Monthly Archives: May 2023

May 25, 2023 –God and the Phenomenon of Person

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    How Can God Be Considered as a ‘person’?

 Today’s Post

Last week we addressed the uniquely Western concept of ‘the person’, and asked the question: “Given the perspective of Teilhard and science in general, how can the phenomenon of ‘person’ as understood in the West be brought into resonance with our working definition of God?”:

“God is the sum total of all the forces by which the universe unfolds in such a way that all the entities that emerge in its evolution (from quarks to the human person) each have the potential to become more complex when unified with other entities.”

How can God be a ‘person’?  This week we will address this question.

‘Personization’ in Universal Evolution

Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, the ‘person’ is a product of evolution which emerges as an effect of increasing complexity over long periods of time.   If we are to understand God in terms of the definition proposed above, where does the characteristic of ‘person’ come in?  If a person is a product of evolution, and God is a person, does this mean that God evolves?

To Teilhard, the phenomenon of ‘complexification’ (increasing complexity over time) is the essence of the cosmic upwelling that we refer to as ‘evolution’.  Once the agent of complexity is added to the scientific canon of forces as found in the Standard Model of Physics and Biology’s theory of Natural Selection, not only does evolution as we know it become possible, but Teilhard shows how this increase in complexity can be seen to lead to the advent of ‘personness’ as found in the human.

As any educated atheist would point out, isn’t this teleology?  In teleology, one reasons from an endpoint (the existence of humans) to the start point (the purpose of evolution is to create humans).  In such teleology, creation exists for the purpose of making humans.  Teleology therefore seeks to rationalize history in terms of what has emerged.  Teleology is frequently used by fundamental Christianity, which sees God as intending humanity as the goal of ‘his’ creation.

Stephen Jay Gould, noted atheistic anthropologist, asserted that “rewinding the tape of evolution” would not necessarily result in the emergence of the human.  He believed that the many random events which have occurred in history, such as asteroid impacts which, by effectively wiping out entire species, cleared the way for the rise of mammals.  He suggests that other, different, accidents would have had other different outcomes, which would not have necessarily led to the emergence of humans.

While offering this insight as an attack on teleology, Gould’s statement nonetheless reflects his belief that evolution would still have proceeded through any combination of such disasters, and would therefore have continued to produce new species, just not necessarily mammals.  It does not acknowledge that such continuation of life would have also reflected a continuing rise of complexity in order to proceed.  Therefore, conditions permitting, evolution would still have had the potential to produce an entity of sufficient complexity to have eventually become aware of its consciousness.

Therefore, a different play of the tape of evolution which does not produce a human person is only part of the picture.  Recognizing that the increasing complexity of any emergent entity would have led to some sort of consciousness is the other part.

Teilhard asserts that this potential for ‘rising complexity’ to eventually lead to consciousness is a phenomenon of the universe itself.  While entities recognizable as ‘human persons’ may not be evolving elsewhere in the universe, the probability of the appearance of entities aware of their awareness is not insignificant.  Therefore, Teilhard sees the agent of complexity at work everywhere in the cosmos, and given the appropriate conditions, it will raise its constituent matter to higher levels of awareness:

“From this point of view man is nothing but the point of emergence in nature, at which this deep cosmic evolution culminates and declares itself.  From this point onwards man ceases to be a spark fallen by chance on earth and coming from another place.  He is the flame of a general fermentation of the universe which breaks out suddenly on the earth.”

   Evolution, therefore, requires complexification, which results in consciousness which leads to personization.

So, if God is to be understood as the ‘sum total of all forces’ (as proposed in our working definition), and the essential evolutive force is understood as that of ‘complexification’, then, among all the other forces (gravity, electromagnetism, chemistry), God can also be seen to be active in the ‘force of ‘personization’.

How can Teilhard’s lens be focused to see this force in play?

The Next Post

This week we began to use Teilhard’s lens to understand how God can somehow be considered ‘a person’ by recognizing how the upwelling of complexity in universal evolution slowly, as Teilhard phrases it, “declares itself”.

Next week we will refocus his lens to see how this declaration manifests itself in human evolution.

May 18, 2023 – The Concept of ‘God as Person’

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  Is God a ‘person’?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how an outline of the nature of the fundamental principle of existence could be derived from the writings of Richard Dawkins, well-known atheist.  In keeping with Dawkins’ secular worldview, we saw how this outline offered an excellent start to addressing God through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.  Based on this brief outline, a working definition of God emerged:

“God is the sum total of all the forces by which the universe unfolds in such a way that all the entities that emerge in its evolution (from quarks to the human person) each have the potential to become more complex when unified with other entities.”

With Dawkins’ outline of the fundamental aspects of God, this working definition, and the principles of reinterpretation that we have developed, this week we will address reinterpretation of the traditional Christian concept of God as ‘person’.

‘Person-ness”

The concept of the ‘person’ is somewhat unique to the West.  It is related to the fundamental Jewish concept of time as seen as flowing from a beginning to an end, unlike the cyclical and recursive concept of time as found in the East.  It also sees personal growth as the process of becoming not only ‘whole’, but distinctively so, as opposed to the Eastern concept of human destiny fulfilled in the loss of identity as merged into the ‘cosmic all’.  This Western concept of ‘person-ness’ is one into which the idea of evolution fits readily, which leads to the religion-friendly idea of emergent complexity.

The idea of the human person emerging from the evolutionary phenomenon of neurological development is also unique to the West.  While there is still much disagreement on how (or even whether) the person, with his unique mind, is separate from random neurological firings in the brain, the idea of the ‘person’ is well accepted.  At the level of empirical biology, however, the distinction is difficult to quantify.

Nonetheless, Western society has proceeded along the path that however the neurons work, the effect is still a ‘person’, and recognized as such in the laws which govern the societies which have emerged in the West.  While materialists can still claim that consciousness results from random neurological activity and that the basis for our consciousness is ‘just molecular interactions’, very few Westerners doubt the uniqueness of each human person.

Further, this concept of the person as unique provides a strong benefit to Western civilization.  While perhaps rooted in the Jewish beliefs which underpin those of Christianity, the Western concept of ‘the person’ nonetheless underpins the other unique Western development: that of science.  The evolution of language and use of both brain hemispheres led to the Greek rise of ‘left brain’ thinking (empirical, analytical) from the legacy modes of the ‘right brain’ (instinct and intuition), thus laying the groundwork for science.

As Jonathan Sacks sees it, when the two great threads of Greece and Jerusalem came together in Christianity, this framework evolved from a way of thinking to a disciplined facet of human endeavor.  As many contemporary thinkers have observed, it is this connection between the uniqueness of the person (and the associated concepts of freedom) and the power of empirical thinking that account for the unique successes of the West.  As Teilhard asserts, (and Johan Norberg thoroughly documents in his book, “Progress”):

“…from one end of the world to the other, all the peoples, to remain human or to become more so, are inexorably led to formulate the hopes and problems of the modern earth in the very same terms in which the West has formulated them.”

   Not surprisingly, the uniqueness of the person is reflected in Western religion.  Further, while the many different expressions of the three major monotheistic religions might disagree on the specifics, they all agree that persons are somehow uniquely connected to God, and that therefore God is in some way a ‘person’ who saves and damns, rewards and punishes, and provides guidance for life.

Our working definition (above) and our outline of the attributes of God from the last post, however, do not explicitly reflect such an aspect of the Ground of Being.
Does this mean that from our point of view God is not a person?

 ‘Person-ness’ and God

The earliest human societies were all painfully aware of the forces in their environment which they could neither explain or control, such as weather, earthquakes, predators and sickness.  They commonly attributed these forces to the work of intelligent beings, gods, as being in control of all these mysterious phenomena.  Most of them imagined these gods as being human-like, but with much greater power.   In the earliest societies, the many aspects of their mysterious environment were personified, even given names.

As society evolved, and humans grouped themselves into increasingly larger units, from families, to clans, to cities, to states, their emerging ruling hierarchies resulted in kings, sultans and other ‘heads of state’.  Many societies evolved their understanding of the gods in similar ways, resulting in an ‘anthropomorphism’ of the gods: “like us but more powerful”.

When Jewish belief moved from a pantheistic understanding of ‘the gods’ to belief in a single god, the person-like aspect of this god was preserved.  As Christianity began to emerge, it took with it the concept of God as ‘a person’.  The writings of thinkers from Irenaeus through Augustine to Aquinas identify the attributes (as well as the gender) of God as personal.  ‘He’ is omniscient (knows everything), omnipotent (all powerful) but still judgmental, and capable of jealousy and anger.

Such characteristics invite contradictory interpretations.  If God gets angry or jealous, generally considered negative human behaviors, how can ‘he’ be said to be ‘good’?  If he is all powerful, how can he permit evil?  If he knows everything in advance, then the future is predetermined and how can human freedom be possible?

On the other hand, if God is not a person, in what way can humans be considered as ‘made in his image’?  How is it possible to have a relationship with ‘him’ if ‘he himself’ is not a person?

So, with all that, Richard Dawkins’ question remains unanswered.

The Next Post

Next week we will begin to address these questions.  Are our starting definition and list of attributes for the Ground of Being antithetical to the time-honored Western concept of God as ‘person’, or can the long development of the unfolding cosmos somehow be understood as compatible with our human personness?

 

May 11, 2023 – Applying the Principles of Reinterpretation To The Concept of God

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   How can God be more clearly seen through the ‘principles of interpretation’? 

Last week we concluded the identification of nineteen ‘principles of reinterpretation’ that can be used to address the traditional tenets of Western religion.  Since all religions in some way address and attempt a definition of the underlying ‘ground of being’, that of ‘God’, we will begin here.

 

A Starting Place

 

The concept of God as found in the many often contradicting expressions of Western religion can be very confusing.  Given the dualities which occur in the Old Testament (such as punishment/forgiveness, natural/supernatural), layered with the many further dualities introduced by Greek influences in the early Christian church (such as body/soul, this world/the next), and topped by many contemporary messages that distort the original texts (such as the “Prosperity Gospel” and “Atonement Theology”) this is not surprising.  It can be difficult to find a thread which meets our principles of interpretation without violating the basic findings of science while staying consistent with the basic Western teachings.

A perhaps surprising starting place might come from the writings of one of the more well-known atheists, Richard Dawkins.   Professor Dawkins strongly dislikes organized religion, but in his book, “The God Delusion”, he casually remarks

“There must have been a first cause of everything, and we might as well give it the name God.  Yes, 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 simple basis for a (process) which eventually raised the world as we know it    into its present complex existence.”

Here we find an excellent outline of the nature of the ‘fundamental principle of existence’ that resonates well with our nineteen principles.

  • It must be the first cause of everything
  • It must work within natural processes
  • It must be an agent active in all phases of evolution from the Big Bang to the appearance of humans
  • It must be an agent for increasing complexity
  • It must be divested of “all the baggage” (such as magic and superstition) of many traditional religions
  • Once so divested, “God” is an appropriate name for this first cause, even by educated atheistic criteria.

Dawkins goes on to claim that such a God cannot possibly be reconciled with traditional religion.  Paradoxically, he fails to grasp how acknowledging the existence of such a “first cause” which raises everything to its current state of complexity is indeed at the core of all religion and offers an excellent place to begin our search.  Our process for this is of course that of ‘reinterpretation’.

For an example of such reinterpretation, in our preliminary outline above we find a reflection of Pope John Paul II’s statement on science’s relation to religion:

“Science can purify religion from error and superstition.”

So here in this starting place we can begin to see a view of God that is antithetical to neither science nor religion, but one in which John Paul II echoes Teilhard when he sees it as one in which:

“Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”

Both John Paul II and Richard Dawkins recognize that Christianity has developed a complex set of statements about God.  How is it possible to put these statements into a context which is consistent with the simple outline offered above: to ‘divest them of their baggage’?  This is the goal of ‘reinterpretation’.

The way to go about it?  We will use those nineteen ‘principles of reinterpretation’ which we identified in the last two posts to ‘divest the baggage’ in which the traditional statements about God are frequently wrapped.

 

A Preliminary Definition of God

 

A simple working definition of God, consistent with both science and religion might be

“God is the sum total of all the forces by which the universe unfolds in such a way that all the entities that emerge in its evolution (from quarks to the human person) each have the potential to become more complex when unified with other entities.”

The question could be asked, “But isn’t this just Deism?”.  In summary, the Deists, most notably represented by Thomas Jefferson, conceived of a ‘ground of being’ which was responsible for everything which could be seen at that time.  In their minds, in order to strip “the baggage” from the religious expressions of their time, God had to be understood as a designer and builder of the world, but once having built it, retired from the project.

However, theirs was a static world and in no need of continued divine involvement once ‘creation’ was accomplished.  As they saw it, Man, given his intelligence by God, was capable of successfully operating the world independently from its creator.

The Deists were off to a good start, but without the grasp of the cosmos and its underlying process of evolution that we have today, they were unable to conceive of a continuing agent of a yet undiscovered evolution which continually manifests itself in increasing complexity.  Their static world postulated either an uninvolved God or (as they saw traditional religion’s belief) a God continually tinkering with his creation.
Thus we can first understand the idea of a ‘ground of being’ as resonant with both science and a ‘reinterpreted’ religion with a few simple observations.  However, Professor Dawkins goes on to dismiss the possibility that a human person could have a relationship with a God such as his above assertion suggests.  How is it possible to ‘love’ God?  To understand Him (sic) as ‘father?  How can such an understanding lead to a relationship conducive to our personal search for completeness?

 

The Next Post

 

Next week we will begin to address such questions to examine conventional conceptions of God through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, starting with that of ‘person’.

 

May 4, 2023 – How Can Religion Be Reinterpreted to Recover Its Relevance?

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Part 2: Principles from Maurice Blondel, Jonathan Sacks, Karen Armstrong, Richard Rohr, and John Haight

Today’s Post

Last week we looked at the task of reinterpreting religion through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’, extracting six principles which we will employ as we move on to reinterpreting religious teaching for their relevance to human life.  This week we will look at additional principles from other sources.

Reinterpretation Principles From Maurice Blondel (Man Becoming)

As seen earlier, in his book, Man Becoming, Gregory Baum describes the work of Maurice Blondel as he addressed the traditional teachings of Christianity in the light of science’s increasingly universal perspective.  In summary, Blondel saw the Catholic Church’s approach to theology as diminishing today in relevance to human life.  Blondel was one of the first Catholic philosophers to call for ‘reinterpreting’ church teachings to reverse this trend, and in doing so proposed several ‘Principles of Reinterpretation’.  Some of these are:

  • Since we cannot know ‘God as He (sic) is apart from man’, we must understand that each statement that we make about God carries with it an implied assumption about humans and the reality in which they live. By applying that implied assumption, we can reinterpret a teaching in terms of our lives.

The Principle:  “Every sentence about God can be translated into a declaration about human life”

  • As Teilhard was later to expand upon, the energies of evolution which have effected ‘Man’s Becoming’ continue to be active in his continued personal evolution. The onset of complexity that began in the ‘Big Bang’ continues to be present in human life and manifests itself in our potential for increased understanding and becoming.  Most religious teachings seek to put us in touch with this current of energy by which we grow.

The Principle:  “There is no standpoint from which a human person can say, “I am here and God is there”.  The presence of God is an essential agent in his saying of it”.

The Principle:  “(Religious teaching) is not a message added to our life from without; it is rather the clarification and specification of the transcendent mystery of humanization that is fundamentally operative in our life.”

  • Any teaching must be relevant to be able to be pertinent to our lives.

The Principle:  “A message that comes to man wholly from the outside, without an inner relationship to his life, must appear to him as irrelevant, unworthy of attention and unassimilable by the mind”

The Principle: “Man cannot accept an idea as true unless it corresponds in some way to a question present in his mind”

  • Our response to reality is a necessary factor in our personal growth

The Principle: “A person is not a determined being, defined as it were by its nature.  A person comes to be, in part at least, through his own responses to reality.”

Reinterpretation Principles From Karen Armstrong (The Great Transformation)

  • In keeping with Blondel’s insistence on elements of existential value in religious teaching, Karen Armstrong also offers principles for reinterpretation.

The Principle:  “Instead of jettisoning religious doctrines, we should look for their spiritual kernel.  A religious teaching is never simply a statement of objective fact: it is a program for action.”

  • Echoing both Teilhard and Blondel, she criticizes attempts to make sense of God on human terms, which can introduce anthropomorphism into the concept of God. She agrees with both the Jewish and Eastern approach to understanding God differently.

The Principle:  “It was unhelpful to be dogmatic about a transcendence that was essentially undefinable”

Reinterpretation Principles From Jonathan Sacks (The Great Partnership)

  • All religions contain dualisms that in their inherent contradiction undermine their ability to map the road to human growth.

The Principle:  “Any teaching that departs from the underlying unity of the universe will be detrimental to successful application to human life”

  • This principle points the way to understanding how evolution continues to proceed through the human person and society. Sacks notes how science quantifies this observation by showing that human evolution has evolved our central neural system (the brain) in three stages:
    • Reptilian: Basic instinctual life sustaining functions: breathing, vascular management, flight/fright reaction
    • Limbic: Appearance of instinctive emotional functions necessary for the longer gestation and maturation of mammals
    • Neo-Cortic: Appearance of the potential for mental processes independent of and capable of mediating the stimuli of the ‘lower’ brains.

The Principle: Human evolution can be understood as the increasing skill of employing the ‘higher’ neocortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of the ‘lower’ brains.

Reinterpretation Principle from Richard Rohr

  • Good religion always acts as a unifying principle in our lives.

The Principle:  “Whatever reconnects (re-ligio) our parts to the Whole is an experience of God, whether we call it that or not.”

Reinterpretation Principle from John Haight (The New Cosmic Story)

  • Religion needs to be consistent with the ongoing insights of the universe discovered by science.

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

An Overarching Principle

  • And finally, a principle which is echoed by each of these thinkers:

The Principle: ”The underlying truth of a teaching, and the key to its relevancy, can be found in its power to bring opposing points of view into a cohesive whole”

 The Next Post

This week we completed our collection of ‘principles of interpretation’, nineteen principles that we will use as we examine the insights, concepts, and teachings of Western religion for their relevancy to human life.  It should be noted that these principles are not derived from traditional religious thought.  They are general principles, secular in nature, which can be applied to religious thought.

Next week we will continue our exploration of religion by addressing the basic cornerstone of all religions, the fundamental ground of being, the ‘first cause’ which underlays the universe: God.