Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the insights of Jonathan Sacks have led us back to the theme of this blog: “The Secular Side of God”.  In offering a secular perspective on religion, as a “philosophical understanding of the human condition and our place within the universe”, Sacks stresses the need for more than the innovation and invention of Norberg in human evolution, but the awareness of meaning.  Like Teilhard, whose ‘evolutionary context’ opens the door to reinterpreting religion, Sacks’ perspective reveals a potential link to science and hence offers a powerful tool for continuing to fabricate the future of human evolution.

As we have seen in this blog, the insights of Sacks, Blondel, Teilhard, Jefferson, Rohr and others all reflect the need for a rethinking of the fundamental concept of ‘God’ before the traditional teachings of religion can be sifted from the chaff which has been accumulated over the many thousands of years, and seen for the core insights by which we can continue our evolution.

This week, we begin a summary of how these thinkers came to understand God as the very core of being from which the entire universe has come to be, including the human person, and how this perspective helps us see the value of synthesized religion and science to the continuation of our journey to Teilhard’s “fuller being”.

The Teilhardian Shift

We began this shift in perspective by seeing how Teilhard applied his scientific evolutionary insights to Christianity, specifically Catholicism, to recast its “philosophical understandings” into not only a universal perspective but one in which the human person fits without recourse to religious ‘miracles’ or scientific ‘accidents’.  In this endeavor, Teilhard was able to place the “human condition” naturally into its “place within the universe”, in keeping with Sacks’ above secular definition.

This shift identifies the beginning point for “The Secular Side of God” by seeing God as the underlying agent by which evolution proceeds as an ‘increase in complexity’.  Teilhard’s identification of this increase in complexity as the basic metric of universal evolution not only elevates the concept of God to a universal agent, but offers an insight into evolution as a continuous process which can be understood as proceeding in succeeding stages, from the ‘big bang’ all the way to its current manifestation in the form of human persons.

Key to his concept of increasing complexity, Teilhard saw each step of this process as the result of the ‘entities of evolution’ uniting at each stage in such a way as to increase not only their ‘complexity’, but their capacity for increased unification resulting in further complexity.  In his words:

“Fuller being from closer union”

   He extrapolates from this by noting that such union also ‘differentiates’, in that the evolutionary products aren’t assimilated into each other with such union, but emerge as not only more capable of future union but more distinct as well.  In his words:

“True union differentiates”

   In Teilhard’s insight, these two actions together constitute the key to universal evolution.  Without either, evolution would not proceed, and the universe, if it existed at all, would be stuck in a static sea of quiescent energy.

In his foundational book, “The Phenomenon of Man”, he carries these two basic actions forward through primordial matter and energy (the realm of physics), through the first phase of life (the realm of biology) to the current phase highlighted by the human person’s ‘awareness of his awareness’, which he refers to as ‘The Noosphere’.  In his sweeping and integrated grasp of universal reality, these are simply phases united by the single evolutionary thread (differentiating unity) in which the pure energy of the ‘big bang’ manifests itself in the increase of complexity leading to (so far) the human person.

Seeing the universe as emerging in ‘cycles of becoming’ leads to the insight that these cycles evolve along a single ‘axis of increasing complexity’ by which all things are connected by their place in the flow, the upwelling, of this basic energy over time.

Teilhard’s understanding of an ‘agent of complexity’ by which evolution proceeds is not restricted to those with a religious background.  One of the foremost atheist thinkers, Professor Richard Dawkins, famously declared:

“There must have been a first cause of everything, and we might as well give it the name God, but God is not an appropriate name unless we very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers. The first cause that we seek must have been the basis for a process which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence.”

   While Dawkins evidently could not conceive that such a God could still be compatible with religious concepts, he implicitly agreed with Teilhard that something was indeed active in the history of the universe to effect the complexity that we now see.  His insistence that religion is incompatible with science was of course based on the many years of warfare between the two that followed the beginning of “the age of reason”, and strengthened by his many valid criticisms of it.  In the “all or nothing” position he takes in his battle with religion, however, he cannot imagine any aspect of religion which could be compatible in any way with science.

In the last several posts, however, we have seen how Teilhard and Sacks, in their more holistic hermeneutics, show an entirely different approach.

The Next Post

This week we have returned to the subject of “The Secular Side of God’ by summarizing how Teilhard, Sacks and others expand the idea of God from a ‘superior being’ with ‘infinite powers’ to the ‘universal agent of becoming’ by which the universe has evolved (and continues to evolve) to states of greater complexity.

Next week we will review how this reinterpretation, instead of ‘watering down’ the concept of God (such as happened with the Theists) can move us on to a much more comprehensive understanding of God which throws new light on both the composition of the universe and as Sacks puts it, a “philosophical understanding of the human condition and our place within the universe.”