“How can religion be reexamined through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’?
Today’s Post
Last week we took a second look at Teilhard’s first step of managing the noospheric risks to human evolution by better understanding it from the perspectives of religion and empiricism. We saw how a deeper understanding of the structure of the Noosphere, the milieu of human enterprise, involves recognition of and cooperation with the universal agent that for fourteen billion years has invested itself in the continuing rise of complexity that has eventually, at least on this planet, given rise to humans.
As we have seen over the past several weeks, with the human person, this rise is no longer solely based on biological and instinctual processes, it must now be consciously grasped and capitalized upon if it is to continue in the human species. The ‘noospheric risks’ which we have identified must be consciously overcome if human evolution is to continue.
A major step in understanding the noosphere so that those risks can be managed, as Teilhard suggests, is to ‘articulate’ it, to understand how it is at work in our continued evolution, both in ourselves as well in our societies.
One such tool is, properly understood, religion. This week we will begin to use Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to look at religion to understand how it can be seen as a tool to achieve such a goal.
Why Religion?
One of the foundational concepts of the great Western awakening known as “The Enlightenment” was the diminishment of religion’s role in society and government. One of the results of this diminishment was the rise of atheism, which placed many of the world’s ills (e.g., ‘Noospheric risks’) at the doorstep of organized religion. Both the leading Enlightenment thinkers, and the atheists which followed them, valued objective, empirical thinking over the subjective and intuitive intellectual processes that had informed medieval Western thinkers. As we have discussed last week, the rise in ‘left brain’ thinking began to surpass that attributed to the ‘right brain’ as a method of ‘articulating the noosphere’.
It is obvious that the many ills stemming from religious teachings that can be seen today in the Mideast governments, infused with radical and fundamentalist expressions of Islam, as well as Western religions weighted down by fundamentalism, dogmatism, and excessive hierarchical structures are sources of ‘evolutionary risk’. This suggests that the post-Enlightenment perspectives are indeed superior to traditional religion in helping us make sense of what’s happening in the noosphere, and how to navigate our way through it.
Can there be a way that religion can be seen as a tool for helping us mitigate these risks, or is it destined to end up in the dust bin of history? Is it simply a perspective that has ‘seen its day’ but is no longer relevant in this new and technical milieu?
One way to look at this question is to see in religion the evidence of many deep seated ‘dualities’. Jonathan Sacks, like Teilhard, saw such dualities as seeing different facets of a single reality as opposites, such as ‘this world’ vs ‘the next’, or ‘natural’ vs ‘supernatural’. Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, most dualities simply reflect an inadequate understanding of such concepts, resulting in ‘cognitive dissonance’, and can be overcome with the application of an appropriate context.
From the traditional perspective, science and religion are often seen in terms of such a duality. Dualities often reflect a mode of seeing in which ‘right brained’ and ‘left brain’ perspectives, empiricism, and intuition, are understood as ‘opposites’. To see them thusly is to overlook the fact that there is only a single brain, although it may have many modes of operation.
Teilhard’s method of resolving ‘dualities’ is simply to put them into a single context, as he does with his ‘lens of evolution’. In such a context ‘opposites’ now appear as ‘different points in a single integrated spectrum’. From this perspective, the underlying coherence that exists in the two ‘opposites’ can now be understood.
So, applying this insight to the question above allows us to reframe it: “How can the legitimate aspects of the ‘right brained’ perspective offered by religion be seen to help us make sense of the human person in the same way that the ‘left brained’ perspectives of the Enlightenment helped us to understand the cosmos?”
As we saw in our series on Norberg’s ‘Progress’, the human actions of innovation and invention, obviously the fruit of ‘left brain’ activity, nonetheless turn on the pivot points of personal freedom and human relationships, which are much more the domain of the ‘right brain’. So, on the surface, it would seem essential that these two modes of human thought operate less like the commonly understood ‘opposites’ than as the two facets of the single thing that Teilhard’s ‘lens’ shows us that they are.
I have suggested that one measure of increasing human evolution is the skill of using the neocortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of the lower (reptilian and limbic) brains. Just as important is the corollary of using the whole neocortex, both left and right lobes, intuition, and empiricism, in making sense of things.
As the above example from Norberg shows, the skill of articulating the ‘right brained’ concepts of personal freedom and relationships, while essential to our continued evolution, is not something we can learn from science. Religion, as it is commonly understood, is not up to the task either. Traditional Western religion has only slightly evolved from its medieval perspectives, and as such would seem to offer little to a partnership with science in the enterprise of ‘articulating the noosphere’. For religion to be relevant to the task of extending Teilhard’s approach of understanding difficult questions by putting them into an evolutionary context, it must itself evolve. Contrary to conventional wisdom, a closer relation to science can aid in the recovery of such relevance, as John Haught asserts.
“…every aspect of religion gains new meaning and importance once we link it to the new scientific story of an unfinished universe.”
A similar challenge can be made to science: for science to expand its reach to the human person, it must recognize the phenomenon ‘spirit’, as understood in Teilhard’s context. ‘Spirit’, to Teilhard, is simply the term we use to address the agency by which matter combines in evolution to effect products which are increasingly complex. As Teilhard puts it,
“…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’.
Haught sees the opposite side of the coin as he takes note of
“…how little illumination materialistic readings of nature have shed not only on religion but also on life, mind, morality and other emergent phenomena.”
The Next Post
This week we have seen how putting human history into a context of evolution helps us to begin to see how what have been traditional and deep seated ‘dualisms’ can be put into a single integrated context and begin the process of using both our human modes of thought to better understand who we are and how can continue to move ourselves forward.
Next week we will look at this process.