Today’s Post

Last week we took another look at ‘articulating the noosphere’, this time in the light of Teilhard’s insights and the many facts which Johan Norberg cites in his survey of exactly how evolution can be seen to proceed in the human.  We saw how well the forecasts for the future that were posited by Teilhard early in the last century are being borne out with Norberg’s contemporary statistics.

We also saw how, Teilhard asserts, that  to continue the rise of complexity in the human species, which is the same as continuing its evolution, we must increase our knowledge of the noosphere so that we can learn to cooperate with its ‘laws’.  This increasing understanding is also necessary for us to deal with the ‘risks’ to continued human evolution .  This week we will take a look at how both religion and science , properly understood, are up to this task.

The Axis of Evolution

Almost every scientific approach to biological evolution uses the metaphor of ‘a tree’, as in “The Tree of Life”.  The metaphor is obviously sound, in that it shows that every living thing comes from a previous form, and with the new science of DNA available, each new branch reveals details of the form from which it came.

Unfortunately, the Darwinist approach to how such forms emerged is the predominant explanation for biological evolution.  As such, it assumes a ‘trial and error’ approach subject to a wide range of random events and thus relies on a causation popularly known as ‘survival of the fittest’.  Therefore, most scientists adhere to the belief that there is no underlying causation for the continuation of evolution:  it is ‘random’.

Teilhard notes how such an approach falls very short of providing an understanding of evolution at the universal level.  He cites scientific discoveries in the last century that describe how the fundamental universe has unfolded from pure energy, progressing through stages including the precipitation of matter from this initial state of energy through stages in which these initial primordial infinitesimal granules of ‘the stuff of the universe’ grow slowly but steadily from simpler to more complex entities until the cell appears.  It is not until this point, some four billion years ago, that the ‘trial and error’ phase of evolution can begin.

Teilhard refuses to admit some sort of divine intervention in this story, insisting that matter and energy, in their initial manifestations, contain a ‘coefficient of complexity’ by which each stage of evolution occurs as a result of this implicit factor, including the step from molecular to cellular entities.  Hence, this ‘coefficient’, while acting in all previous stages, necessarily takes new forms as the complexity of the entities increases.

From this perspective, the orderly ‘tree of life’ can now be seen to have a core element that links it to the preceding ten billion years in which complex molecules emerged from pure energy.  Teilhard refers to this core element as providing an ‘axis of evolution’, and recognizing that it affords us with a metric which unites all three eras of evolution: pre life, life and reflective life.  (Teilhard uses the term ‘reflective life’ to demark conscious life from life conscious of its consciousness.)  While this approach recognizes the impacts of random events, both in the form of cosmic radiation which modifies the DNA of living tissue as well as in the form of interplanetary collisions such as the K-T extinction, Teilhard points to the fact that in spite of them, evolution still can be clearly seen to proceed in the direction of greater complexity over time.

Continuing Evolution in the Human Species

Recognizing this phenomenon of ‘universal complexification’ allows us a starting place to continuing our ‘learning curve’ about the noospheric ‘laws’, a process that is necessary if we are to insure that such complexification continues in our species.

While science sees ‘learning the rules’ as digging deeper and further in the past for clues to how the universe operates, religion has assembled a complex and frequently contradictory set of guidelines for human behavior.  The ‘continuation’ that we seek must rest on both foundations, but only as they are ‘reinterpreted’ in the light of both Teilhard’s forecasts and Norberg’s statistics.

These two perspectives, of course, represent the two most significant human undertakings: science and religion.  Often seen as opposites, and an instance of a profound human ‘duality’, a more appropriate approach might be to see them as simply enterprises  which are influenced by the two modes of human thinking represented by the ‘right’ and ‘left’ brains, and reflected by instincts and intuition on the first side, and empiricism and analysis on the left.

Seen thusly, an integrated understanding of the noosphere requires a synthesis of these two venerable enterprises.  Such a synthesis, in turn, requires a shift of the understanding of God on the one hand, from the anthropomorphic, Greek-influenced model which evolved in the West to Blondel’s ‘ground of being’ and Teilhard’s ‘principle of evolution’.  Teilhard understood the goal of his thinking as “a clearer disclosure of God in the world”.

On the side of Science, Norberg’s identification of the objective measures of human evolution move the process of evolution from a random series of meaningless consequences to a recognition that not only is evolution not random, but in the articulation of its movement, there are indeed guidelines for its continuation.  Norberg implicitly recognizes underlying principle of human evolution, Teilhard’s ‘axis’, as it manifests itself as a necessary ingredient in the increase in human welfare that he documents so thoroughly in his book, “Progress”.  While there are many other causations at play, such as weather catastrophes, even cosmic accidents, which are indeed random, more important to human evolution are the freedoms and relations that he documents.

This brings us back to the focus of the Blog, “The Secular Side of God”.  We can now see that a fresh understanding of the ‘noosphere’ requires a relook at both Science and Religion, and this relook offers the potential of seeing these two great enterprises as two sides of a single coin, and not as history would have it, systems in opposition.

Returning to the ‘sphere’ as a metaphor, but in a different way than we have seen with his explanation of increasing population over decreasing available space, Teilhard notes that Religion and Science can be seen as parallel longitudes which decrease their distance as they approach the pole.  At the equator, they are at their maximum distance, but as evolution proceeds, they approach one another with an eventual coherence at the pole.

Just as we saw the ‘laws of the noosphere’ becoming clearer as we crossed the equator (with the ‘knee in the curves’ that begin to manifest themselves beginning two hundred years ago), we are now beginning to see (as both Teilhard and Norberg evidence today) a similar demarcation in the systems which energize this movement manifest themselves.

The movement of these systems toward such coherence marks the evolution of both enterprises towards their application to  the inevitable risks to human evolution that we have charted, and insure our continued ‘march toward the future’.

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at how the approaches represented by Teilhard and Norberg can be seen to ones which permit us to see how Science and Religion can ‘team up’ to insure our continued evolution.

Next week we will take a second look at how could be made to happen.