How is it possible to relate to a ‘ground of personness’?

Today’s Post

Last week we addressed the phenomenon of ‘personization’ in evolution, recognizing Teilhard’s insight that evolution of the person is a natural manifestation of the increase in complexity that can be seen in, and indeed is necessary to, the evolutionary unfolding of the universe.

In doing so, we extended our working 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.”

   with the missing piece by which the personal nature of these forces become clear:

“In the recognition of the comprehensive forces by which the universe unfolds, the one which causes evolutionary products 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.”

   But we recognized that this definition does not answer the question, “how can we relate to this additional facet of the forces of evolution?”  This week we will take a first step in answering this question.

Personization and God

Although we began our inquiry on God with a statement from Richard Dawkins several weeks ago, he doesn’t go too much further before he states the basis of his belief that while such a god as he proposes might be reconcilable to the unfolding insights of science, the God that we posit here cannot possibly be reconciled with traditional religion.  He quotes Carl Sagan:

 “If by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God.  This God is emotionally unsatisfying…it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”

   Of course, Sagan is right.  Once we limit the laws governing evolution to those found in the Standard Model of Physics and Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection, both Sagan and Dawkins are spot on.

However, neither of them acknowledges that limiting evolution to those influences found in Physics and Biology prohibits the very phenomenon of evolution itself.  It is only through inclusion of the agent of increasing complexity that the forces identified by Physics and Biology begin to account for the observed phenomenon of increasing complexity in evolution.  As we have pointed out previously, a universe without complexification would not evolve, it would remain static and featureless forever.

However, Dawkins is correct in one respect: the definition we are considering, and the six characteristics of God that his definition suggests, do not yet point to a God suitable for our personal relationship.  It is indeed ‘emotionally unsatisfying’.  To find this missing piece we must return to the characteristic of ‘personness’.

From the point of view that we have presented thus far, God is not understood as ‘a person’, but as the ‘ground of person-ness’.  Just as the forces of gravity and biology in the theories of Physics and Biology address the principles of matter, energy and life, the additional force of ‘increasing complexity’ is required to address the essential energy which powers evolution to higher levels of complexity and thus leads to the appearance of the person.

Teilhard offers an insight on this issue

“I doubt that whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized (becomes human) in him.”

   So, from Teilhard’s vantage point, the starting place for a personal approach to God, a ‘relationship’, is the recognition that this ‘axis of evolution’ which has contained the agent of ‘complexification’ for some 14 billion years is not only still active in the human but is the same axis that accounts for our individual ‘personization’.  Humans are not only products of evolution who have become ‘aware of their consciousness’, but specific products, persons, who are capable of not only recognizing but more importantly cooperating with this inner font of energy that can carry them into a more complete possession of themselves.

This unique human capability of being aware of the energy of the unfolding of the cosmos as it flows through our person, empowering our growth and assuring our potential for completeness, is neither earned nor deserved.  It has the same ‘gratuitous’ nature as gravity and electromagnetism: it is woven into the fabric of our being.  We can neither summon nor deny it.  Our only appropriate response to it is to recognize it and explore the appropriate response to it.

Teilhard commented on both our cosmic connection and our cooperation with it:

  “It is through that which is most incommunicably personal in us that we make contact with the universal. “

“Those who spread their sails in the right way to the winds of the earth will always find themselves borne by a current towards the open seas.”

So, For All This Is God A Person?

We have seen how Teilhard understands the concept of ‘person’ from both the concept of God as evident in the agency of complexity and the concept of the human person as an evolutionary product.

But to answer the question, “Is God a person?”, we return to Maurice Blondel.   As part of his objective to reinterpret Western theology, he posits that:

“Every sentence about God can be translated into a declaration about human life.”

   Resonating with Teilhard, Gregory Baum paraphrases Blondel:

“The statement that “God Exists” can therefore be reinterpreted to say that “Man is alive by a principle that transcends him, over which he has no power, which summons him to surpass himself and frees him to be creative.  That God is person means that man’s relationship to the deepest dimension of his life is personal”.

   So, in answer to the question, Baum goes on to state Blondel’s assertion that

“God is not a super-person, not even three super-persons; he is in no way a being, however supreme, of which man can aspire to have a spectator knowledge.  That God is person reveals that man is related to the deepest dimension of his life in a personal and never-to-be reified way.”

   That said, if we are to undertake a relationship with this dimension of life, how can we go about discovering this universal presence in our finite and individual lives?

The Next Post

This week we have seen how our working definition of God, while totally consistent with that of Dawkins, is still open to the concept of God found in traditional Western theology once it has been (as Dawkins suggests) “stripped of its baggage”.  We have also seen how the element of ‘person’ is not compromised by our working definition once the potential for increasing complexity is understood as the process of personness.

But this does not answer the second part of our question: what’s involved in a ‘relationship’ with such a God?   Having seen how we are connected to God by participating in this cosmic upwelling of complexity, next week we will address how such a relationship can be achieved.