘parent’.

As an example, hundreds of atoms are capable of uniting in such a way as to join to produce millions of different types of molecules, and the types of cells which eventually emerge from the initial cells is as yet uncounted.

As Davies cites biologist Bernhard Rensch:

“For example, when carbon, hydrogen and oxygen become combined, innumerable combinations can originate with new characteristics like alcohols, sugars, fatty acids, and so on.  Most of their characteristics cannot be deduced directly from the characteristics of the three basic atoms.”

   The presence of Teilhard’s spiral of evolution is therefore clear when we look back at what we understand of the past.  As Dawkins understands it, there is clearly a process at work “which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence. “

This process, while decidedly hard to quantify, nonetheless powers complexification via the intrinsic nature of matter which, as it becomes more complex, also becomes more ‘spiritual’.  I am using the term ‘spiritual’ here not in the vernacular of religion, but in that of science (as recognized above by Davies and Dawkins).  As Teilhard puts it:

“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 phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self-conscious.  It is a cosmic ‘change of state’.”

   What is less clear is how this spiral can be seen to continue in the human.  Since the continuation of human evolution becomes less and less ‘instinctual’, and more and more ‘volitional’, it seems clear that our understanding of this spiral is increasingly necessary if we are to insure its continuation.  If we don’t understand this, it will be difficult to organize ourselves to align with it and make the choices necessary for its continuation.  In Teilhard’s words:

“Those who spread their sails in the right way to the winds of the Earth will always find themselves borne by a current towards the open seas.”

   Implied in these poetic but insightful words is that if we do not understand the ways that evolution continues its universal unfolding in the human, we will not be able to cooperate with them, and thus will ultimately fail.   Understanding Teilhard’s ‘spiral of evolution’ may well help us to understand more about how evolution works on a universal scale, but other models are needed to see how such a process can be extrapolated into human life, and to better understand how we can move from ‘instinctual’ to ‘volitional’ response to ‘the winds of the Earth.”

The Next Post

This week we took a deeper look at Teilhard’s model of a convergent spiral as a way to better understand how evolution proceeds as a process central to the history of the universe.   We then began to address how this spiral can be seen in human life.

Next week we will look a look at another set of models that can be helpful in moving from this week’s ‘universal’ model to one closer to human life as we get closer to understanding how we can begin to consciously respond to the ‘winds of the Earth’

May 2, 2019 – A Model for Universal Evolution

Leave a reply

Today’s Post

Last week, after looking at how the ‘addiction’ that is possible as we enhance our subjectivity and anger in the acidic pool of internet ‘likes’ that dilute our brain’s ability to reason with dopamine, we saw how this can be seen as another risk (when added to all the other ‘dualisms’ that underlay pessimism) to our continued evolution, and looked a little more closely at this phenomenon of ‘human evolution’.

We saw how the first eight or so billions of years of evolution, ‘pre-life’, and the following four or so billion years of ‘biological’ evolution depended on an innate and instinctive (in the biosphere) agent by which the ‘coefficient of complexity’ slowly rose.  In contrast, in the past two hundred thousand years, as humans have evolved, we noted the slow rise of ‘volition’ as the agency which is becoming the prominent force.  We saw again how the past one hundred fifty years (a nanosecond in evolutionary history) human evolution, as measured by human welfare, has increased exponentially, and how the key agent of this new surge could be recognized as the increase of freedom of the human person.  Such an understanding represents the beginning of our (in Teilhard’s terms) ‘articulation of the noosphere’, and the process of building personal freedom into our political constructs is a beginning to construe our ability to cooperate with it.

We have also seen throughout this blog, examples of ‘risks’ to our evolution, the last of which identified an insidious rising of subjectification and ‘progress pessimism’, which offers yet another ‘risk’.

This week we will begin to move forward to look at the action of universal evolution and see how our understanding of it can help us better overcome these risks and hence develop appropriate responses to it.

A Geometrical Model for a Universal Process

Developing a truly objective and wholistic grasp of universal evolution can be difficult.  After all, we are products of this process.  Whatever and whoever we are, whatever the energy or agency by which we seek this grasp and whichever cause we attribute it to, we are still caught up in its grasp.  Developing a comprehensive but objective view of cosmic becoming and our part in it is not dissimilar to constructing a bridge while we are traversing it.

Teilhard offers a fairly straightforward geometrical model which may help to better grasp this situation.   He sees universal evolution taking place as a ‘convergent spiral’, and this model can be clearly seen in our scientific understanding of the past.  Science understands the eight billion year period preceding the cell as the production of increasingly complex products of evolution, and this elaboration always leads to richer ‘entities’ which are always more conducive to ‘offspring’ of even more complexity.  Biology understands the following four billion years in much the same way: products of evolution appear as richer, better organized and more autonomous entities with each wave of living things.

Science has had a difficult time with this viewpoint, in fear that it is a ‘back door’ for inserting subjective theology into an objective method of inquiry.  However, there are few practitioners of science today that disavow the fact that the universe has become a much more complex thing today than it was at the ‘big bang’, and that humans are products of evolution which exemplify such complexity.

Even those atheists with a scientific background do not deny this.  We have seen how one of the most famous atheists, Richard Dawkins, in his book, “The God Delusion”, states it:

“There must have been a first cause of everything, and we might as well give it the name God, but God is not an appropriate name unless we very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers. The first cause that we seek must have been the basis for a process which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence. “

Other than to note that this does not constitute a vote for religion (he seems less ‘a-theistic’ and more ‘a-religionist’), he doesn’t develop it further or recognize the many contemporary theological concepts that do so.

Teilhard, in one such concept, completely agrees with Dawkins’ premise, but goes on to elaborate in some detail how such a ‘process’ can be articulated in terms of the model of a ‘convergent spiral’.

Such a spiral is simply like a vertical spring, except as the spiral becomes increases in height, the diameter becomes smaller until the spiral converges on a single point at the top.

How Does Teilhard’s Evolutionary Model Apply to Universal Evolution? 

Teilhard applies this model to universal evolution, seeing each stage of such ‘raising of the world’ as located at some point on the spiral.  The vertical axis of the spiral is time, with the past at the bottom and the future at the top.  Along the spiral itself, evolving entities (eg, atoms) join in such a way as to increase the complexity of their products, with the result that the new entity (eg, the molecule) is located further along the spiral.

In addition to the new attributes of the new entity, a measure of such complexity can be also understood as the proximity of the new entity to the ‘axis’ (the centerline) of the spiral.  This distance slightly decreases as each new entity emerges with its slight increase in complexity, and can be seen as the influence of the agency of evolution by which the hew entities become more complex.

The third component of the converging spiral, which distinguishes itself from a simple spiral, is that the increasing complexity of the new component manifests itself as ‘vertical’.  To move along the spiral, the evolving entity must move upwards, increasing its complexity. The entity’s new level of complexity can therefore be seen as a ‘rise’.

In simpler terms, as each new product of evolution appears, it ‘rises’ in complexity in response to some ‘agency of complexification’ which equips it to produce an increase in complexity in its offspring.

In Teilhard’s words:

“Everything that rises will converge.”

The Next Post

This week we have taken a look at Teilhard’s spiral model of evolution and how such a model can be used to conceptualize and even visualize how evolution can proceed.  It still remains to see how such a model can offer a way to see it at work in each of us as we live our lives.

Next week we will unpack Teilhard’s simple statement into terms which articulate how he sees the agency of evolution in universal becoming.