How can seeing religion through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help it become an ‘evolutionary tool’?T
Today’s Post
We have seen how Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ is a potential tool for resolving the ‘dualities’ that have always plagued human evolution. Last week we saw how focusing this lens on the phenomenon of ‘religion’ will help to see it as one manifestation of this ‘tool’.
This week we will continue our look at religion to see not only how such focusing can take place, but how religion can begin to emerge as a simply an intuitive facet of the empirical tool that science offers.
The Evolutionary Roots of Western Religion
Re-reading the Christian New Testament with Teilhard’s evolutionary context in mind offers a starting place for focusing this lens. There are many unprecedented concepts in the ‘New Testament’ that have been poorly carried forward in the evolution of Christian theology, such as:
- Understanding the presence of God in all created things (Paul), and particularly in the human person (John), is contrary to a God eventually taught as ‘external’ to both the universe at large and to the individual person as well.
- Understanding that we are bound together by a force which fosters our personal growth and assures the viability of our society. (Paul)
- Recognizing that this growth enhances our uniqueness while it deepens our relationships.
- Recognizing that this uniqueness gives rise to the characteristic of human equality (Paul)), as opposed to the preeminence of hierarchy
So, a first step toward applying Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to religion would be to focus on its evolutionary roots, many of which have sprouted anew in secular organizations, as so brilliantly seen in Thomas Jefferson’s reinterpretation of these evolutionary roots in purely secular terms.
We must be able to rethink religion.
Rethinking Religion
As we have seen, one of Teilhard’s key insights was that managing manage our journey through the noosphere requires us to first understand it. The entire history of religion shows it to be our first attempt to do so. Born in an era which depended on intuitive insights and instinctive reactions, the earliest religions were simply extensions of the clan lore which formed the base for the societal structures that slowly emerged. They all reflected the need to stabilize the ever-increasing size, density, and diversity of human society. All the early myths and stories reflected the common understanding that the world had always existed, and that it had existed in manifestations that had only superficially changed over the years.
These early noospheric insights held sway for thousands of years until the “Axial Age”, some 700 years BCE. These new perspectives, with their tendrils of early Greek thinking, did not begin to compete with the traditional mode of thinking until the eleventh century, when more empirical and objective perspectives began to appear in the West.
When this happened, the highly metaphorical insights into the composition of the noosphere began to give way to increasingly empirical and therefore secular insights of first the noosphere itself and then the universe which surrounds it At the same time, the universe began to be seen less as static and more as dynamic.
The clash between the neo-think offered by the emerging scientific evidence and the static and intuitive beliefs which still reflected medieval scholasticism is well documented, and to some extent still goes on today. These beliefs offer profoundly opposed insights into the composition of the noosphere and reflect the significant dualism that underpins modern attempts to understand it. So, it comes as no surprise that today we find it difficult to unravel these two threads to find a way to re-weave them into a single strand.
In such a single strand, the concept of morality moves beyond the dualistic religious basis for a secure society and a roadmap to successful entry into the next life. With it, religion becomes a set of guidelines which ‘articulate the noosphere’ in such a way that we insure our continued evolution into states of greater complexity.
The Next Post
This week we took a first look at religion as a tool for helping us understand the structure of the noosphere as a step to managing its risks. Next week we’ll continue this theme, taking a look at how religion has traditionally ‘articulated the noosphere’, and how Teilhard sees a shift needed in the religious concept of ‘morality’ to be able to provide ‘seeds’ for a more evolved, and hence increasingly fruitful and relevant, articulation.