Today’s Post

Last week we began an overview of the eleven posts on the evolution of religion in which Jonathan Sacks’ understanding of how the evolution of human thinking can be seen in the evolution of religion from its earliest beginnings to the emergence of Christianity.

Having begun this look into religion’s role in human evolution, this week we look at some examples of how this role may be seen.

Our treatment of this subject can be seen in the seven posts from 14 January (Making
Sense of Things) to 14 April, 2016 (Stability).

Human Evolution: Moving Ahead

Last week we closed with an observation from Richard Rohr that offered a succinct summarization of human evolution:

“It was necessary for us to move beyond our early motivations of personal security, reproduction and survival (the fear-based preoccupations of the ‘reptilian brain’) … to proceed beyond the lower stages of human development.”

While this does not obviate other insights into our continued evolution, it does encapsulate the key skill that evolution requires us to learn: to use our neocortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of our ‘lower’ brains; stimuli which served our prehumen ancestors so well. This points to six such ‘skills’, the development of which religion has always fostered.

This does not suggest that the whole of religion bears directly on such skills. The many beliefs and practices of historical religion, in their contradictions, supernatural and dualistic modes can and do indeed work against such skills. As we shall see when we address religion’s relationship to science, religion requires ‘grounding’ to insure its relevance. By the same token, denying religion’s value to human evolution, as the materialists would have it, overlooks the existence of the values themselves.

Religion’s role in human history is notoriously complex, and decluttering history to find the threads of religion that contribute empirically to it is difficult. I think six activities first attributed to religion show the value:

Making Sense

Ian Barbour (“Science and Religion”) offers this definition of religion:

“A set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.”

   As can be seen in this definition, all expressions of religion result from some reflection upon reality and result in beliefs and practices which are felt to insure a beneficial relation to it. At their core, all religions are an attempt to understand reality, how we fit into it and how best to effect this fit.

All expressions of belief, however, having evolved over such great spans of time and including the intuitions of so many thinkers, have accumulated diverse and often bewildering explanations and claims to truth.  The evolution of religion as the human attempt to make sense of his surroundings has gone on for such a long time that every possible belief (attempt to make sense) has evolved along with it.

With all this, however, many valid insights can be seen to have found their way into human expression.

Understanding

Such insights began to surface, As Karen Armstrong sees it, by the time of the ‘Axial Age’ (800 BCE):

“The fact that they (thinkers of the Axial Age) all came up with such profoundly similar solutions by so many different routes suggests that they had indeed discovered something important about the way human beings worked. …they all concluded that if people made a disciplined effort to reeducate themselves, they would experience an enhancement of their humanity. ”

   During this period, the need to make sense and organize society was giving way to the need to ‘become more complete”.

Transcendence

Armstrong goes on to see another insight that arose during this period, which was to play a huge role in the evolution of human thinking:

“There is an immortal spark at the core of the human person, which participated in – was of the same nature as – the immortal brahman that sustained and gave life to the entire cosmos.”

   While this insight evidently first rose in the East, it was quick to find roots in the major Western religion of Christianity. It was not only important for the role it was to play in Western society, but in the general belief in a future into which we are ‘invited’. As Maurice Blondel put it:

“Tomorrow can be better than today. The future is inveighed with potential, and we have the potential to fit into it like a child into a family.”

   In this aspect of religion, we are invited to think past the present, and past the obvious, to see not just the workings of the ‘immortal spark’ in us as persons, but in addition, in the lives of all that we relate to.

Acting

We saw last week how Richard Rohr sees the essential act of human evolution:

“It was necessary for us to move beyond our early motivations of personal security, reproduction and survival (the fear-based preoccupations of the ‘reptilian brain’) … to proceed beyond the lower stages of human development.”

Such ‘movement’, while being essential to ‘becoming’ requires an intense struggle against egoism and an overcoming of instinctual fears.   A ‘transcendence’ is required that sees the future as open, rather than closed, and ourselves as ‘gifted’ with potential as opposed to ‘cursed’ with impotency. To be able to ‘act’ is to understand ourselves just as capable of action as reality is capable of receiving it.

Transcendence is most often understood as a ‘religious’ experience, but at its base it is just recognizing the potential for a better way to see things. For ages, those able to ‘look beyond’ the obvious to the presence of a truth only partially seen, such as Newton looking beyond the apple to the unseen force of gravity, or Einstein grasping that at its roots, matter was just a unique way that energy manifests itself.

One aspect of religion is whatever we believe about reality that gives us the confidence to act, even when, especially when, we’re stepping into the unknown.

Belonging

As we have often addressed in this blog, one of the perennial ailments of the human psyche is the sense of being disconnected, alienated. As Carl Rogers and many other others have observed, Western religion is not clear on the nature of the human person which effects our ‘connections’ to each other. Richard Rohr summarizes the situation:

““…Augustine’s “original sin,” Calvin’s “total depravity,” or Luther’s “humans are like piles of manure, covered over by Christ.”

   Carl Rogers shows how Freud ‘piles on’ to these traditional mindsets with his opinion that

“the id, man’s basic and unconscious nature, is primarily made up of instincts which would, if permitted expression, result in incest, murder and other crimes.”

   Against this undeniable thread of Wester misanthropy, Maurice Blondel returns us to the basic gospel message, clearly articulated by John:

“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”.

   Blondel reinterpreted John when he said

“To say that God is father is to acknowledge that the relationship between us and the ground of being is that of child to parent.  The ground of being is on our side.  We belong to the universe as a child belongs to a family”

   Thus one aspect of religion is to go past that of a bond among believers, as do all religions, to the level of basing our actions on the belief that we ‘belong’.

Stability

The contemporary biblical (and agnostic) author, Bart Ehrman sees yet another characteristic of religion: that of helping to ‘shore up’ the ever more complex edifice of society. In his book, “From Jesus to Christ”, he tracks both the doctrinal development of the new Christian religion and how it contributed to our first truly diverse civilization: that of the Roman Empire. While he acknowledges the role that the emperor Constantine played in adjudicating the first great Christian schism, Ehrman also notes Constantine’s quite secular motive for avoiding a split in this new religion . He points out that Christianity offered two major benefits as a state religion: –

– it was capable of reinterpreting and appropriating facets of the many aspects of popular ‘pagan’ religions

• • Paul’s assertion that “Jesus came for all” insured the spread of the Roman empire into Gaul and Spain.

On a more contemporary note, Jefferson, many years later, was to factor Jesus’s teaching on human equality into his revolutionary concept of a government based on human freedom.

The Next Post

This week we continued an overview of the eleven posts on the evolution of religion, looking at six discrete ways that religion, in spite of its many shortcomings, can be seen to aid in the continuation of evolution of the human species.

Having seen this, next week we will move on to interpreting religion itself. We have noted in many places in this blog how religion includes threads of expression which lend themselves to Armstrong’s “enhancement of (our) humanity”, but how can they be found?