Today’s Post
This week we sum up the first three parts of the blog, which deal with Teilhard’s unique view of evolution and how this view not only extends science’s understanding of biological evolution into the distant past of the ‘big bang, but extends it forward into the present day. In other words, Teilhard’s vision not only encapsulates science’s ‘Standard Model’ of physics, and biology’s Darwinistic concept of ‘Natural Selection’ but addresses the continuation of evolution in the human person, a subject of both the science of psychology and the benumbing swirls of religious belief.
Our treatment of this subject can be seen in the posts from 29 October 2014 through 23 July 2015.
Complexity: The Starting Place
Before Teilhard, and in many minds still applicable today, these three domains of universal existence Remain heavily compartmentalized, with no hermeneutic or phenomena to connect them. Natural Selection pays scant attention to the atoms and molecules addressed by the Standard Model at one end, and the human person, with his attribute of ‘consciousness aware of itself’ conforms poorly to the ‘laws’ of Natural Selection at the other.
Teilhard’s approach to this perennial disconnect is to simply derive a ‘centristic’ approach to evolution in which the validity of both points of view are recognized. He begins with the undeniable fact of ‘complexification’ (his term) as the underlying metric of evolution which the three stages. Once this is understood, what is left is to identify the ways that complexity can be seen to have occurred in the history of the universe and to plot its rise to the level seen in the universe today.
This method of placing everything into the ‘context of complexification’ overcomes several problems. Most scientists understand evolution in terms of Physics (for small particles) and Natural Selection (for living things). Physics, with the ‘Standard Model’ addresses how quarks, protons and atoms work their way up the complexity chain to molecules. The Darwinian process of ‘Natural Selection’ addresses how living things evolve. However, at the point of formation of molecules, particularly the highly complex nucleic acids, proteins and DNA (which underlie all life), neither approaches seem to work.
We see this discontinuity again at the appearance of ‘reflective consciousness’ (consciousness aware of itself). As a result, science offers little to address the human person.
The problem can be seen at the level of religion as well. While all religion addresses the human person directly, it is rife with such a degree of the supernatural, superstitious and fancy that it becomes more difficult to see as relevant as science reveals more about the building blocks of reality.
Teilhard simply takes a step back and views this universal journey from pure energy at the big bang to the ‘reflective consciousness’ unique to humans as single journey in which the ‘stuff of the universe’ (his term) simply reveals itself in shades of increasing complexity over time. In this view, neither the laws of physics nor Darwinian evolution are contradicted, they are simply seen as stepping stones by which the universe ‘complexifies’.
The Action of Complexity in Universal Evolution
If the universe is a single thing, and evolves according to a single agency, how can it be understood to be active in all stages of universal evolution? Teilhard answers this question with the assertion that each element of ‘the stuff of the universe’ comes into being with two potentials: Unity and Complexity.
The potential for Unity simply refers to the tendency for elements of this ‘stuff’ at the same rung of evolution to unite with each other to produce new ‘stuff’. The potential for Complexity refers to the product of such union: it can be more complex than either of its ‘parent’. This is relatively self-proving; if such complexity did not result from such unions, the universe would remain at the level of complexity found at the ‘big bang’: an undifferentiated plasma of energy.
Following his insight, we can see the agency of complexification active in the evolution from energy to quarks, quarks to electrons, electrons to atoms to molecules to highly complex molecules (such as DNA) with leads to cells, then multicell animals, then neurons, brains, consciousness and finally, in ourselves, consciousness aware of itself.
Teilhard acknowledges that there are several ‘discontinuous’ steps in this story, such as the appearance of cells from molecules and consciousness from neurons, but notes that the process of complexification can be seen to continue through them. We many not yet understand how nucleic acid, proteins and DNA can ‘gang up’ and suddenly produce a cell, nor understand how neurons can pool their resources to produce an idea . Neither do we understand the mechanism of a human group producing an invention, but it happens frequently enough to be beyond simple conjecture.
He also acknowledges that the ‘rules’ change with each stage: with molecules we have the capability of producing millions of molecules from a hundred or so atoms, which themselves come from a handful of smaller components (outlined in the “Standard Model’). Then, with cells, the capacity to fill huge ‘trees of life’ with unique living entities (Outlined in biology’s “Natural Selection”). All these sequences not only seem to follow different ‘rules’, but the rules, as the entities, are themselves more complex.
While the ‘rules’ may change, Teilhard asserts that they can be seen as ‘harmonics’ riding on the fundamental wave of ‘complexification’. All such rules give rise to the increasing complexity of the entities which they describe.
Further, he notes that such enfolding occurs at an increasing rate. Further still, humans can be considered in the infancy of discovering their ‘rules’. Even further still, most thinkers consider the universe, hence the processes, hence the ‘rules’, to be intelligible.
The Next Post
This week we overviewed the first three segments of the blog, consisting of the first twenty posts on Teilhard’s widening the concept of evolution from biological to universal, and from impersonal to personal.
Since Teilhard believed that properly reinterpreted, religion offers a unique understanding of
the human person’s place in the universe, next week we will overview how the subject of religion can be understood from his ‘context of universal evolution’.