Monthly Archives: January 2020

January 30, 2020 – Evolution in Human Life

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Today’s Post

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

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

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

The Three ‘Vectors” of Evolution in Human Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love as the Primary ‘Virtue’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love in Human Evolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

January 23, 2020 – Moving Evolution Forward

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Today’s Post

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

Given these insights into the scaffolding of evolution, this week we go to the other end (at least so far) of evolution as it manifests itself in our personal complexification and in the progression of our species toward yet further complexity. What are the ‘nuts and bolts’ that hold this scaffolding together so that it can continue to progress through the human species?

This week’s post summarizes several posts that address what Teilhard referred to ‘Articulating the noosphere’ as the development of guidelines for forging our evolution.

‘Articulating the Noosphere’

As Teilhard sees it, the evolution of our planet can be seen in the appearance of five ‘spheres’, layers of evolutionary products, which have appeared in succession on our planet.   He sees these spheres as:

  • The ‘lithosphere’, the grouping of matter which form the base of our planet
  • The ‘atmosphere,’ which consists of the gasses which emerge to surround it
  • The ‘hydrosphere, which forms as the atmosphere produces water
  • The ‘biosphere,’ the layers of living things which cover it
  • And finally, the ‘noosphere’, indicative of the layer of human activity which pervades it

Today’s controversies over such subjects as ecology, global economy and global warming are evidence of the emerging awareness of just how significantly the noosphere has become in the evolution of our planet and how important it is to understand it..

Teilhard notes that all religions attempt to identify ‘how we should be if we would be what we can be’. With religion’s strong infusion of myths, superstitions, dualities, and entanglements with the state that are inevitable over such long periods of development (arising in the prescientific world of thousands of years ago), its accumulated guidelines for continuing our evolution are problematic. Thus we are left today with inconsistent and even contradictory guidelines for our continued development.

Science does not offer much help in this area. Its exclusion of the ‘spiritual’ (see last post) nature of the person offer little support for the faith and insight needed to deal with the daily burden of human life.

Putting this into perspective, Teilhard notes that we are moving as a species from passive experience of evolution to actively affecting it. It is becoming more necessary to use our neocortex brain to modulate the instinctive impulses of our lower brains, impulses which were successful in raising the complexity of our pre-human ancestors, but which now must be channeled to insure our evolutionary continuation.

As Teilhard sees it, to be effective, human life requires us to ‘set our sails to the winds of life’, but the skills of reading the wind and tending the tiller are first necessary to be learned.   As he sees it:

“And, conventional and impermanent as they may seem on the surface, what are the intricacies of our social forms, if not an effort to isolate little by little what are one day to become the structural laws of the noosphere.

In their essence, and provided they keep their vital connection with the current that wells up from the depths of the past, are not the artificial, the moral and the juridical simply the hominized versions of the natural, the physical and the organic?”

Teilhard refers to identifying these skills, those necessary for evolution to continue through us, as ‘articulating the noosphere’. These skills are reflected in examples of behavior that are passed from generation to generation via the cultural ‘DNA’ of religion.

Religion is not the only place that such ‘noospheric articulations’ can be found. As we saw in the post of September 14 on the ‘secular basis of spirituality’, a secular example of spirituality can be found in a fundamental axiom of our government. It is at the basis of the idea of a ‘representative government’, and often described as the ‘will of the people’ so essential to democratic institutions. Thomas Jefferson was very clear in his concept of the validity of ‘the power of the people ‘and ‘consensus in government’ as ‘articulations of the noosphere’:

“I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be other that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master. I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves.”

This exercise of ‘trust of the people to govern themselves” is a secular example of an ‘articulation of the noosphere’. When we engage in such activity as the process of voting, we are implicitly connecting with one of the threads of evolution as it runs through human evolution. This activity is effectively a ‘secular sacrament’.

Some Specific Articulations

As we saw last week, ‘spirituality’ is the underpinning of ‘matter’. In order to better understand ourselves and our role in evolution we must understand how this dyadic energy works. Following Teilhard’s insight that

“..the artificial, the moral and the juridical (are) simply the hominized versions of the natural, the physical and the organic”

any ‘articulation’ of the structure of the noosphere that we undertake must first identify the places in our lives in which such ‘spirituality’ (or as Davies would have it, ‘software’) manifests itself so that we can better cooperate with it and thus strengthen our own journey toward fuller being.

Almost all religions attempt to articulate the noosphere by traditional rituals which help address

such things as funerals, pilgrimages, social work and meditation. The Western ‘sacraments’ are but one example.

The Western church made an early effort to identify this ‘articulation’ in its concept of ‘grace’. Using the term, grace to indicate the manifestation of spirituality in human life, this early effort identifies those human activities where it is believed to be most active. These activities are known as ‘sacraments’.

Thanks to the-all-too human Catholic attempts to control (and profit from) these activities and to Luther for recognizing the evil in doing so, the ‘sacraments’ have little attraction today outside the Catholic church. Their reinterpretation in secular terms might seem forced, but in terms of Teilhard’s context of evolution, they can be seen as highlighting where the agency of spirituality, Davies’ ‘software’, is most active in critical human life events. They identify the human activity that is most likely to move us forward in our quest for both personal and cultural complexity.

Such reinterpretation sees the seven sacraments of baptism, confirmation, eucharist, matrimony, penance, ‘holy orders’ and the ‘last rites’ taking on new relevancy as the recognition of the ‘sanctity’ (proximity to the ‘tree of evolution’) of the human person, human maturity, human society, human relationships, human reconciliation, human focus on spirituality and the end of human life. New, more secular, sacraments are still appearing in the West, such as the well-being of nature (ecology).

Sacraments simply point the way to the critical points necessary to continuation of the evolution of our species. They are not divine intrusion into nature, but signposts to those activities most important to our continued evolution. Such signposts aid the navigation our lives by the compass of, and in cooperation with, the energy of evolution as it flows through our lives.

The Next Post

Having seen how spirituality is a phenomenon essential to the process of evolution as it lifts the universe to ‘its current level of complexity’., this week we looked at how such spirituality can be found in human life.

Next week we will continue our summary of the blog, “The Secular Side of God” taking another look at religion from Teilhard’s vantage point of seeing religion not as ‘anti science’ but as, at its core, valuable not only of sharpening our sense of evolutionary direction, but providing science with a new hermeneutic which opens its study of the human person to wider and more relevant vistas.

January 16, 2020 – TheSecular Side of Spirituality

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Today’s Post

For the last few weeks we have been summarizing the part of the blog, “The Secular Side of God, in which we have seen how from Teilhard’s perspective, the traditional concepts of God and the Trinity can be reinterpreted into facets of universal evolution. Last week we saw how they play together in Teilhard’s convergent spiral, manifested in the ‘hominized’ vectors of Faith, Hope and Love, the human version of the universal agencies of unity, convergence and complexification, and thus continue the rise of complexity through the human person.

Throughout this journey, we have touched on the idea of ‘spirituality’, assuming that at every rung of evolution some sort of underlying agency moves the universe, and ourselves, from less to more complexity.

This week we will look at this commonly used term in more depth as we address the ‘secular side of spirituality’. The posts of September 14 through 26 October, 2017 are summarized this week.

The Evolution of ‘Spirituality’

In opposition to the traditional Western concept of spirituality as a quality of ‘supernature’, in which reality is dualistically divided into ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’. Teilhard sees only one reality, not two, and things traditionally relegated to the ‘supernatural’ are simply things that we have not yet recognized as ‘natural’

Teilhard takes the key underlying metric of ‘complexification of the universe’ as his starting point. As many have objected, how can we make this assumption? Teilhard’s answer is that if the universe did not evolve in the direction of increasing complexity, it would have been ‘dead on arrival’, and we would not be here to debate it. In his words, “complexification is not a phenomenon of the universe, it is the phenomenon”

Hence if we follow this thread of increasing complexity, we can better understand ‘how things come to be what they are’ and in doing so, better understand how we fit in.

In Teilhard’s day, this concept had yet to take root in traditional Physics. Science restricted evolution to the biological era, via the Darwinistic principle of ‘Natural Selection’. Teilhard was one of the few thinkers to question what happened in the preceding ten billion or so years that prepared the inanimate ‘stuff of the universe’ for integrating in such a way as to produce living cells.
Teilhard’s insight was that each particle of the universe somehow had the innate capability of joining with other ‘like’ particles to effect an increase in complexity in the resulting new particle. It wasn’t until the late 1960’s before empirical scientists, such as Ilya Prigogine, began to address the mystifying capability of natural things to ‘self-organize’, such as weather patterns (tornadoes), crystals, in their intricate patterns, and many other phenomena.

In the next few decades, scientists began to build an approach to physics which saw inanimate particles as inclusive of ‘information’. An example of this ‘information’ is how the complex DNA molecule provides ‘instructions’ for the conversion of nucleic acids into proteins, which would ultimately provide energy to the cell.

Paul Davies, who elaborates on this implicit factor in his book, “The 5th Miracle”, asks the question,

“How can mindless molecules, capable only of pushing and pulling their intermediate neighbors, cooperate and sustain something as ingenious as a living organism?”

   He answers his question:

“If I am right that the key to biogenesis lies, not with chemistry but with the formation of a particular logical and informational architecture, then the crucial step involved the creation of an information processing, system, employing software control.”

   Thus empirical science is being led to consider that there is something in material particles which contains what Davies analogically refers to as ‘software’. This ‘software’ is precisely what Teilhard understood as the underlying principle which guides things to unite in such a way as to increase their complexity.
Davies is quick to point out that science does not yet have an empirical understanding of exactly how this ‘software’ is embedded in the ‘hardware’ of matter, but like Richard Dawkins, he believes that it will one day be discovered.

The Spiritual Basis of Evolution

We have seen in our secular perspective of God how the principle metric of evolution is the increasing of complexity over time, and how this increasing complexity has yet to be quantified by science but yet is critical to science’s understanding of how the universe unfolds. We have also seen how this increase in complexity underpins the principle by which entities of a given order of complexity can unite in such a way that the ensuing entities are of a higher order.

Teilhard sees an energy at work by which this happens at every rung of evolution. At the rung of fundamental particles, it can be seen in the effecting of electrons from quarks, then atoms from electrons, protons and neutrons, then molecules from atoms. At the rung of the human person, it is the energy which unites us in such a way that we become more complete. At the human level this energy manifests itself as ‘love’.

It is at work, therefore, to an increasingly lesser extent as we look backward in time at all previous steps of evolution. While science does not yet have a term for this energy, the religious term is spirit.

As Teilhard points out, in the collection of his thoughts, “Human Energy”, the roots of this essential ‘complexifying’ energy of evolution are deeply embedded in the ‘axis of evolution’.

“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. ..it 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.”

   As Teilhard sees it, this ‘secular’ approach to spirituality overcomes yet another dualism that is common to religion: spirit vs matter.

“Spirit and matter are (only) contradictory if isolated and symbolized in the form of abstract, fixed notions of pure plurality and pure simplicity, which can in any case never be realized. (In reality) one is inseparable from the other; one is never without the other; and this for the good reason that one appears essentially as a sequel to the synthesis of the other. The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals (itself in) a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self-conscious.”

   Teilhard is making an essential point about spirit and matter here. He sees matter evolving to higher levels of complexity (‘synthesizing’) under the influence of the energy of complexification (‘spirit’), and the increased complexity which results from such synthesis is therefore capable of more complex interaction, which itself is capable of closer union (See last week’s post on the convergent spiral of evolution). This increased material level of complexity is a manifestation of an increased level of spirit. To Teilhard, spirit is “Nothing more; and also nothing less” than the energy of evolution, or in Davie’s analogy, “The ‘software’ which drives the ‘hardware’ to more complexity”.

In Teilhard’s perspective, therefore, the basic process of evolution can now be seen as a process of matter “changing its spiritual state”. ‘Spirit’ can now be seen as that which underlies the very axis of evolution, finally becoming fully tangible in the human person and his society.

The Next Post

This week we summarized the posts which addressed the concept of spirituality from Teilhard’s secular perspective, and saw how spirituality is a phenomenon essential to the process of evolution as it lifts the universe to ‘its current level of complexity’.

Next week we will continue our summary of the blog, “The Secular Side of God” by addressing the specific aspects of evolution as it is appears in human life. We have seen how evolution can be understood both by science and a reinterpreted religion as an increase in complexity leading up to the era of biologic life, but what happens when we introduce the concept of “Natural Selection”? Does Natural Selection replace ‘complexification’ as the key agency in evolution once the cell arrives? How do these two phenomena play out in human life? How can we become aware of evolution as it occurs in our lives?

January 9, 2020 – The Trinity and the Convergent Spiral of Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week we completed a look at how the concept of the ‘Trinity’ addresses three facets of the ‘ground of being’ that underlays the entire universe and has, as Richard Dawkins suggests, “raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence”.

This week we will look a little deeper into this agency, seeing it through a model proposed by Teilhard which illustrates how these three facets work together to effect this ‘raising’ over time.

This post is a summary of those posted from September 2 May to 16 May 2019.

The Universal Spiral of Evolution

Teilhard’s insight into evolution moves the subject from a biological process on a single planet which moves life toward manifestations that survive over time (Natural Selection) to one which increases the complexity of its products beginning at the ‘big bang’ and continues to this day, not only on this planet but at every place in the universe. As we have seen, he sees three factors are at work at each step of the the elements of ‘the stuff of the universe’ to effect this increase. He proposes this model as a way of viewing this process

In this simple figure, each element of evolution is acted on by three ‘vectors’ of evolutionary energy.

In the first vector, a, the element engages in union with other elements of the same rank, This unifying force produces a new product whose measure of complexity is slightly increased from the ‘parent’ elements, such as the atom which is a product of the union among electrons, protons, and neutrons. Teilhard refers to this vector as ‘tangential’.

The second vector, b, is an indication of the force which increases the potential for further union and complexity of the new product. Teilhard’ term for this is ‘radial’.

The resulting magnitude of complexity of the new product is indicated in the third vector, c,

By which the elements move forward and upward on the spiral as they increase their complexity.

Teilhard sees this convergent spiral as illustrating the process of evolution at every stage of every component of evolution in the entire cosmos. All components are acted upon by these three forces.

He notes, however, that every stage of evolution, while these three forces apply they appear in different ways to effect the outcomes of closer union, increased capacity for union and as a result, increased complexity. The forces of evolution by which atoms result from unifications of electrons, protons and neutrons, for example, while conforming in general to his model, are manifested quite differently from those which effect the evolution from atoms to molecules, and radically different from the appearance of the cell, the neuron, consciousness, and finally consciousness aware of itself: the human person. As the level of complexity increases, articulating and understanding how the three vectors play out becomes increasingly difficult.

This model, while explanatory of the underlying process of complexification as it rises throughout the entire universe, is not universally accepted by science. The complaint is that it can be seen as ‘teleological’, and hence a ‘back door’ intrusion of religion into the field of science.

There are, however, scientists who empirically inquire into such tangible complexification, such as Paul Davies, who, in his book, “The Cosmic Blueprint”, says

“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.)

   And, as we have seen, even the more clear-headed atheists, while dismissing religion as a valid school of thought, can refer to a process which

“…eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence. “

The Spiral of Evolution in the Human Person

If, as Teilhard asserts, the basic three vectors of the fundamental forces of evolution apply as well to humans as to atoms, how can they be seen as active in our lives?

If the three facets or ‘vectors’ identified above are still active in the human species, how do they manifest themselves in our lives?

We saw in the last post how the concept of a ‘triune God’ can be understood as the basic forces of evolution working in three interconnected ways, identified by Teilhard as ‘tangential’, ‘radial’ and resulting ‘vertical’, the increase of complexity.   Teilhard refers these three ‘facets’, or ‘vectors’ as that seen in one of Paul’s great summaries of the teaching of Jesus: the ‘theological virtues’.

The first of Paul’s three human components of this converging spiral is ‘Love’, the component of unity.   Love is the ‘hominized’ (Teilhard’s term) characteristic of the vector labelled ‘a’ in the diagram. In doing so, Teilhard frees the concept of ‘love’ from its popular understanding as a strong emotion and allows it to flower as the energy of the power of evolution to unite its products in ways that increase their complexity. To Teilhard, 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. From this perspective, 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.

Paul’s second component is that of ‘Faith’, the hominized appearance of ‘b’ in the figure above.   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 like religious terminology, imagine if Newton had not first believed that there was some objective, measurable and most of all ‘comprehensible’ force by which objects moved from ‘static’ to ‘dynamic states. 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’, ‘c’ in the figure. Hope is the result of engaging in Love and Faith which results in the opening our eyes to a future now seen as pregnant with possibility. It encourages us on our journey toward our potential for increased complexity as we move forward (and therefore upward) 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 we see ourselves 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

For the past several weeks we have been tracing the traditional approach to God, Jesus and the Trinity. Fundamentals of Western religion, through the eyes of Teilhard to their secular sides. This week we looked at the whole picture in terms of Teilhard’s ‘spiral of evolution, showing how these concepts emerge as manifestations of the forces of universal evolution, and further how they can be seen to work in our individual lives.

Throughout this journey, we have touched on the idea of ‘spirituality’, assuming some sort of underlying agency which moves the universe, and ourselves, from less to more complexity.

Next week we will look at this commonly used term in more depth as we address the ‘secular side of spirituality’.