How can Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ help us to develop attitudes which can lead to increased ‘fullness’?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Science’s discovery of the immensity of time and the process of evolution offers a new perspective on the statements of meaning that have evolved with both Science itself and Religion.  We also saw how, as John Haught asserts in his book, “The New Cosmic Story” a third, holistic, approach emerges from these discoveries which can bring these two traditional schools of thought into increased coherence.  Seeing this potential coherence through his ‘lens’, Teilhard predicted:

“Like the meridians as they approach the poles, science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.”

   We have been exploring the topics of sacraments, morals and values over the past several weeks.  This week we will move on to ‘attitudes’, the stances which we take in relation to life, and by which such ‘articulations of the noosphere’ can be lived out.

Attitudes

There are few things more important to the way we live our lives than the attitudes we assume as we go about our daily enterprises.  This has nothing to do with religion: even secularists have attitudes, and our attitudes have immense impact on our actions.   They are also strongly rooted in our underlying beliefs.  The difference between the influence of pessimistic and optimistic attitudes on quality of life, for example, has been well documented in psychological journals, but by what ‘hermeneutical’ principle is one’s attitude determined?  Are attitudes chosen by each of us in an intellectual process by which we reason to them, or are they a result of biological pressures over which we have no control?  Are they a result of our neocortex activity or imposed on us by the stimuli of our reptilian and limbic brains?  Are they empirical or intuitional?

One of the most common underlying principles of all religions is the impetus to believe and act in accordance with some defined principles.  Often the actions are proscribed in spite of beliefs.  Examples of this can be found in the more conservative Christian expressions, in which faith is more important than reason in deciding how to act.  Nearly all contain the teaching that ‘proper’ belief is more necessary for salvation (passing successfully into the afterlife) than ‘proper’ action.  The role of ‘attitude’ in the comportment of life, while not absent in these teachings, does not seem to be paramount.

Christianity addresses attitudes in its concept of ‘virtues’.  While traditional teaching treats virtues as ‘dispositions by which we live good lives’, the traditional implication is that the ‘good life’ is the one which ends in our salvation.

At the other end of the spectrum, in the materialistic scheme of things, attitudes are seen as those dispositions which contribute to the biological process of evolution: ‘survival of the fittest’.  In this scheme, many traditional religious beliefs can be germane in their secular support of continued evolution, but the ultimate principle as discussed last week, is to be found in the interaction among elementary particles as increasingly understood by science.

Also, as discussed last week, both approaches are rooted in the past:  Religion with its doctrines of ‘truth’ firmly rooted in ancient divine pronouncements, and Science with its belief in meaning to be found at the bottom (and hence in the past) of the evolution of matter.

The Dangers of the Past

Why should such perspectives be seen as problematic?  On the one hand, hasn’t religion proven its value to society with the building blocks it has offered to civic stability?  And hasn’t Science’s incessant search for the ultimate understanding of how matter holds together led to advances in human quality of life that would have been the stuff of dreams to our grandparents?  So, why should such traditional principles be called into question?  What’s wrong with either of these perspectives?

To answer these questions, a starting place can be found in the waning influence of religion in the West.  Most surveys, particularly reflected in the Pew polls, seem to show a correlation between declining levels of traditional church participation and increasing levels of education.  The materialists gleefully interpret this as evidence that Religion is becoming less necessary for societal stability as many of its precepts become encoded in legal systems and society becomes more educated.  This attitude is reflected in the scientific community, mostly notably Stephen Hawking, in their claim that scientific discoveries are gradually eliminating a place for God in the universe.   This perspective sees that traditionally, God is now only to be ‘found in the gaps’, and as these gaps are filled by Science, there is a decreasing need for God.

But science also faces a danger in looking for meaning in the composition of simplest matter.  As we have seen, it’s been difficult for Science to include the human person in its understanding of reality.  There is no “Standard Model” for the human person like there is for inorganic matter.  In our exploration of psychology, in which Science turns its lens on the human, we have seen that there is considerable dualism.  Add to this the belief that real meaning is only to be found in the “behind and below”, and a truly bleak picture of the future of human evolution begins to emerge.  As one atheist put it, “life’s a bitch, then you die”.  Instead of seeing human evolution as a process which can increase the level of complexity of its products (which it has so far for billions of years), it is now seen with a future more of decay than enrichment.  As John Haught puts it:

“The typical scientific materialist…takes decay to be finally inevitable because the totality of being is destined by what-has-been to end up in a state of elemental, lifeless disintegration.”

   Further, Haught notes that both traditional Science and Religion, with their sights fixed firmly rearward, seem complicit in their disdain for universal potential.  He notes that:

“The cosmic pessimism of so many modern intellectuals, it turns out, is a cultural by-product of the implicit despair about the physical universe that had been tolerated for so many centuries by otherworldly, religious readings of nature.”

   It is this pessimism that is at the root of the ‘dangers of the past’.  As science opens our eyes to the immensities of time and space, the seemingly impersonal processes of how they relate, and the ultimately material basis of matter, those traditionally spiritual (Haught: ‘otherworldly’) beliefs of Religion which have underpinned a positive stance to life in the past can become increasingly irrelevant.  What can replace our traditional set of principles?

As thinkers such as Blondel, Teilhard, Rohr and Haught suggest, it’s not that the underlying precepts of Science and Religion are wrong, and hence must be replaced, it’s more that their wisdom becomes immediately richer and more relevant when reoriented from the past to the future.  This reorientation occurs with the simple recognition that the universe is unfinished, in which, as Haught sees:

“(Science) professes to be highly empirical and realistic but leaves out of its survey of nature the fact that the cosmos is still in the process of becoming.  …the fullness of being, truth and meaning are still rising on the horizon.”

The Next Post

This week we have explored the phenomenon of ‘attitudes’ and saw how the traditional approach of science and religion can lead to not only the increasing irrelevance of religion but the increased pessimism of science.  Next week we will take another look at how reorienting our Scientific and Religious perspective from past to future offers an additional ‘principle of reinterpretation’.

  How can Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ aid in seeing the potential confluence between science and religion?

Today’s Post

For the last several weeks we have been exploring the religious concepts of sacraments, values and morals as ‘articulations of the noosphere’: structures of the reality in which we live that, when cooperated with, can lead us to Karen Armstrong’s “greater possession of ourselves” and place us on Teilhard’s “current to the open sea”.

This week we will continue this exploration into a clearer view of human life which capitalizes on these structures.

The Holistic Perspective

Last week we saw how both the traditional scientific, materialistic, even atheistic perspectives on human existence can be brought into confluence with traditional religious perspectives with a few changes in interpretation.

• Once science expands its understanding of evolution from terrestrial biological phenomena (Natural Selection) to a universal perspective (complexification), evolution can be seen in three distinct phases united by a continuing increase of complexity in its products (pre-life, life, life conscious of itself).  In this more comprehensive perspective, there are indeed ‘articulations of the noosphere’ which foster our continued evolution.
• The theist assertion that morals are absolute imperatives issued from a divine source thousands of years ago requires that these standards of behavior are, as the materialists assert, intelligible, but also that our quest for understanding them is still ongoing.

Or, as Teilhard puts it:

“So long as our conceptions of the universe remained static, the basis of duty remained extremely obscure.  To account for this mysterious law which weighs fundamentally on our liberty, men had recourse to all sorts of explanations, from that of an explicit command issued from outside to that of an irrational but categorical instinct.”

   So, putting evolution into an unfolding cosmic context leads to, as John Haught asserts in his book, “The New Cosmic Story” a third, holistic, approach.

 The Third Way

As we saw when we addressed John Haught’s three approaches to making sense of reality, he notes that at their roots, both the traditional theistic traditions and materialistic interpretations most often associated with science are rooted in the past (.https://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=202303)

Science, for its part, continues to search for understanding of the cosmos by looking backwards into the increasingly particulate components of matter and energy.  In science’s ‘Theory of Everything’, success will be declared when we understand every step of the evolution of matter from its initial state of pure energy (the ‘big Bang’) to its current state of highly complex combinations of atoms, molecules, and cells.   As Jonathan Sacks puts it, “Science takes things apart to see how they work”.  This approach leads to such beliefs as random determinism (our thoughts are the result of random firings of neurons precipitated by molecular activity), and often lead to a denial of human free will.  In other words, from this approach, meaning is to be sought from, as Teilhard puts it, “The behind and below”.  In this perspective, the future is indeterminate; it is only by understanding the past that we can understand the universe and prepare for the future.

Religion posits the validity of its beliefs in ‘revealed truth’, usually contained in ‘sacred scripture’ written eons ago.  In simpler terms, humans have been given the ‘law’ but consistently fail to live up to it.  From this perspective, the human species will fail in its enterprises, requiring an eventual imposition by God of a theistic and divine government.  While Sack’s observation that ‘Religion puts everything together to see what it means’, is correct, the criteria by which it does so assumes a perfect past from which we are ‘fallen’.

Haught notes that Teilhard (as well as Blondel, Haught, and Rohr) recognizes that the scientific concept of evolution (when freed from its biological constraints) offers religion a freedom from its ‘chains of the past’, and permits these two classical modes of thinking to be seen to have a future level of coherence that the traditional modes deny.  He also notes that the single strongest component of this new approach is simply the clarity that is brought by understanding the ‘stuff’ of science and religion in the light of a comprehensive, universal evolutionary process.

Again, from Teilhard:

   “Under the influence of a large number of convergent causes (the discovery of organic time and space, progress in the unification or ‘planetization’ of man, etc), man has quite certainly become alive, for the last century, to the evidence that he is involved in a vast process of anthropogenesis, cosmic in plane and dimensions.”

   So, if we are to find new ways of ‘employing our neo-cortex brains to modulate the instincts of our limbic and reptilian brains’, or more prosaically, ‘becoming what we are capable of becoming’, we must find new meaning in the old pronouncements.  Understanding and living life in terms of the sacraments, morals and values that we have explored can take on new meaning when we begin to understand that we are part of an evolutionary process by which we are brought into ‘greater possession of ourselves’.

To see ourselves caught up in Teilhard’s process of ‘anthropogenesis’ is to recognize that meaning is always to be sought in the future.  There can be no doubt that our bodies can be boiled down to masses of molecules and that the insights of the past are worth our attention.  However, recognition that we are ‘borne on a current to the open sea’ requires us to look past the “explicit commands issued from the outside” as proposed by Religion, and the “… irrational but categorical instincts” proposed by Science, to a future that, to our opening eyes, is truly open to us.

Teilhard proposed a spherical image of the actualizing of potential for Science and Religion to mutually foster our future evolution:

 “Like the meridians as they approach the poles, science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.”

   The shift in our stance with respect to life that Haught explores is one that turns our expectations, hopes, and actions, as Teilhard says, “Towards the future”.  This leads us to the religious concept of ‘virtue’.

The Next Post

This week we have explored how Teilhard’s understanding of cosmic evolution can bring new clarity to both the meanings proposed by materialists as well as those asserted by theists.  Next week we will extend this exploration to the stances that we take when we seek to apply the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ (sacraments, morals, and values) to our life.  It makes a difference whether or not we see such articulations as rules to be followed to achieve ‘salvation’, or the acceptance of the fate of a faceless, indeterministic universe, and we will take a look at such stances in the light of religion’s ‘theological virtues’.

   How can Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ serve to reconnect the spiritual and materialistic understanding of morality?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how legacy religious and scientific perspectives on morals are very orthogonal.   Where traditional religion insists on an absolute basis of morals, science proposes one which is relative to our understanding of science’s key agency of evolution: ‘survival’.  Today we will see how these two perspectives can be brought into coherence by employment of Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.

From Teilhard’s Insights

There are many ways in which the orthogonal perspectives of Science and Religion can be seen to align.  As we have seen many times, both Religion and Science are rife with ‘dualisms’ which choose a viewpoint from the many shades of belief on any subject.  Teilhard’s approach seeks to bring the opposing sides into confluence by understanding them in the holistic context of universal evolution and applying the techniques of reinterpretation that we have proposed.  The subject of ‘morals’ is no exception.   One way to effect such confluence is to return to Teilhard’s treatment of the two seemingly contrary positions:

“So as long as our conceptions of the universe remained static, the basis of duty (moral standards) remained extremely obscure.  To account for this mysterious law (the energy of evolution which effects increasing complexity) which weighs fundamentally on our liberty, man had recourse to all sorts of explanations, from that of an explicit command issued from outside to that of an irrational but categorical instinct.” (parenthetical statements and italics mine)

   Teilhard noticed that science’s new understanding of evolution can offer an improved understanding of morality:

“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 notes that in the slow transition from ‘expansion’ to ‘compression’ that is occurring in human history, new beliefs and tactics must evolve for humanity to survive its infolding on itself.   Those practices that could be understood as normative in the ‘expansion’ stage of evolution, in which the ‘open’ capacity of the Earth allowed unlimited spreading, have worked poorly as there became less space to expand into.  The last two centuries, with their incessant and ever widening wars, offer clear evidence of it.

As we looked into finding evidence for our own evolution, we saw how Johan Norberg suggests that new paradigms, emerging in the West, are causing a reversal of the slope of this curve in the past hundred fifty years.  He suggests the cause of this change in direction to be rooted in such phenomena as

• The ridiculing of war by Enlightenment thinkers
• The calming of religious fundamentalism
• The recognition of the horror of war as improved education and increased social stability permitted a more objective look at the past.

He also suggests that globalization has offered a milieu in which the fruits of Western personal autonomy and social cohesion can spread quickly across the globe.  As a result, the global awareness that has emerged not only recognizes that it is cheaper to buy resources than to take them by force, but that fostering individual autonomy and improved human relationships can lead to a national stability which increasingly accomodates the inevitable compression of society.

In a nutshell, just as the instincts evolved in our mammalian ancestors worked well for their evolutionary history but need to be modulated by our neocortex brains to manage our own history, the ‘morals’ that guided our human ancestors as they evolved ‘upward and outward’ need to be modulated and recast as our continuing evolution, if it is to continue ‘upwards’ must now focus ‘inwards’.

To aid in such an ‘inward’ focus, Teilhard proposes the same principle of reinterpretation that was previously suggested by Blondel: to understand that human persons are products of an evolutionary process, as science teaches, requires the acknowledgment of the existence of a principle which ‘effects our becoming’, as religion teaches.  This suggests common ground between the materialist and theist perspectives:

• The materialists are correct in asserting that the basis of morals can be found in the principles of evolution. However, it is necessary to expand the understanding of evolution from terrestrial biological phenomena and open it to its universal perspective.  In doing so evolution can be seen in three distinct phases which are united by a continuation of the increase of complexity in their products.  In this integrated perspective, there are indeed ‘articulations of the noosphere’ which foster the continuation of evolution in human life, and these can be expressed in terms such as sacraments, values and morals.
• The theists are correct in asserting that these morals are indeed, at their basis, absolute. The absolute nature of these standards of behavior are, as the materialists assert, intelligible, but require our continued search for a more complete understanding of them.

So, the materialistic approach to morals needs to be placed in the full picture of evolution and take into account the presence of the agent of universal evolution in each personal life.  By the same token, the theist approach needs to be shorn of its premature dogmatism and be open to both the intelligibility of the universe and our part in it as we continue to evolve our understanding of it.

Science, with its grasp of the universe as ‘becoming’ can bring new life to religion, as asserted by John Haught and Teilhard.  As Blondel and Teilhard understood, recognizing that the human is a product of a continuously evolving universe permits a deeper understand of God as the universal principle of such evolution.  By the same token, their fresh approach to religion also serves to expand science’s understanding of this process to include the human as not only a product of evolution, but one able to respond to a new mode of evolutive energy which goes beyond the Darwinian principles of ‘chance and necessity’,

The question can then be asked, how can humans employ their new-found capacity of being aware of their consciousness in service to their continued evolution How can they be seen to be capable of ‘effecting their own complexification’?

The answer involves developing the skill of the neocortex brain in modulating the instinctive stimuli of the lower limbic and reptilian brains.  Examples of practices and beliefs that develop and strengthen this skill abound in every religious and philosophical school of thought that has emerged in human history.  The downside, of course, is that they are enmeshed and deeply entangled in hierarchies, sentimentality, and supernaturalism that can undermine their validity as ‘articulations of the noosphere’.

So, in order to be able to (paraphrasing Richard Dawkins) “explicitly divest religious belief of all the baggage that it carries in the minds of most religious believers”, it is necessary to reinterpret these beliefs in terms of human ‘complexification’ (human growth) so that their relevancy to human life and continued evolution can be more fully understood.

In simpler terms: in the human, the mechanism of evolution transforms from ‘evolutionary selection of entities’ to ‘entities which select their evolution’.

The Next Post

This week we have contrasted the ‘materialistic’ (‘atheistic’) position with that of the ‘theists’ on ‘how we should be if we would be what we can be’ and saw how a holistic perspective on evolution offers a common ground of belief that seems more consistent with both our general religious and scientific understanding not only of the universe but of our part in it.

Assuming that there are indeed ‘articulations of the noosphere’ that when observed, lead on to, as Teilhard put it, “being carried by a current to the open sea”, what do we do with them?  How can we orient ourselves to these ‘currents’?

Next week we will take our explanation of sacraments, values and morality to the next level and explore an approach to evolution which finds common ground between these seemingly orthogonal approaches to understanding human evolution.

How can the material and spiritual approach to morality be seen to differ?

Last Week

Last week we expanded our look at sacraments into the realm of values and morals and saw how scientific materialism understands the basis of ‘correct behavior’ to be derived from the interpretations of ‘evolutionary psychology’.  From this perspective, behavior is ‘correct’ if it fosters our continued participation in the flow of evolution, understood as the continuation of ‘survival’.  The materialistic basis for morality is, then, ‘relative’.

On the other hand, the differences in behavioral standards that can be found among religions are seemingly compounded by the differences between religion and science, and further vary with different interpretations of the evolutionary process itself.  In general, however, each religion considers their behavioral standards as ‘absolute’.

Is it possible to have a coherent interpretation of values and morals?

This week we will employ Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to explore these two ends of the belief spectrum- materialism and traditional Christianity- in our search for the basis of morals.

Two Orthogonal Viewpoints

The word ‘seemingly’ is used above because the materialistic ‘evolutionary psychological’ viewpoint is based on an incomplete grasp of evolution.  As we saw last week, this understanding restricts the historical timeline of evolution to the most recent phase of ‘biological evolution’.  This narrow approach falls significantly short of the universal perspective proposed by Teilhard.  As we have frequently noted, Teilhard’s ‘lens’ sees evolution as the underlying phenomenon in all of universal history,  from the ‘big bang’ to the present.

Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection only addresses the few billion years which constitute the phase of biological evolution leading to the human person.  Teilhard identifies the nine or so billion years preceding the first cell as the inorganic ‘first phase’ of evolution, and the two hundred thousand years (or so) of human existence as the ‘third’.  As we have seen, he goes on to point out how the energy of evolution takes different forms as it proceeds through the three phases in its continuous increase of the complexity of its products.

A first step towards a more comprehensive perspective is to recognize that materialists are correct when they assert that the basis of morality should lie in the continuation of human evolution.  When seen by Teilhard’s more inclusive ‘lens’, however, Natural Selection becomes an ‘epi-phenomenon’ which rides on top of the more fundamental ‘rise of complexity’ that underpins all three phases.  The agency of the first phase can be seen in the precipitation of matter from pure energy following the ‘Big Bang’.  It can be seen as matter goes on to evolve into more complex arrangements leading to the mega-molecules which form the raw material for the first cells.

This phenomenon is only now in the early stages of being addressed by science.  The agency of the third phase by which individual persons and their societies emerge and become more complex is also poorly addressed by science, and even there in the form of highly controversial and relatively untestable theories.  Applying the well-understood process of Natural Selection as an explanation of poorly understood human evolution is like losing one’s car keys in the middle of a dark city block and looking for them at the street corner because the light is better.

So the conclusion which should be drawn from science’s discovery that we are products of evolution is less that we are to continue the urge to procreate and survive (essentially to continue to respond to the instinctual stimuli of our reptilian and mammalian brains) but that, in the human person, the energy of evolution is much more manifest in the activity of our neocortex brain, which must be employed to modulate the instinctual stimuli of our lower brains if evolution is to continue through us.

Therefore, once evolution is seen in its complete context, from the Big Bang to the present, the evolutionary basis for morality can be expanded to include those principles by which our continued evolution can be assured.

While the materialistic approach to the basis of morals can be seen to reduce standards of behavior to the instincts of our animal evolutionary predecessors, addressing the basis of morals from the traditional perspective of religion also comes with problems.  In many western expressions, morals are understood as laws given explicitly by God in the distant past and recorded in scripture.  As we have frequently seen, from this perspective, morals can also be seen more as justifying a post-life reward (or as one theologian puts it,  ”As an escape route from this life”).  The basis of morals as understood by the more conservative western Christian expressions is then ‘absolute’, even if we humans in our sinful state find them difficult to follow.

The Next Post

This week we have contrasted the ‘materialistic’ (‘atheistic’) position with that of the ‘theists’ on ‘how we should be if we would be what we can be’, The materialist, in a limited view of evolution, sees morals as ‘relative’ to ‘survival’, while the theists sees them as dictated by an all-powerful God eons ago and therefore ‘absolute’ and thus necessary for reward in the ‘next life’.

Next week we will explore how a more comprehensive perspective on evolution can be seen to offer a common ground of belief that seems more consistent with both our general religious and scientific understanding of both the universe and our part in it.