How Can God Be Considered as ‘Personal’?

 Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ captures the human as

“.. the flame of a general fermentation of the universe which breaks out suddenly on the earth.”

This week we will refocus his ‘lens’ on how the result of this ‘outbreak’ can help to recognize the ‘personness’ of God.

 ‘Personization’ In The Human

Looking through Teilhard’s lens, we can see that the human person emerges from evolution not in a single discontinuous step, but instead from a slow accretion of characteristics layered one upon another over a long period of time.  Cells evolve from single-cell to multiple-cell entities, adding sensory and mobility characteristics and uniting through increasingly complex centers of activity via increasingly complex neural circuits.  There is not a single entity in this long line of development that does not proceed from a less-complex precursor.

There are two seeming discontinuities in this process.  The first is seen in the appearance of the cell itself.  At one instance in the evolution of our world, it is swimming in a primordial soup of very complex molecules.  At the next, many of these molecules are functional parts of an enclosed and centered entity, the cell.  As Teilhard notes:

“For the world to advance in duration is to progress in psychical concentration.  The continuity of evolution is expressed in a movement of this kind.  But in the course of this same continuity, discontinuities can and indeed must occur.  For no psychical entity can, to our knowledge, grow indefinitely; always at a given moment it meets one of those critical points at which it changes state.”

The advent of the cell is such a ‘change of state’ in which increasing complexity results in something totally different from its predecessor, but still composed of the same basic elements.

The ‘person’ is the second example of such ‘change of state’.  Materialists argue that the differences between humans and their non-human ancestors are too small to be of significance, denying any uniqueness to the human person.  This is true at the levels of morphology and supported by the evidence of DNA. It is just as true that human persons, through their unique ‘awareness of their consciousness’, are clearly separate from the higher mammals.  They represent the outcome from the same significant type of ‘change of state’ as seen in the advent of the cell.

Therefore, while human persons are clearly a ‘product of evolution’, their level of complexity has increased from ‘consciousness’ to ‘awareness of consciousness’.  It is in this new level of being that we find ‘the person’.  And in finding it, we can now expand our definition of God:

“God is the sum total of all the forces by which the universe unfolds in such a way that all the entities that emerge in its evolution (from quarks to the human person) each have the potential to become more complex when unified with other entities.”

   To which we add:

“In the recognition of the comprehensive forces by which the universe unfolds, the one which causes things to unite in such a way that they become more complex, conscious and eventually conscious of their consciousness (eg, the person) can only be understood as personal.”

   As Teilhard sees it, the person is

“.. nothing but the point of emergence in nature, at which this deep cosmic evolution culminates and declares itself”.

   In such declaration, evolution itself can be seen as ‘ultimately personal’.  From this refocusing of Teilhard’s lens, the human person is

 “…the flame of a general fermentation of the universe which breaks out suddenly on the earth.”

   Thus, God is not ‘a person’ (by Teilhard’s definition, a product of evolution) but the ultimate principle of ‘personness’.  In the human, evolution shows the universal process of evolution ‘declaring itself’, at least on this planet’ in the form of ‘person’.

The Next Post

Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, this understanding of the evolution of ‘personness’, while locating the personal agency of evolution in the sum total of evolutionary forces, answers the question “Is God a person?”  It does however lead to the question of a human-God ‘relationship’. Humans are learning how to align themselves with many of the other aspects of ‘the ground of being’, which accounts for human evolutionary success thus far. How can such awareness of the personal aspect of these forces be seen to provide a basis of similar alignment?

Next week we will address this side of the question of personness and explore how the concept of God as an agent of ‘personization’ can be extended to that of understanding ‘him’ as an agency of evolution with which we can have a relationship.