Today’s Post

Beginning last summer we summed up Teilhard’s perspective on Articulating the Noosphere and Living the Theological Virtues. We went on to explore his metaphor of evolution as the advance of humanity over an imaginary sphere, Initially experiencing an age of expansion, but as the ‘equator’ is crossed, leading to a new age of compression. He notes that as we come to the equator, everything begins to change as the increase in human population no longer finds empty space to pour into, and consequently begins to fold in on itself. In Teilhard’s words, “The noosphere begins to compress.”

We then went on to address how this new phenomena is effecting a change in human evolution.   We started with a focus on evolution as it manifests itself in our daily lives, then went on to see exactly how we can see such manifestation, then to question the lack of recognition of this manifestation in society at large and finally to look at the risks of such pessimism.

This week we’ll begin to address how all this fits into our focus of “The Secular Side of God”.

A Relook at ‘Articulating the Noosphere’

Teilhard believed that understanding how evolution proceeds both in our lives and in our societies depends on developing an understanding of the structure, the warp and woof, of the ‘noophere’: the ‘mileu’ which appears in cosmic evolution with the appearance of the human. Without denying science’s understanding of evolution as seen in the stage of biological life (Natural Selection), he offers a perspective on not only how such evolution can continue on in the human species, but how the workings of the stages of ‘pre-life’ and ‘life’ as described by science can be seen to continue in the ‘noosphere’, the stage of human thought.   His straightforward observation that ‘evolution effects complexity’ is just as valid in the noosphere as it was realms of Physics and Biology. This observation, then, is the key to beginning to understand the structure of the ‘noosphere’. To understand how evolution works in the human is to understand how the ‘complexification’, so clearly seen in these spheres, can be understood as acting in both our personal lives and in the unfolding of society.

As we saw last week, Teilhard summarizes the unfolding of such complexity in the human species as we

“…continually find new ways of arranging (our) elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space” by “a rise in interiority and liberty within a whole made up of reflective particles (human persons) that are now more harmoniously interrelated.”

   And as we have seen in the past few weeks, Johan Norberg offers “A tornado of evidence” on how Teilhard’s projections of how “a rise in interiority and liberty” constantly effect “new ways of arranging ourselves” but requires ever more “harmonious interrelations”. Effectively, in Norberg’s evidence we see how Teilhard’s approach to understanding how the classical duality, “The one vs the many” is resolved as we get better at ‘articulating the noosphere’.

And, as the subject of the blog has taken shape, the ‘reinterpretation of religion’, we can now see more clearly why such an undertaking is important for our continued evolution. Classical Western religion, entwined as it has become with superstition, mythology and medieval philosophy, nonetheless contains within it nuggets of true understanding of those ‘articulations’ which Teilhard asserts we must uncover and follow if we are going to continue to move forward. Western religion is rife with teachings which address Teilhard’s three essential elements of human evolution:

• New ways of arranging ourselves (our cultural/social structures and how they expand across the globe through ‘globalization’)
• A rise in interiority (our personal maturity) and liberty (our autonomy)
• Harmonious interrelations (relationships which are capable of forming ‘psychisms’ capable of effecting increases in our person and our liberties to effect new arrangements)

But as we have seen, these teachings all require ‘reinterpretation’ to uncover their relevance and focus to these three elements. Such reinterpretation of religion is necessary for it to provide signposts to the future.

Continuing the March to the Future

So, Teilhard asserts, 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 more clearly understand and cooperate with its ‘laws’. As Teilhard forecasts and Norberg cites, in the past hundred fifty years we have seen distinctive examples of both. Since the mid-1800s, as Norberg maps in detail, the speed at which we better understand what works and what doesn’t in an increasingly tight spiral of ‘trial and error’ is ever increasing.   While Norberg and Teilhard both address this phenomenon, they also articulate the evolutionary ‘physics’ which underlies it.

Norberg essentially agrees with Teilhard that human persons must be free to capitalize on their ‘interiority’ and be given the ‘liberty’ to continuously renew their personal perspectives to identify rearrangements which can be attempted and either used as stepping stones to new arrangements or corrected if they do not effect an improvement, and to engage with other persons to freely form ‘psychisms’ to perform these tasks.

This should come as no surprise to many of us when put it into these terms. For the past hundred fifty years, scientists and those in technical fields have experienced increasing participation in ‘psychisms’ as well as the satisfaction of using their innate skills and education to design, develop, field and deal with the consequences of their products. They may not have been explicitly aware of how they were ‘articulating the noosphere’, nor always conscious of how their participation in their work groups

contributed to their personal growth, but nonetheless grew into an appreciation of the contributions of others as well as of the limited autonomy of those groups which bore fruit. They were effectively participating in small ‘Teilhardic’ rearrangements.

The Next Post

For the last few weeks we have been exploring both the mechanism of increasing complexity in the human as well as the many examples of how this mechanism is playing out. We’ve looked at both examples and risks. While progress is being made, how can we insure its continuation?

Next week we will return to address how religion, ‘divested’ of Richard Dawkins’ ‘baggage’ can be reinterpreted to provide both relevance and functionality to such insurance.