Monthly Archives: October 2019

October 31 Understanding Religion In the Context of Evolution

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Today’s Post

After seeing last week how religion can be seen as an evolving phenomenon, this week we will begin an overview of the eleven posts that look at this evolving phenomenon in the light of Teilhard’s insights into how evolution continues its rise of complexity through the human species. If we are evolving, what role can religion be seen to play in the process?

Our treatment of this subject can be seen in the posts from 10 December2015 (The Continuation of Evolution in the Human) to 14 April, 2016 (Religion and Stability).

The Continuation of Evolution in the Human Species

Before looking at religion’s role in human evolution, it is necessary to see this evolution holistically. Teilhard’s insights into such a comprehensive view place evolution at the heart of the ‘coming-to-be’ of the universe from the ‘big bang’, some fourteen billion years ago, to the present day. As we saw previously, the phenomenon which unites the three major phases of the universe’s evolution, matter, life and reflective life, is that of increasing complexity. In every step of each of these three major stages, and in the transition of each stage to the next, more complex products emerge from the unification of ancestral products in such a way as to increase their complexity.

The key to understanding how evolution continues through the human, he asserts, is simply to recognize how the rise of complexity can be seen to take place in human history.

The problem, of course, is that any observations that we make about ourselves is, by definition, relative to ourselves, and hence subjective in nature, and this subjectivity makes it difficult to stand back and observe with any amount of objectivity. This hesitation can be clearly seen in science’s insistence that not only is evolution absent in the scientific theories of changes of matter leading up to the cell, but that evolution after the cell is the result of ‘Natural Selection’, which itself is driven by ‘chance’ and ‘necessity’. Further, this narrow view of evolution in which the agency of ‘complexification’ is ignored, reduces science’s treatment of the human person to either an ‘epiphenomenon’ or perhaps predicated on a ‘non-existent’ consciousness which is merely the result of random neuron firings.

As Ian Barbour puts it in his book, “Religion and Science’:

“Something radically different takes place when culture rather than the genes becomes the principal means by which the past is transmitted to the future and when conscious choice alters that future.”

   Thus, something new comes into play with the human: the capability of being aware of consciousness, and this results in the ability to choose, and this ability manifests itself in the two emerging styles of human thinking, science and religion.

Teilhard and many others (such as Jonathan Sacks, whom we saw last week) also point out that these two evolutionary branches of thinking at first seem to be just other ‘branches’ on the tree of life, similar to those occurring for millions of years. Teilhard and Sacks both note that at their bifurcation points, the two branches are indeed different, but that they emerge as a result of evolving skills of thinking. Sacks notes how they are related to the more recent evolution of left brain activity, and both point to the potential of ‘reconnection’, or as Teilhard puts it, “confluence after fluorescence”.

Thus, as Teilhard sees it, science’s understanding of atomic and molecular structure, and biology’s understanding of Natural Selection aren’t incorrect, simply incomplete. While these clearly play a part in cosmic evolution, once the phenomenon of ‘complexification’ is factored in, they can now be seen as ‘harmonics’ of a ‘fundamental’: second order effectors riding on top of the first order of increasing complexity.

With The Rise of the Left Brain, is Religion Still Relevant?

With Teilhard’s perspective of human evolution as a subset of cosmic evolution, and Sacks’ insight into the bicameral brain’s evolution, what sense can be made of religion?

Detractors of religion offer much to defend their stance. Richard Dawkins in his book, “The God Delusion” offers a sobering but undeniable picture of the ills to be found in the history of organized religion. The most prevalent attitude of these detractors seem to favor a future shorn of all religious belief: one of complete dominance of the ‘left’ brain, with disdain for any thought rising from intuition experienced by the ‘right’ brain. Such right- brained modes of thinking, such as those found in art and music, are sort of ‘patched in’ to these beliefs, but are strictly prohibited from affecting legal or scientific thought. Governments in which this ideal has been prominent, such as the communist regimes of Russia and China offer proponents of religion much to argue against.

Supporters of traditional religious modes of thinking, those who would eschew ‘left’ brain modes and rely exclusively on the intuitional modes of the ‘right’, with their fundamentalism, supernaturalism and ‘anti-intellectual’ approach to thinking, give the materialists much ground for opposition.

Add to this the frequently publicized polls that show a distinct decline of religious belief in the West, and it would seem that religion as an evolutionary phenomenon has passed its prime’. How can it be seen as relevant today?

Understanding Religion From the Perspective of Evolution

Teilhard understood religion’s role in evolution when he stated:

“To explain the workings of the universe we must understand the forces and process by which it comes to be, and this understanding must include the human person.”

   With that simple statement, the relationship between the two modes of thinking is established: a complete understanding of the universe requires an understanding of how the human person fits into it. This perspective isn’t limited to Teilhard; many thinkers have intuited that since there is only one reality, all modes of thought must be brought into confluence if they are to address it.

In the beginning, as we saw last week, humans have always attempted to understand their part in life so they would know how to negotiate it. The earliest insights manifested themselves in beliefs, rituals and laws which not only helped each person to better understand themselves, but insured the connection to a society which would in turn support their existence. This wasn’t as much a ‘left vs right’ brained activity, as it was one to support the development of thinking which could be protected from instinctual impulses from the ‘lower’, reptilian and limbic, impulses that had served our nonhuman ancestors so well. As Richard Rohr puts it

“It was necessary for us to move beyond our early motivations of personal security, reproduction and survival (the fear-based preoccupations of the ‘reptilian brain’) … to proceed beyond the lower stages of human development.”

This “proceeding from the lower stages’ is indeed the action of continuation of universal evolution in the human species.

Religion, for all its imperfections, can certainly be seen to be a belief system which supports just that. But, given these many and obvious imperfections, as well documented by detractors of religion, how can religion be seen as specifically contributing to the process of our evolution?

The Next Post

This week we began an overview of the eleven posts on the evolution of religion in which Jonathan Sacks’ understanding of how the evolution of human thinking can be seen in the evolution of religion from its earliest beginnings to the emergence of Christianity.

Having begun this look into religion’s role in human evolution, next week we will articulate this role in a little more detail.

October 24 The Evolution of Religion

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Today’s Post

This week we continue the recap of the blog, “The Secular Side of God” with an overview of the posts which address the evolution of religion.

We left off last week with an overview of evolution itself, seeing through Teilhard’s eyes how the unfolding of the universe can be seen in the increase of complexity over time. Therefore this universal context, since it includes both the infinitesimally small at one end and the consciously personal at the other end, it seamlessly encompasses humans as well as atoms.

Our treatment of this subject can be seen in the posts from 6 August 2015 (Isn’t This Just Deism?) to 26 November 2015 (Part 7- The Rise of Christianity)

Looking at Religion From the Vantage Point of Evolution

This blog assumes Teilhard’s basic hermeneutic that most things can be better understood when put in the context of religion, and his context included the entire universe over the entire span of time to the present. Therefore it is appropriate to approach the complex and multifaceted subject of religion as one of the products of evolution if we are to make better sense of it.

We took a look at such evolution from three perspectives:

  • From the vantage point of history
  • As the evolution of thinking
  • As influenced by human neurology

As history

From the perspective of history, we noted how Matthew Kneale, An Atheist’s History of Belief, saw it: we have evidence of religious belief in the very first stirrings of human thought, addressing healing, controlling the environment, enhancing relationships and coordinating group activities. These four values, articulated in the many diverse and manifold beliefs, were understood as contributing to the quality of early human life.

He traces the evolution of these intuitions at the tribal level to the formation of regulations seen as necessary for the social order of the emerging civilizations. The earliest of such formal guidelines seems to have appeared as early as the 24th century BCE. The first ‘laws’ to address a relation between humans and deities appears later, and includes prescriptions for rituals, behavior and worship (Judaism).

As The evolution of thinking

It was not until the fourth century BCE that laws begin to appear which addressed relations among different societal groupings that took the place of distinct tribes. The first comprehensive example of which can be found in the Roman laws, which begin to appear as early versions of what we know today as ‘constitutions’.

During this same period, however, a new way of thinking emerged in the East which addressed both human nature and relationships separately from regulating society. The ‘Axial Age’, summarized eloquently by Karen Armstrong in her book by the same name, introduced such concepts as ‘person’, ‘love’, and ‘human potential’. Such intellectual stirring can be seen in Chinese Confucianism, Indian Buddhism, Israeli Monotheism and Greek Rationalism, all of which addressed the basic nature of the human person and explored ‘his’ potential for a fuller life.

All the great concepts of contemporary religion were born during this period, such as the importance of charity, the danger of egoism, the existence of the transcendent and the importance of the human person in the scheme of things.   With such new ideas, humans were becoming ‘self conscious’, aware of their consciousness, and therefore planting seeds in the garden of collective consciousness that would flower a few centuries later in societies which treated all members as ‘equal’.

Other seeds were planted at this time, such as the Greek break from Eastern modes of thinking, as seen in the rise of objectivity and rationality, and the Jewish understanding of the ‘ground of being’ as not only ‘one’ but ‘personal’.

As Influenced by human neurology

Jonathan Sacks, in his book, “The Great Partnership” goes beyond seeing such evolution simply as the development of ideas. He notes that the human brain is made up of two hemispheres, referred to as the ‘right’ and ‘left’ brains. While a neurological fact, it is common to impute human thinking to one or the other, resulting is a general association of ‘emotion’ to the left brain, and ‘reason’ to the right. While he correctly identifies the necessity of the whole brain working cohesively to achieve ‘rationality’, he does acknowledge each hemisphere’s contribution as distinct.

With this approach to human thinking in mind, he sees the historical record prior to the ‘Axial Age’ as more influenced by the ‘right’ brain, and hence more ‘intuitional’. This can be seen in the preponderance of the religious beliefs, which themselves were the basis for what was understood to be the norms of society.

With the Greeks, he theorizes, a movement to thinking with the ‘left’ brain can be seen. As an example of this, he proposes that the shift in writing of the Greek alphabet from ‘left-to-right’ to ‘right- t- left’ was caused by this shift in brain hemisphere thinking.

He further takes note that as a result of this shift, by the third century BCE, Greek and Hebrew (still ‘left-to-right) were not just different languages with different alphabets, they represented orthogonal civilizations, very unlike in their most basic understanding of reality. Departing from the prevalent mode of ‘right brained’ thinking to one more influenced by the ‘left brain’, he sees

“Athens evolved to a ‘literate’ from an ‘oral’ culture”, and in doing so “it became the birthplace of science and philosophy, supremely left-brain, conceptual and analytical ways of thinking”.

The Rise of Christianity

Having established a pathway of the evolution of human thought from the ancient ‘right-brained’ mode to the branching of the ‘left-brain’ mode about six thousand years ago, Sacks goes on to look at how these two great branches continue to evolve. In particular, he notes how, in five steps, these two branches demonstrate their potential for eventually becoming a single branch.

First he notes how in the passages from ‘the stories of Jesus’ seen in the first three gospels (the synoptic gospels), the teachings of Jesus are expressed in typical Jewish lexicon: Jesus makes points by telling stories, as had the many ‘authors’ of the Old Testament.

Then we find Paul restating them into Greek formats: lists, analysis, and most importantly, philosophy. He summarizes Jesus’ teachings into such things as ‘Theological Virtues’ (faith, hope love) and the eight aspects of the ‘Fruit of the Spirit’. He goes on to develop the nascent gospel concept of ‘Jesus as the Son of God’ into his concept of ‘The Universal Christ’. Then, we find that under the Hellenistic influences of Paul, the first ‘New Testament’ emerges in Greek, not Hebrew. Finally, the continued development of Christian theology occurs at the hands of the ‘Fathers’ and the ‘Doctors’ of the Church, all classically trained in Greek philosophy.

Thus, Sacks notes,

“Christianity combined left-hand brain rationality with right-brain spirituality in a single, glorious overarching structure.”

   However, he goes on to see several problems with this attempt to remerge the two branches. He finds that as Christianity develops, while it might carry the evolving insight of human personal and societal potential for continued evolution, its burdensome hierarchy, insistence on its exclusive understanding of truth and creation of many dualities weakens it. He sees these as

“Much more so than Judaism, Christianity divides: body/soul, physical/spiritual, heaven/earth, this life/next life, evil/good, with the emphasis on the second of each. “

As a result, he sees modern Christianity as having effected an increased loss of relevancy as well as an increase in the perceived distance between the human person and the ‘ground of being’. These problems also contribute to the well-known contention between science and religion today.

We will explore this division and the potential for overcoming it later in the blog, but at this stage, how can we take one step back to establish a clearer picture of how these two major currents of thinking are active in human life? How can they be better understood in Teilhard’s hermeneutic of using the context of universal evolution to make sense of things?.

The Next Post

This week we overviewed the six posts on the evolution of religion in which Jonathan Sacks’ understanding of how the evolution of human thinking can be seen in the evolution of religion from its earliest beginnings to the emergence of Christianity.

Having established this look into religion’s evolution, next week we will apply Teilhard’s unique perspective on universal evolution to Sacks’ insights.

October 17 Summing Up “Understanding Evolution”

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Today’s Post

This week we sum up the first three parts of the blog, which deal with Teilhard’s unique view of evolution and how this view not only extends science’s understanding of biological evolution into the distant past of the ‘big bang, but extends it forward into the present day. In other words, Teilhard’s vision not only encapsulates science’s ‘Standard Model’ of physics, and biology’s Darwinistic concept of ‘Natural Selection’ but addresses the continuation of evolution in the human person, a subject of both the science of psychology and the benumbing swirls of religious belief.

Our treatment of this subject can be seen in the posts from 29 October 2014 through 23 July 2015. 

Complexity: The Starting Place

Before Teilhard, and in many minds still applicable today, these three domains of universal existence Remain heavily compartmentalized, with no hermeneutic or phenomena to connect them.   Natural Selection pays scant attention to the atoms and molecules addressed by the Standard Model at one end, and the human person, with his attribute of ‘consciousness aware of itself’ conforms poorly to the ‘laws’ of Natural Selection at the other.

Teilhard’s approach to this perennial disconnect is to simply derive a ‘centristic’ approach to evolution in which the validity of both points of view are recognized. He begins with the undeniable fact of ‘complexification’ (his term) as the underlying metric of evolution which the three stages. Once this is understood, what is left is to identify the ways that complexity can be seen to have occurred in the history of the universe and to plot its rise to the level seen in the universe today.

This method of placing everything into the ‘context of complexification’ overcomes several problems. Most scientists understand evolution in terms of Physics (for small particles) and Natural Selection (for living things). Physics, with the ‘Standard Model’ addresses how quarks, protons and atoms work their way up the complexity chain to molecules. The Darwinian process of ‘Natural Selection’ addresses how living things evolve. However, at the point of formation of molecules, particularly the highly complex nucleic acids, proteins and DNA (which underlie all life), neither approaches seem to work.

We see this discontinuity again at the appearance of ‘reflective consciousness’ (consciousness aware of itself). As a result, science offers little to address the human person.

The problem can be seen at the level of religion as well. While all religion addresses the human person directly, it is rife with such a degree of the supernatural, superstitious and fancy that it becomes more difficult to see as relevant as science reveals more about the building blocks of reality.

Teilhard simply takes a step back and views this universal journey from pure energy at the big bang to the ‘reflective consciousness’ unique to humans as single journey in which the ‘stuff of the universe’ (his term) simply reveals itself in shades of increasing complexity over time. In this view, neither the laws of physics nor Darwinian evolution are contradicted, they are simply seen as stepping stones by which the universe ‘complexifies’.

The Action of Complexity in Universal Evolution

If the universe is a single thing, and evolves according to a single agency, how can it be understood to be active in all stages of universal evolution? Teilhard answers this question with the assertion that each element of ‘the stuff of the universe’ comes into being with two potentials: Unity and Complexity.

The potential for Unity simply refers to the tendency for elements of this ‘stuff’ at the same rung of evolution to unite with each other to produce new ‘stuff’. The potential for Complexity refers to the product of such union: it can be more complex than either of its ‘parent’. This is relatively self-proving; if such complexity did not result from such unions, the universe would remain at the level of complexity found at the ‘big bang’: an undifferentiated plasma of energy.

Following his insight, we can see the agency of complexification active in the evolution from energy to quarks, quarks to electrons, electrons to atoms to molecules to highly complex molecules (such as DNA) with leads to cells, then multicell animals, then neurons, brains, consciousness and finally, in ourselves, consciousness aware of itself.

Teilhard acknowledges that there are several ‘discontinuous’ steps in this story, such as the appearance of cells from molecules and consciousness from neurons, but notes that the process of complexification can be seen to continue through them. We many not yet understand how nucleic acid, proteins and DNA can ‘gang up’ and suddenly produce a cell, nor understand how neurons can pool their resources to produce an idea . Neither do we understand the mechanism of a human group producing an invention, but it happens frequently enough to be beyond simple conjecture.

He also acknowledges that the ‘rules’ change with each stage: with molecules we have the capability of producing millions of molecules from a hundred or so atoms, which themselves come from a handful of smaller components (outlined in the “Standard Model’). Then, with cells, the capacity to fill huge ‘trees of life’ with unique living entities (Outlined in biology’s “Natural Selection”). All these sequences not only seem to follow different ‘rules’, but the rules, as the entities, are themselves more complex.

While the ‘rules’ may change, Teilhard asserts that they can be seen as ‘harmonics’ riding on the fundamental wave of ‘complexification’.   All such rules give rise to the increasing complexity of the entities which they describe.

Further, he notes that such enfolding occurs at an increasing rate. Further still, humans can be considered in the infancy of discovering their ‘rules’. Even further still, most thinkers consider the universe, hence the processes, hence the ‘rules’, to be intelligible.

The Next Post

This week we overviewed the first three segments of the blog, consisting of the first twenty posts on Teilhard’s widening the concept of evolution from biological to universal, and from impersonal to personal.

Since Teilhard believed that properly reinterpreted, religion offers a unique understanding of

the human person’s place in the universe, next week we will overview how the subject of religion can be understood from his ‘context of universal evolution’.

October 10 An Overview of the Blog “The Secular Side of God”

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Today’s Post

For the past five years I have been publishing this blog, “The Secular Side of God”. I embarked on this undertaking as an exploration of a non-religious approach to the ‘ground of being’ (AKA God) and hence human life. This approach appealed to me as a ‘cradle Catholic’ as I found myself finally giving myself the freedom to explore the many aspects of Catholicism which I had greeted with skepticism even as a child.

This, of course, didn’t happen overnight. My education as a physicist and my lifelong experience as an aerospace engineer only deepened the sense that, as stated, many of the teachings of Catholicism became harder to accept.

By the same token, however, many didn’t. I was fortunate to have insightful spiritual mentors who pointed out many expressions of Catholicism which articulated its many beliefs differently than those to which I had been exposed. The most influential of these were those of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French priest and paleontologist who sought to reinterpret the classical foundations of Christianity in terms of the recent and revolutionary scientific awareness of the depth, span, richness and age of the universe.
To him, such awareness could be applied to traditional Christian teachings not only to show how they fundamentally resonate with scientific insight, but as ‘principles of reinterpretation’ that would restore the urgency, immediacy and intimacy of the original gospels.  By such reinterpretation, he felt that a more relevant Christianity could be brought to contemporary life as an antidote to the apathy and anxiety which often accompany us on our ‘road to the future’.

For the next few weeks I would like to recap this long string of posts which mark my own search for such antidotes.

Overviewing the Blog

By way of an overview, I’d like to summarize the key points from the twenty-two part blog.These are, in order of their appearance:

Understanding Evolution This first segment presented the concept of universal evolution as seen from Teilhard’s unique and revolutionary view of evolution, which extends the biological concept of ‘Natural Selection’ to evolution in the eras before life and after the appearance of the human species. Not only is this groundbreaking perspective inclusive of the entire universe, from its history from the ‘big bang’ to the present day, it opens the door to a ‘worldview’ in which the insights of science and religion can be seen as collaborative rather than conflicting.

Biological Evolution  This section applies Teilhard’s expanded view of evolution to integrating Darwin’s ‘Natural Selection’ into the context of ‘universal evolution’. This expanded view also opens the door to placing the human person into the scope of science at the same time that it opens the restricted religious concept of the human person to the insights of science.

Human Evolution   Being able to understand the human person in the context of both universal evolution and an expanded understanding of biological evolution permits human evolution to be understood in terms of what is new with the human: “conscious become aware of itself”.

Universal Evolution With these new insights into how the process of evolution proceeds through its pre-life, life, and human life phases, we returned to another look at the ‘structure of the universe’ and how the understanding of science is expanded by recognizing the process of ‘complexification’

The Evolution of Religion  Since religion is part of reality, it is therefore a product of evolution. Applying the insights of Teilhard and Jonathan Sacks, former chief Rabbi of London, we looked at religion as an evolving ‘universal story’.

Understanding Religion From the Perspective of Evolution We continued our look at religion from the insights of Teilhard to understand how its concepts have unfolded and the part it has played in Western History.

Reinterpreting Religion From Teilhard’s insights we looked at how the traditional teachings of Western Christianity can be ‘reinterpreted’, and how such reinterpretation offers new meaning, relevancy and immediacy to them.

Relating to the ‘Ground of Being’    Having applied Teilhard’s ‘principles of reinterpretation’ to religion we looked at how the resulting concept of ‘God’ is echoed in secular science as well as how our relationship to ‘Him’ can be better understood.

Who or What is God?  With Teilhard’s understanding of God, how it possible to comprehend ‘Him”?

Who or What was Jesus?  How does Teilhard’s ‘reinterpreted’ understanding of God, map into the central Christian person of Jesus? How is Jesus different from ‘the Christ?’

Who or What is Spirituality? Considering Teilhard’s unique grasp of evolution at a universal level, his understanding of how we fit into it, and more importantly, how his ‘Axis of Evolution’ is present in each of us, how does this play out in the concept of ‘spirituality’?

Reinterpreting Christian Teachings   Having offered a ‘reinterpretation’ of the fundamentals of Western religion in the light of Teilhard’s ‘universal evolution’, how can its traditional teachings be understood in a way not tied to traditional religious statements? This segment looks at Sacraments, Morals and Virtues in this light.

Understanding Evolution in the Human Species With Teilhard’s revolutionary understanding of evolution and how religion has attempted to map the terrain of human existence, this section takes a second look at how evolution can be seen to proceed in the human species today, offering several distinct and empirical examples.

Understanding and Managing the Risks of Human Evolution With the clearer understanding of universal evolution and our part in it, this section looks at the ‘downside’: If our evolution, in contrast to the evolution of our nonhuman predecessors, is now dependent on our choices, what are the risks and how can we manage them?

Science and Religion  Long seen as mutually hostile, this section takes a first look at their need for each other as well as the possibility of a productive synergy.

The Cosmic Spark   With Teilhard’s clearer understanding of cosmic evolution and the action of the ‘ground of being’, this section offers a second look at how Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’ is present in all products of evolution, and how understanding its presence in the human person can lead to fuller being.

Pessimism In a second look at what can hold us back from such ‘fuller being’, this section takes a look at how the negativity of pessimism can impede both our personal evolution as well as the evolution of society.

Universal Evolution This second look at Teilhard’s universal concept of evolution shows how his clearer understanding of our place in the universe offers the possibility of not only understanding science and religion as compatible, but discovering the ‘terrain of synergy’ which results when we begin to see ourselves and our universe more holistically.

Happiness With all of the positive aspects of human evolution outlined by Teilhard, human evolution, departing so drastically from the dynamic enjoyed by our evolutionary predecessors, comes with difficulty. This section looks at the idea of human happiness from several perspectives and outlines how science and religion, working from the ‘terrain of synergy’ can offer a path to happiness.

The Next Post

This week we began finalizing the blog, “The Secular Side of God” with an outline of the twenty-two part series in which we looked at universal evolution, and humanity’s part in it, through the eyes of Teilhard de Chardin.

Next week we will begin a summary of each of these topics, beginning with “Understanding Evolution”

October 3 Summing Up Human Happiness

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Today’s Post

For the past nine weeks we have been exploring the phenomenon of ‘human happiness’ from reaction to the ‘pain of convergence’ caused by the facets of our evolution to outlining the eight facets of happiness that occur when we manage to open our lives to it.

This week I’d like to sum up these nine posts.

Why Pain?

We concluded exploration of the preceding subject, the ‘Terrain of Synergy’ by identifying the recognition of such terrain as a step to ‘reconnecting our individual parts to the whole’. Richard Rohr frequently mentions this as a very basic goal of religion, ‘re-ligio’.

The problem arises, however, when such a connection becomes difficult, seemingly impossible, and we are caught up in what is often referred to as ‘existential angst’, pain which is unfocussed and leaves us feeling alienated and lonely. In such a state, ‘better’ is always the enemy of ‘good enough’, “yesterday was the best day of the rest of our life”, and the ability to feel satisfied is denied us.

In addition, we are caught up in the inevitable side effect of human evolution: convergence. With the crowding that we see increasing every day, on our streets, in our schools, in our neighborhoods our personal space increasingly dwindles.   The need for re-connection is countered with the need for isolation.

As Yuri Harari points out, these articulations of our existential angst can be traced to our breaking of the ‘evolutionary covenant’ that ancestors enjoyed in their millions of years on this planet: the evolution of their species proceeded at the same pace as the evolution of their environment. Yuval notes that, distinct from our pre-human ancestors, we have evolved much faster than our skills of accommodation with the environment could develop.

With humans, in contrast to ancestors, our evolution proceeded much faster than that of our environment. To make matters worse, we exacerbated this disconnect by degrading the environment itself.
According to Harari, this has robbed us of the evolutionary balance that our ancestors enjoyed with their environment, and thus opening us up to a future of continued disconnect with not only our environment but to ourselves as well. This ‘evolutionary singularity’, as he sees it, prevents us from experiencing true happiness.

Toward Happiness

We went on to consider this dystopian conclusion in the light of three perspectives on happiness that show a different outcome to our evolution:

  • Happiness from the material perspective

There is much in contemporary society, news, religious lore and scientific theory which address the human experience of ‘happiness’, but as we noted on August 8, very little of it is consistent, and much contradictory. Other than that it is highly subjective, and subject to physiological stimulation, one does not come away with a comprehensive understanding of what it is and how to come by it.

We noted that if Teilhard’s perspective on evolution is applied, and the ‘rise of complexity’ from the big bang to the present is still active, then some optimism in the future can be merited. Therefore, such an insight into the process of evolution is a facet of ‘being happy’. Just ‘belief in the future’ alone contributes to our happiness.  As Patricia Albere, author of “Evolutionary Relationship”, puts it, this long history of rising complexity suggests that we have only to allow ourselves to be “lifted by the evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”. To do this, “we only have to begin to pay attention”.

We noted that Teilhard’s use of this term differs considerably from that of traditional religion, and spent more time on this particular perspective than the other two. Key to this perspective is the ‘terrain of synergy’ in which the insights of science and religion overlap. As we have seen many times in this blog, science and religion have much to offer each other, and the subject of happiness is no exception.

We also noted the insights from John Haught which clearly delineates this terrain from that of traditional religion and science. Such delineation also opens the subject of happiness to understanding it from the perspective of Western religion. This insight provides further articulation to how Albere’s suggestion of ‘paying attention’ can take place.

We ended this segment by proceeding with the process of ‘reinterpretation’ of traditional Christian tenets, first addressed back in May, 2016. Once again, we saw how Teilhard’s ‘principle of evolutionary context’ makes it possible to understand anew how our religious lore can become more relevant to our lives, and hence our continued evolution.

We first looked at how Teilhard’s three ‘vectors’ of universal evolution: ‘forward’, ‘inward’ and ‘upward’, manifested in every step of evolution from the big bang to human persons, can be seen as active in human persons in reinterpreting Paul’s essential actions of ‘faith’, ‘hope’ and ‘love’.

Finally, we continued reinterpreting Paul with his ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ into articulations of eight facets of human life which underlie the dimension of human happiness. While the subject of human happiness might well be a ‘slippery subject’, the nine facets of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control certainly offer a scaffolding for a relationship to life that brings us ‘happiness.

In this search for Harari’s ‘accommodation to evolution’, we have generally taken two approaches to Patricia Albere’s suggestion to ‘pay attention’ so that we can learn to trust evolution, one from Maurice Blondel and the other from John Haught.

From Blondel,

“In the light of evolution, religious tenets can be reinterpreted in terms of human life.”

Then Haught,

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

Therefore we have seen, using Teilhard’s evolutionary hermeneutic, how happiness is not only possible in our species, to a large extent it is both necessary for our continued evolution and the payoff for the finding of our place in it. .

The Next Post

This week we wrapped up our look at the experience of human happiness, tracing it from “The Terrain of Synergy’ to a practical way to relook at our religious lore and reinterpret it in the light of Teilhard’s hermeneutic of cosmic becoming.

Next week we will do another ‘wrapup’, this time of the overall blog, “The Secular Side of God’ over its five year run.