Religion is based on ‘morality’.  How can Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help see it as a tool necessary to our evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we began a look at religion as a tool for managing the noosphere, particularly in dealing with the risks that arise with evolution of the human.  We acknowledged the traditional ills that can be seen in various expressions of religion over its six or so thousand years of manifesting itself.  We also opened the door to re-seeing it through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, as simply an attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’; the ‘right brained’ counterpart to the ‘left brained’ perspectives of science.

The question remains, of course: how can such an approach to religion be developed, weighted as it is with its historical attachment to such things as found in the radical and fundamentalist expressions of Islam in the Mideast, as well as the fundamentalism, excessive hierarchical structures and dogmatism seen in the West?  Is there a way that the teachings that have led to such obvious ‘noospheric risks’ can be reinterpreted into teachings that can mitigate them?

This week we will begin to look at the roots of Western religion to begin rediscovery of principles which will move us forward.

Rethinking Morality 

   It was in this vein that Teilhard, along with other thinkers such as Maurice Blondel, began to look at the tenets and structure of religion, particularly Western religion, in terms of the new insights offered by science.   Blondel was one of the first theologians to recognize that science’s discovery of both the depth of universal time and the nature of evolution provided an insight which could be applied not only to the universe but the human person as well.  This new insight showed the universe as ‘dynamic’, as opposed to the medieval worldview which understood both as ‘static’.  Teilhard substantially expanded this insight, understanding how this new thinking not only could bring a new, secular, empirical and more relevant meaning to religion’s ancient teachings, but that Christianity, as one of the first attempts to see religion and reason as sides of a single coin, was well suited to do so.

In his essay on “The {Phenomenon of Spirituality”, Teilhard offers five insights into the key religious concept of ‘morality’ which can not only increase the relevancy of religious teaching, but in doing so increase its value to science.  Not only can religious teaching be better grounded by the findings of science, but in doing so can provide a much needed ‘ground of humanity’ to science.

This week we will address the first two.

 The Evolutionary Basis for Morality

“If indeed, as we have assumed, the world culminates in a thinking reality, the organization of personal human energies represents the supreme stage (so far) of cosmic evolution on Earth; and morality is consequently nothing less than the higher development of mechanics and biology.  The world is ultimately constructed by moral forces; and reciprocally, the function of morality is to construct the world.”

Here Teilhard asks us to recognize that what religion has been trying to accomplish, with its topsy-turvy, ‘noosphericly-risky’, ultimately very human efforts, has simply been to ‘make sense of things’ so that we can relate to them more effectively. In this attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’, religion has used the slowly accumulated noosphere provided by intuition, metaphors, and dreams, but impeded by egos, fears, and ambitions.

He is unconcerned by the fact that we’re already some two hundred thousand years into human evolution, and still not ‘there yet’.  While considering that evolution is ‘a work in progress’, he sees morality as a tool to ‘construct the world’.  Conversely this calls for us to ‘construct morality’ even as we ‘articulate the noosphere’.

Properly understood, morals are the building blocks of the noosphere, by which we ourselves are ‘built’.

The Evolution of Morality

“Morality has until now been principally understood as a fixed system of rights and duties intended to establish a static equilibrium between individuals and at pains to maintain it by a limitation of energies, that is to say, of force.

Now the problem confronting morality is no longer how to preserve and protect the individual, but how to guide him so effectively in the direction of his anticipated fulfillments that the ‘quantity of personality’ still diffuse in humanity may be released in fullness and security.”

Here Teilhard introduces two insights:  First, the most tangible way that morality ‘constructs the world’ is by clarifying the structure of the universe so that we can better understand it.  Secondly, it offers a clearer understanding of how we are to make the best use of it as we unlock the fullness and security that is still diffuse in us.

   Put another way, as we better understand morals, we better understand the noosphere, and become more skilled at cooperating with its forces to actualize our potential.

The Next Post                              

This week we applied Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to two aspects of religion’s concepts of morality 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 three more such ‘facets’.