How could a closer relationship with science add to religion’s potential as an ‘evolutionary tool”?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw we saw how the scientific insights reflected in the Enlightenment opened the door to a rebound in human evolution envisioned by Teilhard and documented by Johan Norberg.

This week we will turn Teilhard’s ‘lens’ on religion to see how he understands the potential of a rebound in religion that can work better with science to move us along in our march to the future.

Religion’s Role As An ‘Evolutionary Tool’

And this, of course, is where religion comes in.  We have taken a long look at ‘risks’ to the noosphere and saw that even with the unconscious ‘tide’ that Steven Pinker cited last week, there’s no guarantee that it will ultimately prevail over the ‘risks’ to the noosphere that we have identified.

At the basis of these ‘risks’ is the necessity for us to choose to continue to power this tide.  It is possible for humans to simply allow fear, pessimism, and disbelief to weaken their will to continue.   When this happens, the ills of “racism, sexism and homophobia” recognized by Pinker, always lurking in the background, will resurge.

Pinker notes, for example, that although the rate of suicide is declining everywhere across the world, it is increasing in the United States.  Increased welfare, it would seem, is no bulwark against despair.  This, of course, is the ultimate duality:  Faith in human progress seems to be declining in the first society to provide evidence of the progress itself.

We have looked at examples of how evolution is proceeding through contemporary secular events, as prolifically documented by Norberg and Pinker, but as many of their critics note, they spend little time addressing the downside, the ‘evolutionary risks’ of these examples.  While this does not diminish the reality of the progress that they document, neither does it address the risks.

Teilhard believed that religion, properly unfettered from its medieval philosophical shackles, its overdependence on hierarchy, and its antipathy towards science, is well suited to address these ‘downsides’.

We noted last week that Teilhard asserted that religion, if it is to indeed rise to its potential as a tool for dealing with these ‘noospheric risks’, must find a way to enter into a new phase of contribution to this process:

“At the first stage, Christianity may well have seemed to exclude the humanitarian aspirations of the modern world.  At the second stage its duty was to correct, assimilate and preserve them.”

  In the last two weeks, we have applied Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to a key facet of religion, ‘morality,’ to understand how this concept can be reinterpreted in terms of building blocks for continued human evolution.  How can religion itself evolve to become an agency which can “correct, assimilate and preserve them”?  Teilhard’s answer to this question was to see a way forward for religion and science to overcome the traditional religion-science duality:

  “Religion and science are the two conjugated faces of phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge- the only one that can embrace the past and future of evolution so as to contemplate, measure and fulfil them.”

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at the potential of science and religion to become ‘partners’ for managing the noosphere, particularly in managing the human-initiated risks to it, but recognizing that traditionally, they have been understood as opposites in a long-standing duality.

Next week we will look a little deeper into how Teilhard understood the potential confluence between these two powerful modes of thinking, and how they could be brought into a fully and integrated human response to the challenges of evolution.

How does Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help to see the potential connections between religion and science?

Today’s Post

In the last two weeks, we looked at religion’s concept of morality, and saw how Teilhard’s insights offer a rethinking of traditional religion’s potential as a tool for ‘stitching together’ the fabric of society.   Teilhard sees the need for religion’s morality to evolve from proscription to prescription for it to realize its potential as a tool for insuring our continued evolution.  We saw five ways in which he recognized that traditional morality could be understood as a fundamental way for religion to recover its role as a tool for understanding the noosphere, and by doing so to assist us in living life in such a way that we can become fully and authentically human.

This week we turn our focus to the other great human enterprise, science, to begin exploring how a revitalized religion, better focused on an evolving humanity, might better work with an increasingly insightful science in realizing our human potential.

Evolution Everywhere

In addressing Johan Norberg’s extensive data (‘Progress’), we saw how it is possible for us, with eyes properly focused through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’, to recognize threads of this evolution all around us. We saw how Norberg offers, as the Economist identifies, “A tornado of facts” which quantify the many ways that human welfare proceeds by the correct application of human freedom, innovation, and relationship throughout the world.  Norberg’s examples of increased human welfare are without doubt tangible evidence of the ways in which the human species can be seen to continue its evolution today.

We have also seen that Norberg considered human freedom, innovation, and relationships to be essential for such progress to proceed, which is why the earliest examples of this progress appeared in the West, with its unprecedented emphasis on all three.

By the same token, we also noted that these three characteristics are addressed poorly by science, and its companion ‘secular’ disciplines such as economics and politics.   Norberg’s three cornerstones of progress initially appear in the West, as a slowly building consequence of society influenced by its Christian roots in the uniqueness of the person.

When Jefferson asserted that “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves” he was recognizing such uniqueness, but it was not an insight derived from any empirical source.  His inspiration for such an unprovable concept was none other than his own excerpts from the New Testament, known as the “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth”:

 “We all agree in the obligation of the moral precepts of Jesus, and nowhere will they be found delivered in greater purity than in his discourses.”

   Thus, our claim that religion, for all its creaky hierarchy, superstitions, and contradictions, and even its many instances of hostility to Norberg’s three building blocks of freedom, innovation, and relationships, threads can still be found of the current which must be fostered if it is to continue to carry us forward.

We have Jefferson to thank for both a clearer understanding of the noosphere, and how its structure in human affairs has evolved from Enlightenment principles intermixed with Christian values, even though they can initially be seen as “dripping” with the accouterments of medieval worldview.

As Norberg quantifies at length, this objective understanding of the unfolding of human evolution clearly articulates the success of the West in providing a milieu which has effected a degree of stability not only unprecedented in human history, but which has slowly permeated into the rest of the world.

Steven Pinker (“Enlightenment Now”) recognizes how this unfolding can be seen in the West as a “tide of morality” which is effecting an “historical erosion of racism, sexism and homophobia”.  It is not coincidental that these three negative aspects of society have all, at one time (and even today) been paramount in all religions.  Pinker sees in this tide the effect of ‘empiricism’s superiority over ‘intuition’, a sentiment which underpins the beliefs found in the Enlightenment.  However, as do many thinkers influenced by the Enlightenment, he fails to recognize that in the essential beliefs of Jefferson, reflecting those of Jesus, the key kernel which makes such a tide possible is the recognition of the essential importance of the human person.  Without this belief, essentially unprovable and thus ‘intuitive’ rather than ‘empirical’, the tide would not surge, it would ebb.

The Next Post

This week we saw how the ‘Enlightenment’ opened the door to a phase of human evolution in which, as Teilhard envisioned and Johan Norberg documents, human evolution rebounds in terms of increased human welfare.

Next week we will begin to look at what is needed by religion if it is to begin to realize its potential as ‘co-creator’ of the future with science.

   Religion is based on ‘morality’.  How can Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help see it as a tool necessary to our evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we began a look at religion as a tool for managing the noosphere, particularly in dealing with the risks that arise with evolution of the human.  We acknowledged the traditional ills that can be seen in various expressions of religion over its six or so thousand years of manifesting itself.  We also opened the door to re-seeing it through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, as simply an attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’; the ‘right brained’ counterpart to the ‘left brained’ perspectives of science.

The question remains, of course: how can such an approach to religion be developed, weighted as it is with its historical attachment to such things as found in the radical and fundamentalist expressions of Islam in the Mideast, as well as the fundamentalism, excessive hierarchical structures and dogmatism seen in the West?  Is there a way that the teachings that have led to such obvious ‘noospheric risks’ can be reinterpreted into teachings that can mitigate them?

This week we will begin to look at the roots of Western religion to begin rediscovery of principles which will move us forward.

Rethinking Morality 

   It was in this vein that Teilhard, along with other thinkers such as Maurice Blondel, began to look at the tenets and structure of religion, particularly Western religion, in terms of the new insights offered by science.   Blondel was one of the first theologians to recognize that science’s discovery of both the depth of universal time and the nature of evolution provided an insight which could be applied not only to the universe but the human person as well.  This new insight showed the universe as ‘dynamic’, as opposed to the medieval worldview which understood both as ‘static’.  Teilhard substantially expanded this insight, understanding how this new thinking not only could bring a new, secular, empirical and more relevant meaning to religion’s ancient teachings, but that Christianity, as one of the first attempts to see religion and reason as sides of a single coin, was well suited to do so.

In his essay on “The {Phenomenon of Spirituality”, Teilhard offers five insights into the key religious concept of ‘morality’ which can not only increase the relevancy of religious teaching, but in doing so increase its value to science.  Not only can religious teaching be better grounded by the findings of science, but in doing so can provide a much needed ‘ground of humanity’ to science.

This week we will address the first two.

 The Evolutionary Basis for Morality

“If indeed, as we have assumed, the world culminates in a thinking reality, the organization of personal human energies represents the supreme stage (so far) of cosmic evolution on Earth; and morality is consequently nothing less than the higher development of mechanics and biology.  The world is ultimately constructed by moral forces; and reciprocally, the function of morality is to construct the world.”

Here Teilhard asks us to recognize that what religion has been trying to accomplish, with its topsy-turvy, ‘noosphericly-risky’, ultimately very human efforts, has simply been to ‘make sense of things’ so that we can relate to them more effectively. In this attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’, religion has used the slowly accumulated noosphere provided by intuition, metaphors, and dreams, but impeded by egos, fears, and ambitions.

He is unconcerned by the fact that we’re already some two hundred thousand years into human evolution, and still not ‘there yet’.  While considering that evolution is ‘a work in progress’, he sees morality as a tool to ‘construct the world’.  Conversely this calls for us to ‘construct morality’ even as we ‘articulate the noosphere’.

Properly understood, morals are the building blocks of the noosphere, by which we ourselves are ‘built’.

The Evolution of Morality

“Morality has until now been principally understood as a fixed system of rights and duties intended to establish a static equilibrium between individuals and at pains to maintain it by a limitation of energies, that is to say, of force.

Now the problem confronting morality is no longer how to preserve and protect the individual, but how to guide him so effectively in the direction of his anticipated fulfillments that the ‘quantity of personality’ still diffuse in humanity may be released in fullness and security.”

Here Teilhard introduces two insights:  First, the most tangible way that morality ‘constructs the world’ is by clarifying the structure of the universe so that we can better understand it.  Secondly, it offers a clearer understanding of how we are to make the best use of it as we unlock the fullness and security that is still diffuse in us.

   Put another way, as we better understand morals, we better understand the noosphere, and become more skilled at cooperating with its forces to actualize our potential.

The Next Post                              

This week we applied Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to two aspects of religion’s concepts of morality as a tool for helping us understand the structure of the noosphere as a step to managing its risks.

Next week we’ll continue this theme, taking a look at three more such ‘facets’.

How can seeing religion through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help it become an ‘evolutionary tool’?T

Today’s Post

We have seen how Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ is a potential tool for resolving the ‘dualities’ that have always plagued human evolution.  Last week we saw how focusing this lens on the phenomenon of ‘religion’ will help to see it as one manifestation of this ‘tool’.

This week we will continue our look at religion to see not only how such focusing can take place, but how religion can begin to emerge as a simply an intuitive facet of the empirical tool that science offers.

The Evolutionary Roots of Western Religion

Re-reading the Christian New Testament with Teilhard’s evolutionary context in mind offers a starting place for focusing this lens.  There are many unprecedented concepts in the ‘New Testament’ that have been poorly carried forward in the evolution of Christian theology, such as:

• Understanding the presence of God in all created things (Paul), and particularly in the human person (John), is contrary to a God eventually taught as ‘external’ to both the universe at large and to the individual person as well.
• Understanding that we are bound together by a force which fosters our personal growth and assures the viability of our society. (Paul)
• Recognizing that this growth enhances our uniqueness while it deepens our relationships.
• Recognizing that this uniqueness gives rise to the characteristic of human equality (Paul)), as opposed to the preeminence of hierarchy

So, a first step toward applying Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to religion would be to focus on its evolutionary roots, many of which have sprouted anew in secular organizations, as so brilliantly seen in Thomas Jefferson’s reinterpretation of these evolutionary roots in purely secular terms.

We must be able to rethink religion.

Rethinking Religion

As we have seen, one of Teilhard’s key insights was that managing manage our journey through the noosphere requires us to first understand it. The entire history of religion shows it to be our first attempt to do so.  Born in an era which depended on intuitive insights and instinctive reactions, the earliest religions were simply extensions of the clan lore which formed the base for the societal structures that slowly emerged.  They all reflected the need to stabilize the ever-increasing size, density, and diversity of human society.  All the early myths and stories reflected the common understanding that the world had always existed, and that it had existed in manifestations that had only superficially changed over the years.

These early noospheric insights held sway for thousands of years until the “Axial Age”, some 700 years BCE.  These new perspectives, with their tendrils of early Greek thinking, did not begin to compete with the traditional mode of thinking until the eleventh century, when more empirical and objective perspectives began to appear in the West.

When this happened, the highly metaphorical insights into the composition of the noosphere began to give way to increasingly empirical and therefore secular insights of first the noosphere itself and then the universe which surrounds it   At the same time, the universe began to be seen less as static and more as dynamic.

The clash between the neo-think offered by the emerging scientific evidence and the static and intuitive beliefs which still reflected medieval scholasticism is well documented, and to some extent still goes on today.  These beliefs offer profoundly opposed insights into the composition of the noosphere and reflect the significant dualism that underpins modern attempts to understand it.  So, it comes as no surprise that today we find it difficult to unravel these two threads to find a way to re-weave them into a single strand.

In such a single strand, the concept of morality moves beyond the dualistic religious basis for a secure society and a roadmap to successful entry into the next life.  With it, religion becomes a set of guidelines which ‘articulate the noosphere’ in such a way that we insure our continued evolution into states of greater complexity.

The Next Post                             

This week we took a first look at religion as a tool for helping us understand the structure of the noosphere as a step to managing its risks.  Next week we’ll continue this theme, taking a look at how religion has traditionally ‘articulated the noosphere’, and how Teilhard sees a shift needed in the religious concept of ‘morality’ to be able to provide ‘seeds’ for a more evolved, and hence increasingly fruitful and relevant, articulation.

  What can happen as we learn to use both sides of our hemispheric brain?

Today’s Post

Last week we used Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to see how the oft kaleidoscope of history can be fit into a continuous and homogeneous spectrum when placed into the context of universal evolution.

This week we will begin a look at the great human modes of thought, religion and science, to see how the ‘dualisms’ and ‘contradictions’ of history can be sorted into a focused perception of the threads of this evolution

From the Religious Side

One way to understand Teilhard (or any such ‘synthetic’ thinker, such as Blondel or Rohr) is to apply their concepts to such traditional ‘dualisms’.  We saw two weeks ago how Teilhard’s thoughts on spirituality show one such application, and how in just a few words, the traditional dualism of spirit and matter is overcome.

Thus, we can see that approaching traditional science and religion concepts through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ can move us unto a mode of thinking which sees things much more clearly and less self-contradictory than as seen in the past.  Teilhard saw this as ‘articulating the noosphere’.

So, we can see how Teilhard’s approach illustrates that one thing necessary for continued human evolution is a continuation of right/left brain synthesis by which science and religion can move from adversaries into modes of thinking which allow our intuition to be enhanced by our empiricism, and in which our empiricism can build upon our intuition.  We effect our own evolution by use of both sides of our brain.

This approach also, to some extent, recovers much of the optimism contained in the Christian gospels, such as the recognition that, as Blondel puts it, “The ground of being is on our side”, and as John articulates the intimacy of this ground, “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”.

Such recognition of the positive nature of the agent of increasing complexity, and the awareness that such an agent is alive and empowering each of us, is another example of Teilhard’s “clearer disclosure of God in the World”.  It also repudiates the natural Greek pessimism that had such influence on Christian doctrine emerging in the Christian Protestant ontology by which Luther could see humans as “piles of excrement covered by Christ”.

From the Empirical Side

By the same token, Norberg’s rich trove of facts, which document how ‘progress’ is powered by increased human freedom and improved relationships, can be seen as evidence that we are indeed evolving.

The facets of empowerment which he documents, personal freedom and improved relationships, also happen to be the cornerstones of Western religion.   This strongly suggests that the continuation of human evolution is based on enhancement of them, requiring continued empowerment fostered and strengthened by our increased understanding of them, of how they work and of how to enhance them.

Something else is necessary as well.  Putting these concepts, ‘persons’ and ‘love,’ into an evolutionary context may well be necessary for us to overcome the profoundly influential dualisms which have thus far forged our world view, but this same evolutionary context also offers yet another aspect: Time.

Considering that the human species is some two hundred thousand years old, and only in the past two or so centuries have we begun to unpack these dualisms and recognize them less as contradictions than as ‘points on a spectrum’, we need ‘patience’.  Such an integrated insight of humanity emerged only two hundred years ago in a civic baseline in which it would be stated by Thomas Jefferson that:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

   Two hundred years is an evolutionary ‘blink’, to be sure, but by ordinary human standards, represents many lifetimes.  It also represents an incessant search for how this ideal of human freedom and relationships should be played out (or in some cases, if we’re not careful, can be stomped out) in human society.

Thus, the pace of evolution must be appreciated.  Certainly, it is not fast enough for most of us, especially if we live in ‘developing’ countries, watching our children suffer from curable diseases, hunger, war, or born with the ‘wrong’ skin color or ‘sinful’ dispositions.   On the other hand, as Norberg reminds us, evolution has never unfolded as quickly as it is unfolding today.

The Next Post

This week we have seen how putting human history into Teilhard’s ‘evolutive’ context helps us to begin to see how what have been traditional and deep seated ‘dualisms’ can be put into a single integrated context and begin the process of using both our human modes of thought to better understand who we are and how can continue to move ourselves forward.

Next week we will employ Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to see how such a relook at religion can help us to do so.

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Teilhard de Chardin places ‘spirit’ into the context of evolution, in which context it can be seen not as the ‘opposite’ of matter but an essential aspect of what causes ‘the stuff of the universe’ to energize the development of matter into increasingly complex arrangements.  We also saw how Johan Norberg, who in articulating how such ‘matter-spirit’ combinations can be seen to increase human welfare, provides substantiation for Teilhard’s recognition of the necessary elements of human evolution and his audacious optimism.

This week we’ll continue exploring what’s involved in managing ‘Noospheric risks’ by seeing them through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.

Seeing Human History in an ‘Evolutionary’ Context

Teilhard ‘lens’ provides a way to understand who and where we are by placing ourselves into the context of universal evolution.  This includes understanding the roles played by our two great human enterprises, religion, and science in the flow of human history.

As many thinkers, notably Jonathan Sacks, point out, religion began as a very early human activity characterized by ‘right brain’ thinking (instinct and intuition). As such, these enterprises were employed to help us to make sense of both human persons and their groupings.   Stories such as ‘creation narratives’ provided insights for a basis for societal conduct and were eventually coded into the first ‘laws’ as humanity began to emerge from clans to social groups, then cities, then states.

Sacks sees a record of the rise of human ‘left brain’ thinking (empiricism and reason) in the Greek development of philosophic thought.

An example of the first movement toward some level of synthesis between the ‘right’ and ‘left’ modes of thought, (intuitional and empirical) can be seen in the New Testament.  Paul, with his Greek roots, then John, began to incorporate left brain ideas such as Paul’s “Fruits of the Spirit” and John’s ‘ontological’ articulation of God (“God is love…”) as an essential aspect of ‘the ground of being’ as it is active in each of us.   While demonstrating a clear difference from the traditional right-brained Jewish approach of the Torah, they mark less of a departure than an evolution from it.

Thus, as Sacks points out, Christianity can be seen as possibly the first attempt to synthesize right- and left-brain thinking modes.

Science is born from such an early application but was initially seen as competitive with the prevailing right brain concepts of the time, and hence threatening to the established church hierarchy. Many of the traditional dualisms, which then accepted the cognitive dissonance between right and left brain thinking, can still be seen today.

Science in its own way is also stuck.  Thinkers of the Enlightenment, ‘threw the baby out with the bath’ when they attributed human woes to religion.  Not that this was totally incorrect, since the ills of the secular aspect of all religions can be seen in their need for ‘hierarchies’, which have traditionally required adherence to absolute and dogmatic teachings to maintain control over their followers.  However, by neither recognizing the primacy of the person nor his need for such things as freedom, faith, and love (as understood in Teilhard’s context), science is hard pressed to find a place for the human person in its quest for understanding of the cosmos.

As Sacks puts it,

 “To understand things, science takes them apart to see what they are made of while religion puts them together to discern what they mean”.

   This is often referred to as the ‘hermeneutical paradox”: we can’t understand a complex thing without understanding its component parts, but the component parts make no sense when removed from their integrated context.

The Next Post

This week we have seen how putting human history into a ‘evolutive’ context helps us to begin to see how what have been traditional and deep seated ‘dualisms’ can be put into a single integrated context and begin the process of using both our human modes of thought to better understand who we are and how can continue to move ourselves forward.

Next week we will focus Teilhard’s ‘lens’ on where we are today in this process.