How can science and religion, our two great modes of thought, be rethought to help us evolve?

Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at managing the ‘noospheric risks’ that we can see as evolution rises through the human species.  We boiled down the essential approaches to ‘building the noosphere’ that we saw last week:

“…that human persons must be free to capitalize on their ‘interiority’ and be given the ‘liberty’ to continuously rearrange both their personal perspectives to identify enterprises which can be either used as steppingstones to new arrangements or corrected if they do not effect an improvement, and to engage with other persons to freely form ‘psychisms’ to perform them.”

But we noted that these approaches themselves need to be continually improved if they are to reflect true ‘articulations of the noosphere’.

This week we will continue this look, by exploring science and religion, our two great systems of thought, as they attempt to help us ‘make sense of things’.

Spirit and Matter: The Bones of Reality

We have noted that, as Teilhard postulates and Norberg articulates, no movement forward (towards Johan Norberg’s continued improvement in human welfare, powered by Teilhard’s increased complexity) occurs without some unplanned and unwanted consequence.  Religious skeptics of ‘secular progress’ see such progress as meaningless if unwanted consequences ensue. As we have seen, such negativity compromises progress in favor of superficial improvements.  They see such consequences as illustrations of the futility of humans to overcome their ‘sinful nature’.  From this point of view, the ills of the world are evidence of our innate ‘broken ness’.  We are not, they assert, ‘spiritual enough’.  This perspective is well countered by Teilhard in his understanding of spirituality as simply a facet of ‘the stuff of the universe’.

“…spirit 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.  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. “

   In this unique perspective, Teilhard offers a totally new perspective on the traditional ‘spirit/matter duality’ so common to a religious perspective which sees them as opposites, requiring divine intervention into ‘lower’ matter in order to ‘save’ it, much as Luther envisioned humans as “piles of manure covered by Christ”.

In the same breath he also counters the prevalent materialistic position of many scientists that ‘spirituality’, as understood by most ‘believers’ is simply a mental illusion use to salve the pains of daily life.

Recognizing this, as Teilhard does so succinctly, bridges the gap between the ‘spirituality’ so prized by Religion and the ‘progress’ equally prized by Science.  He does not seem them as opposites, but simply two facets of a single integrated reality.  Both Teilhard and Norberg would agree that, properly understood, such spirituality is embodied not only in every cosmic step towards increased complexity, but also in all progress by which human welfare is advanced.

More succinctly, and essential to the core of Teilhard’s insight, spirituality is the agency by which matter becomes more complex, therefore more evolved.  From his perspective, it can be seen as essential to every cosmic act of unification, from bosons all the way up to humans: Unification effects complexification which effects consciousness.
   John Haught, in his book, “The New Cosmic Story’, restates this perspective.

“Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ has been part of the universe from the start. So hidden is this interior side of the cosmos from public examination that scientists and philosophers with materialist leanings usually claim it has no real existence.”

   Thus, the religionists are correct: the world needs more spirituality if it is to succeed.  However, with Teilhard’s more universal understanding of ‘spirituality’ we can now see that spirituality is that which underlies the evolution of the ‘stuff of the universe’ (e.g.: matter, e.g.: humans).  With this understanding, the idea of spirituality is freed from the ‘otherworldly’ nature which requires us to disdain matter, to one in which matter is dependent on spirit for its evolutionary rise in complexity and spirit depends on matter as a vehicle for this rise.

With this new approach, Teilhard’s ‘lens’ human welfare can now be seen as not only just as important as ‘spiritual’ growth, but also actually a result of it.  And seen in this light, Norberg’s metrics of ‘progress’ also provide evidence of the continued rise of spirituality in human evolution.

This perspective doesn’t suggest that the human species will be ‘saved’ by all forms of religion or science; the ills of both are commonly enough reported.  However, the successes of both are embodied, as Teilhard, Norberg and Richard Rohr point out, in the freedom of the individual, the recognition of the importance of relationships, and in the trust that stewardship of these two facets of existence will lead to a better future.  Compromising any of these three will undermine the continuation of human evolution.

As Richard Rohr succinctly puts it:

“The first step toward healing is truthfully acknowledging evil, while trusting the inherent goodness of reality.”

The Next Post

      This week we continued our look at managing the risks of continued human evolution by relooking at how Teilhard offers a perspective in which spirituality and human progress aren’t in opposition to each other, they represent two facets of a single thing, increasing complexity.    Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, spirituality is expanded from human ‘holiness’ to a universal agency of ‘becoming’ on the one hand, and Norberg’s list of how such ‘becoming’ plays out in human affairs on the other, permits us a fuller appreciation of how evolution is occurring in our everyday lives.

Next week we will see how this new perspective can lead to a better understanding of where we can go from here.