Today’s Post

Last week we continued our look at the ‘Theological Virtues’ by addressing that of Hope, which we saw as one of the attitudes that we take when we set about mapping the dimensions of human life, ‘articulating the noosphere’ in terms of sacraments, values and morals.
We noted that “Faith and Hope intersect in a present which we all too frequently experience as ‘dangerous.’”  At this intersection, drawing on the energies of life which are ‘gifted’ in the flow of evolution, we become able, as Blondel puts it, “.. to leave the paralyzing past behind and enter creatively into our destiny”.

This week we will look at this significant intersection in a little more detail. 

Faith and Hope: From Interpolation to Extrapolation

Faith can be seen as an interpolation of the past.  Looking back on our experience, we begin to better understand what we are capable of, and in doing so we begin to increase our confidence in our capability to act.

Hope can be seen as an extrapolation from this experience to an anticipation of what can be accomplished in the future if we but trust our experience.   Hence Faith and Hope can be seen in the two ever-recurring stages of our lives: our pasts becoming our futures in the evanescent moment of the present.

We can find examples of this intersection of our “currents of life” from the three great thinkers that we have explored in this blog:  Maurice Blondel, Carl Rogers and of course, Teilhard.
Blondel was one of the first theologians to recognize that science’s discovery of the immensity of the past and the dynamic nature of the universe provided both an opportunity as well as a hermeneutic for reinterpreting legacy Christian teachings into a form not only congruent with the findings of science but offering a greater relevance to human life.  From science’s discovery of a universal unfolding, he recognized that the human species was better understood when seen in the same dynamic light as that of science, and whose individual ‘becoming’ is fueled by the same energy which underpins the entire universe.  In effect, he remapped the empirical insights of science into new spiritual insights, interpolating from science’s view of the past to extrapolating to a religiously optimistic view of the future.  Of course, from Blondel’s viewpoint, this was a religious reinterpretation, from science to religion, from science’s impersonal grasp of the distant past to religion’s deeply personal grasp of human life, and hence from past to future.

   Rogers, as we saw in the post on “Secular Meditation, Finding Self” also used empirical information to come to his conclusion that the human person was, at the most basic level, good, positive and trustworthy.  This was quite orthogonal to the then common Freudian perspective which saw the basis of personal existence, the id, as a dangerous and decidedly untrustworthy force in the human psyche.  Once again, we see in Rogers an interpolation from past, empirical data (in this case Rogers’ extensive case notes) to an extrapolation to an optimistic, hopeful human future.  We saw earlier in this post a list of the characteristics that Rogers observed in his patients as they underwent a process toward healing.   This time, however, Rogers offers a scientific, empirical reinterpretation.
Then of course, we come to Teilhard.  Going well beyond either Blondel or Rogers, Teilhard draws on the same scientific empirical findings, and expands them to the entirety of the life of the universe.  His first step in doing so was to unbind science’s understanding of evolution from the narrow perspective of the theory of Natural Selection and open it up to the immensity of universal evolution.  This unprecedented vision understood the metric of ‘complexification’ as the basic measure to plumb both the universal depths of time as well as the long, slow accretion of ‘fuller being’ which emerged with it.

He begins by articulating the many stages now understood to have emerged during the ten or so billion years preceding biological terrestrial life.  He then shows how they are connected in evolution by a rise in complexity, a steady, reliable force which acts on all the entities in all the stages leading to the cell.  Having established this basis of universal ontological continuity, he goes on to show how it continues through the biosphere, and eventually emerges in the present noosphere .  In doing so, Teilhard offers an extrapolation from scientific findings to an interpolation, an insight as valuable to the clarification of science as it is to the reinterpretation of religion.

Teilhard and The Continuity of Past to Future: “Spirituality”              

This insight into the basis of universal ontological continuity, providing as it does an integrated perspective inclusive of both spirit and matter, science and religion, and ultimately the human person and evolution, is Teilhard’s great contribution to a comprehensive perspective of the universe.  In doing so, he departed substantially from Science’s materialistic menagerie of pre-life stages disconnected from life stages, and its current schizophrenic approach which inhibits the placing of the human person into a cohesive view of the universe.   To Teilhard, these eras can now be seen in a single, connected context, one in which the human person is no less a product of evolution than the stars that glow in the sky.   He also offered a reorientation of Religion’s accumulated closet of dualisms. In a single, cohesive, integrated approach to the universe as ‘becoming’, he showed how the action of God can be seen as the basic life blood of evolution, and hence in which each individual life partakes of this universal bounty of universal life.

This grand vision deconstructs religion’s great and seemingly indissoluble dualisms.  One example of such deconstruction (healing?) is his explanation of ‘spirit’ vs ‘matter’, found in ‘Human Energy’.  First, he lays out the dualism itself:

“For some, heirs to almost all the spiritualist philosophies of former times, the spirit is something so special and so high that it could not possibly be confused with the earthly and material forces which it animates.  Spirit is a ‘meta-phenomenon’.

For others, on the contrary, …, spirit seems something so small and frail that it becomes accidental and secondary.  In the face of the vast material energies to which it adds absolutely nothing that can be weighed or measured, the ‘fact of consciousness’ can be regarded as negligible.  It is an ‘epi-phenomenon’.”

Then he dissolves the dualism by identifying spirituality as the underlying phenomenon which is essential to universal evolution:

“…spirit is neither super-imposed nor accessory to the cosmos, but it quite simply represents the higher state assumed in and around us by the primal and indefinable thing that we call, for want of a better name, the ‘stuff of the universe’.  Nothing more; and also nothing less.  Spirit is neither a meta- nor an epi- phenomenon, it is the phenomenon.”

He then restates his conclusion, this time answering the assertions outlined in his mapping of the dualism:

“Spirituality is not a recent accident, arbitrarily or fortuitously imposed on the edifice of the world around us; it is a deeply rooted phenomenon, the traces of which we can follow with certainty backwards as far as the eye can reach, in the wake of the movement that is drawing us forward.”

It is worth noting that in this brief exposition, Teilhard not only deconstructs the traditional religious dualism of spirit/matter by moving them from ‘either/or’ to ‘both/and’, placing them in a dynamic, ‘becoming’ context in which they are simply different facets of a single phenomenon as it moves from past to future.   He also heals science’s dualistic mind/body treatment of the human person by recognizing that the state of evolution characterized by ‘consciousness aware of itself’ is simply the latest manifestation of a complexity which has been increasing in the universe since the ‘big bang’.  He addresses this process in the last part of the quote from “Human Energy”:

“The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self-conscious.  It is a cosmic change of state.”

So, in this example we can see how Teilhard goes about his ’interpolation/extrapolation’ process, drawing on Science’s study of deep time and evolution to understand the thread of universal life to which our essence is connected, then to extrapolate to a future which we can trust to offer a continuation of such ‘increased complexity’.

He offers an approach to Faith not based on (but also not, as it turns out, orthogonal to) belief in scripture or the church’s ‘Magisterium’, but on a recognition that the fourteen billion year rise of complexity which (so far) has resulted in our own individual person can be expected to continue in our lives if we can but trust and cooperate with it.

And this is where Faith and Hope can be seen to intersect in our lives.

The Next Post

This week saw how the intersection of Faith and Hope can be seen to intersect in our lives, from the insights of Blondel, Rogers and Teilhard.

Next week we will move on to a look at the third of the Theological Virtues, that of Love.

How hope in the future can reorient us from past failures to the anticipation of  future wholeness

Today’s Post

Last week we began our look at the attitudes (the ‘Theological Virtues’) that we can take if we are to live out Teilhard’s ‘articulations of the noosphere’.  We looked at ‘Faith’, and saw how it acquires new relevance if we reorient it from ‘belief in the unbelievable as a condition for being eligible for the afterlife’ to the recognition and trust that the energy of evolution flows through each of us and carries us on to a future state of wholeness.

This week we will continue our look at the Theological Virtues by addressing ‘Hope’.

The Traditional Approach to Hope

As seen by the traditional church, Hope, like Faith, is an attitude based upon the concept of a salvation earned by living a moral (as defined by the church) life.  It is deeply intertwined with Faith, in that it is the result of believing that pleasing God is necessary for eternal salvation.  It focusses more on the ‘payoff’, than the ‘process’.  As the Catechism says, “Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness”.  As such, it is given to us as a guard against despair, to help us keep our eyes on the end goal, the ‘next life’ while we endure the pains and disillusions of this one.

Like the traditional approach to Faith, the traditional approach to Hope assumes that ‘truth’ is ‘given to man by scripture and the church’, adhered to by ‘Faith’ and trusted to result in salvation by ‘Hope’.

Reinterpreting Hope

Even though the Church approached hope as rooted in belief in the afterlife, it was Paul himself who identified what can be expected in this life when we take the stance of ‘faith’.  As much of Paul’s writing clearly shows, as the first Christian theologian he took great pains to boil the teachings of Jesus down into specifics, such as we saw in his teaching on the ‘Theological Virtues’.  Another example can be found in his listing of what he referred to as ‘The Fruit of the Spirit’.  This ‘fruit’ consists of the human attributes which are ‘given’ by the Holy Spirit when we cooperate with the presence of God in our lives.  The facets of this ‘fruit’ are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and faithfulness.

Of course, in our secular approach, as we have seen when we addressed the Trinity, the ‘Holy Spirit’ is one manifestation of the tri-faceted energy of evolution which flows in our lives.   ‘Gifts’, in our secular reinterpretation, refer to those human potentialities that can be actualized as we become more aware of, and come to cooperate with, the energy of evolution as it rises in us.
Paul’s ‘Fruit’ describes what can happen in our lives as we live out the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ that we have been describing, that are reflected in the sacraments, values and morals of our culture.  One does not have to be religious to recognize the quality of life that would accrue to us were we better able to love, have our lives filled with joy rather than foreboding, feel at peace with ourselves and others, resulting in natural (vs forced) kindness, recognizing our innate goodness and being able to trust.

Paul’s fruits correlate well with Carl Rogers’ observations of a patient undergoing the process toward healing (excuse the fifties misuse of gender):

– The individual becomes more integrated, more effective

– Fewer of the characteristics are shown which are usually termed neurotic or psychotic, and more of the healthy, well-functioning person

– The perception of himself changes, becoming more realistic in views of self

– He becomes more like the person he wishes to be, and values himself more highly

– He is more self-confident and self-directing

– He has a better understanding of himself, becomes open to his experience, denies or represses less of his experience

– He becomes more accepting in his attitudes towards others, seeing others as more similar to himself

Comparing Hope to Faith

If faith involves trusting in the power of belief itself, that it is possible to find within ourselves the power to act in the face of the emotion of fear, then hope provides a ‘pull’, in which we can make the decision and muster the energy to act because we can envision the importance, even the enjoyment, of the consequence of such action.   One of Paul’s ‘fruits’ is ‘joy’, and there are few greater joys than the feeling of satisfaction of completion of a difficult and risky task.  We can envision this potential for joy even before we undertake the risk, and as a result the arduousness of the task is therefore lessened by the anticipation of the result.  While faith can be seen in the ‘decision’, hope can be understood as the ‘anticipation’.

An example is Rogers’ insight that the risky choice to ‘be willing to live with ambiguity’ is counterbalanced by the ‘hope’ that, as a result, we will mature into the greater possession of ourselves as articulated in his list above.

Another result of the ability to hope is ‘patience’, another of Paul’s ‘fruits’.  Faith may provide us with the insight that we are growing by a principle of universal evolution working within us, but hope is a bulwark against the despair that can set in as we frequently experience failure.  None of us gets through life without Shakespeare’s ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’, but the burden becomes heavier with impatience.

While faith allows us to reinterpret our past in a positive light, hope allows us to taste a future in which today’s burdens have been overcome.  Faith and hope intersect in a present which we all too frequently experience as ‘dangerous’.  While there are many actions that we can take to manage the danger, none is more important than to believe in our ability to endure and that this endurance allows us, as Blondel puts it,

“..to leave the paralyzing past behind and enter creatively into our destiny”.

The Next Post

This week we took a ‘secular’ look at the stance of ‘hope’ in our reinterpretation of the ‘Theological Virtues’ as stances that we take when we ‘articulate the noosphere’ in terms of sacraments, values and morals of our culture.

Next week we will continue by looking at the intersection between Faith and Hope.

Today’s Post

Last week we explored a simple shift from locating ultimate meaning in the past, by both religion and science, to locating it in the future, as Teilhard’s concept of universal evolution asserts.  We saw how such a shift of perspective not only opens up new relevance to traditional religion, but affords an overcoming of the historical dualities and dangers of both science and religion, and can thence lead to a new synergy between them.  This week we will look at how such a reorientation not only adds to the richness of science and religion, but how such a change of stance offers an additional ‘principle of reinterpretation’ to our search for the ‘Secular Side of God’.

Reorienting Religion Towards the Future

In a series of earlier posts, we looked at ‘principles of reinterpretation’ which could be applied to traditional Christian teachings if we were to examine them for their secular meanings.  In this series, we noted our use of the insights of Teilhard de Chardin in establishing these principles:

“Teilhard’s unique approach to the nature of reality provides insights into the fundamental energies which are at work in the evolution of the universe and hence are at work in the continuation of evolution through the human person.  His insights compromise neither the theories of Physics in the play of elemental matter following the ‘Big Bang” nor the essential theory of Natural Selection in the increasing complexity of living things, but instead brings them together into a single, coherent process.”

Based on last week’s post, and indebted to both Teilhard and John Haught, we delved into a very basic and powerful approach to reorientation which highlights the underlying problems of both traditional science and religion in making sense of our lives.

We saw that this reorientation is simply a shift of perspective from locating ‘meaning’ in the past to positing it in the future.  Again, paraphrasing Haught

“While traditional religion locates the fullness of being appearing in the past, a ‘timeless fiat accompli’, and science locates it in a set of mathematically perfect principles extant at the ‘Big Bang’, an ‘anticipatory set of eyes’ sees it as a dramatic, transformative, temporal awakening.”

   Or, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins saw it, as a

“Gathering to greatness/Like the oozing of oil”:

   However, we can take this further in our search for the attitudes which we can adopt in the process of living out Teilhard’s ‘articulations of the noosphere’, sacraments, morals and values that we addressed in the last two posts.  We can add the development of Haught’s ‘anticipatory set of eyes’, as a reinterpretation principle that emerges when we look to an unfinished but positive future as the basis for our faith in life.  In summary, to reinterpret our Christian set of beliefs into secular terms, we must also understand the universe, and hence our lives, as being ‘in process’, consisting of the development of Haught’s ‘anticipation’, and requiring attitudes which are firmly focused on the future.

The Three ‘Theological’ Virtues

Thus, the logical next step after establishing the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ as found in sacraments and morals, would be establishing the ‘stance’ that we must take if we are to embrace such articulation and further the cause of human development as we continue the long rise of complexity as it unfolds in the human species.

The first Christian theologian, Paul, addressed the teachings of Jesus as found in the three synoptic gospels.  He was the first to recognize that Jesus was more than just another itinerant preacher (of which there were many to be found at the time), but a human manifestation of the creative energy of God.  In Paul, we find not just a repetition of the ‘stories of Jesus’ found in the three synoptic traditions, but a synthesis, a ‘boiling down’ to the essentials, the key points, found in them.  One such synthesis was expressed in what the church has come to refer as the “Theological Virtues”.

Paul presents these three virtues as the three facets of human attitude that recognize and enhance our response to the life of God within us, as taught by Jesus.  According to Paul, when we ‘practice’ these virtues, when we adopt them as attitudes that we take on as we live our everyday life, we are opening ourselves to, cooperating with, the flow of grace as it courses through our lives.    In theological vernacular, then, virtues are “interior principles of the moral life which directs our relationship with God and others”.

From our secular perspective, they are the stance we take when we live our lives in a way that capitalizes on the flow of evolutive energy as it rises in our individual lives.  In our secular terms, we are orienting ourselves to Teilhard’s ‘currents which bear us towards the open sea’, the energy of evolution.  We are aligning our lives to the ‘axis of evolution’.

So, virtues can be understood as the basis of the actions we take that are consistent with the sacraments, values and morals that serve as the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ which provide the framework for our continued evolution.  While morals can be understood as ‘blueprints’ for the scaffolding of the edifice of a life which is aligned along the axis of evolution, virtues address the skills which are necessary to construct and maintain such an edifice.  We have explored the ‘blueprints’ in the past few posts, but we now turn to the attitudes that are appropriate to live them out in such a way as to better become what it is possible for us to become.

As we noted last week, by introducing the concept that we are ‘borne along by the currents of evolution’, Science offers a unique ‘principle of reinterpretation’ to religion.  Understanding ourselves, and the universe, as being in the state of ‘becoming’ permits religion to overcome not only its excessive dogmatism but also much of its dualism.  At the same time, religion can offer a ‘principle of meaning’ to science in which, as we have seen, the locus of meaning shifts from the past to the future.

The three facets of the ‘stance’ that we can take to work together as we reorient ‘towards the future’ are labelled by theology as ‘faith, hope and love’.  In our reinterpretation, this involves turning from the theological focus as attitudes necessary for salvation, to attitudes which enable us to cooperate with Teilhard’s ‘currents of life’.

Looking at these attitudes from our secular point of view:

Faith is the recognition that there exists in each of us some component of the energies by which the universe has been lifted to its current stage of complexity.  It recognizes that this component is neither summoned by us as a result of our ‘good works’, nor extinguishable by our ‘bad works’.  In a term most often used by theologians, it is ‘gratuitous’: a gift.  Faith, then, can be understood as trusting this current to take us to Karen Armstrong’s ‘greater possession of ourselves’.

Hope is the belief that this current will continue to effect our complexity in the terms by which we have measured it over the prior fourteen or so billions years: increased ‘personness’ marked by increased centeredness, enhanced individuality and deeper relationships.  With hope, we expect that ‘fuller being’ will result from the energies of evolution as they continue within us.  More simply, hope can be understood in Blondel’s assertion that “God is on our side”.  As John Haught saw it, “..it is the sense that something ontologically richer and fuller is coming into the universe” through us.

Love is our increased capacity to cooperate with the energy of evolution as it rises through our personal growth and our connectivity with others.  It is the current manifestation of the same energy which connects electrons to form atoms, atoms to form molecules, molecules to cells, to neurons and eventually to consciousness.  Each step of which united previous products of evolution to effect new and more complex products just as we unite among ourselves to become products of increased wholeness.

These three ‘attitudes’, stances that we can take in our turn towards the future, are deeply intertwined.  One cannot have faith in any enterprise without hope of a favorable outcome, which would be impossible to achieve without the faith and the collaboration (love) to get there.  Hope is necessary to overcome our instinctual recoil from the closer union that results from greater love which in turn requires a level of faith in our own capacity for such union and trust that such a union will bring us to a higher state of being.  And finally, love is the basic energy of the universe become manifest in human life, without which our personal evolution is impossible.

The Next Post

This week we have transitioned from the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ to the stance, the attitude, that we can take if we are to make the most of the articulations reflected in sacraments, values and morals of our culture.  We saw that the key aspect of a ‘forward’ approach to making sense of the universe is to change the orientation of traditional Science and Religion from the past to the future, and how this reorientation can be reflected in the stance we take toward living life.

Next week we will look a little more deeply at religion’s three traditional aspects of this stance, beginning with the ‘virtue’ of ‘Faith’.

 Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Science’s discovery of the immensity of time and the process of evolution offers a new perspective on the statements of meaning that have evolved with both Science itself and Religion.  We also saw how, as John Haught asserts in his book, “The New Cosmic Story” a third, holistic, approach emerges from these discoveries which can bring these two traditional schools of thought into increased coherence.  As Teilhard predicted:

“Like the meridians as they approach the poles, science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.”

   We have been exploring the topics of sacraments, morals and values over the past several weeks.  This week we will move on to ‘attitudes’, the stances which we take in relation to life, and by which such ‘articulations of the noosphere’ can be lived out.

Attitudes

There are few things more important to the way we live our lives than the attitudes we assume as we go about our daily enterprises.  This has nothing to do with religion: even secularists have attitudes, and our attitudes have immense impact on our actions.   They are also strongly rooted in our underlying beliefs.  The difference between the influence of pessimistic and optimistic attitudes on quality of life, for example, has been well documented in psychological journals, but by what ‘hermeneutical’ principle is one’s attitude determined?  Are attitudes chosen by each of us in an intellectual process by which we reason to them, or are they a result of biological pressures over which we have no control?  Are they a result of our neocortex activity or imposed on us by the stimuli of our reptilian and limbic brains?  Are they empirical or intuitional?

One of the most common underlying principles of all religions is the impetus to believe and act in accordance with some defined hermeneutics.  Often the actions are proscribed in spite of beliefs.  Examples of this can be found in the more conservative Christian expressions, in which faith is more important than reason in deciding how to act.  Nearly all contain the teaching that ‘proper’ belief is more necessary for salvation (passing successfully into the afterlife) than ‘proper’ action.  The role of ‘attitude’ in the comportment of life, while not absent in these teachings, does not seem to be paramount.

Christianity addresses attitudes in its concept of ‘virtues’.  While traditional teaching treats virtues as ‘dispositions by which we live good lives’, the traditional implication is that the ‘good life’ is the one which ends in our salvation.

At the other end of the spectrum, in the materialistic scheme of things, attitudes are seen as those dispositions which contribute to the materialistic process of evolution: ‘survival of the fittest’.  In this scheme, many traditional religious beliefs can be germane in their secular support of continued evolution, but the ultimate ‘hermeneutic’ as discussed last week, is to be found in the interaction among elementary particles as increasingly understood by science.

As discussed last week, both approaches are rooted in the past:  Religion with its doctrines of ‘truth’ firmly rooted in divine pronouncements of long ago, and Science with its belief in meaning to be found at the bottom (and hence in the past) of the evolution of matter.

The Dangers of the Past

Why should such perspectives be seen as problematic?  On the one hand, hasn’t religion proven its value to society with the building blocks it has offered to civic stability?  And hasn’t Science’s incessant search for the ultimate understanding of how matter holds together led to advances in human quality of life that would have been the stuff of dreams to our grandparents?  So, why should such traditional principles be called into question?  What’s wrong with either of these perspectives?

To answer these questions, a starting place can be found in the waning influence of religion in the West.  Most surveys, particularly reflected in the Pew polls, seem to show a correlation between declining levels of traditional church participation and increasing levels of education.  The materialists gleefully interpret this as evidence that Religion is becoming less necessary for societal stability as many of its precepts become encoded in legal systems and society becomes more educated.  This attitude is reflected in the scientific community, mostly notably Stephen Hawking, in their claim that scientific discoveries are gradually eliminating a place for God in the universe.   This perspective sees that traditionally, God is now only to be ‘found in the gaps’, and as these gaps are filled by Science, there is a decreasing need for God.

But science also faces a danger in looking for meaning in the composition of simplest matter.  As we have seen, it’s been difficult for Science to include the human person in its understanding of reality.  There is no “Standard Model” for the human person like there is for pre-biological matter.  In our exploration of psychology, in which Science turns its lens on the human, we have seen that there is considerable dualism. (10 Nov 2016).  Add to this the belief that real meaning is only to be found in the “behind and below”, and a truly bleak picture of the future of human evolution begins to emerge.  As one atheist put it, “life’s a bitch, then you die”.  Instead of seeing human evolution as a process which can increase the level of complexity of its products (which it has so far for billions of years), it is now seen with a future more of decay than enrichment.  As Haught puts it:

“The typical scientific materialist…takes decay to be finally inevitable because the totality of being is destined by what-has-been to end up in a state of elemental, lifeless disintegration.”

   Further, Haught notes that traditional Science and Religion, with their sights fixed firmly rearward, seem complicit in their disdain for universal potential.  He notes that:

“The cosmic pessimism of so many modern intellectuals, it turns out, is a cultural by-product of the implicit despair about the physical universe that had been tolerated for so many centuries by otherworldly, religious readings of nature.”

   It is this pessimism that is at the root of the ‘dangers of the past’.  As science opens our eyes to the immensities of time and space, the seemingly impersonal processes of how they relate, and the ultimately material basis of matter, those traditionally spiritual (Haught: ‘otherworldly’) beliefs of Religion which have underpinned a positive stance to life in the past can become increasingly irrelevant.  What can replace our traditional hermeneutic?

As thinkers such as Blondel, Teilhard, Rohr and Haught suggest, it’s not that the underlying precepts of Science and Religion are wrong, and hence must be replaced, it’s more that their wisdom becomes immediately more rich and relevant when reoriented from the past to the future.  This reorientation occurs with the simple recognition that the universe as unfinished, in which, as Haught sees:

“(Science) professes to be highly empirical and realistic, but leaves out of its survey of nature the fact that the cosmos is still in the process of becoming.  …the fullness of being, truth and meaning are still rising on the horizon.”

The Next Post

This week we have explored the phenomenon of ‘attitudes’, and saw how the traditional approach of science and religion can lead to not only the decreasing relevance of religion but the existential pessimism of science.  Next week we will take another look at how reorienting our Scientific and Religious perspective from past to future offers an additional ‘principle of reinterpretation’.

Today’s Post

For the last several posts we have been exploring the religious concepts of sacraments, values and morals as ‘articulations of the noosphere’: structures of the reality in which we live that when cooperated with can lead us to Karen Armstrong’s “greater possession of ourselves” and Teilhard’s “current to the open sea”.

This week we will continue this exploration into modes of human life which capitalize on these structures: ‘ways to be what we can be’.

The Holistic Perspective

Last week we saw how both the traditional scientific, materialistic, even atheistic perspectives on human existence can be brought into confluence with traditional religious perspectives with a few changes in interpretation.

• Once science expands its understanding of evolution from terrestrial biological phenomena (Natural Selection) to a universal perspective (complexification), evolution can be seen in three distinct phases united by a continuing increase of complexity in its products (pre-life, life, life conscious of itself).  In this more comprehensive perspective, there are indeed ‘articulations of the noosphere’ which foster our continued evolution.
• The theist assertion that morals are absolute imperatives issued from a divine source thousands of years ago requires that these standards of behavior are, as the materialists assert, intelligible, but also that our quest for understanding them is still ongoing.

Or, as Teilhard puts it:

“So long as our conceptions of the universe remained static, the basis of duty remained extremely obscure.  To account for this mysterious law which weighs fundamentally on our liberty, men had recourse to all sorts of explanations, from that of an explicit command issued from outside to that of an irrational but categorical instinct.”

   So putting evolution into an unfolding cosmic context leads to, as John Haught asserts in his book, “The New Cosmic Story” a third, holistic, approach.

 The Third Way

As we saw in the post of September 12, when we addressed John Haught’s three approaches to making sense of reality, he notes that at their roots, both the traditional theistic traditions and materialistic interpretations most often associated with science are rooted in the past.

Science, for its part, continues to search for understanding of the cosmos by looking backwards into the increasingly particulate components of matter and energy.  In science’s ‘Theory of Everything’, success will be declared when we understand every step of the evolution of matter from its initial state of pure energy (the ‘big Bang’) to its current state of highly complex combinations of atoms, molecules and cells.   As Jonathan Sacks puts it, “Science takes things apart to see how they work”.  Such beliefs as random determinism (our thoughts are the result of random firings of neurons precipitated by molecular activity) often lead to a denial of human free will.  In other words, from this perspective meaning is to be sought from, as Teilhard puts it, “The behind and below”.  In this perspective, the future is indeterminate; it is only by understanding the past that we can understand the universe and prepare for the future.

Religion posits the validity of its beliefs in ‘revealed truth’, usually contained in ‘sacred scripture’ written eons ago.  In simpler terms, humans have been given the ‘law’ but consistently fail to live up to it.  From this perspective, the human species will fail in its enterprises, requiring an eventual imposition by God of a theistic and divine government.  While Sack’s observation that ‘Religion puts everything together to see what it means’, is correct, the criteria by which it does so assumes a perfect past from which we are ‘fallen’.

Haught notes that Teilhard (as well as Blondel and Rohr) recognizes that the scientific concept of evolution (when freed from its biological constraints) offers religion a freedom from its ‘chains of the past’, and permits these two classical modes of thinking to be seen to have a level of coherence that the traditional modes deny.  He also notes that the single strongest component of this new approach is simply the clarity that which is brought by understanding the stuff of science and religion in the light of a comprehensive, universal evolutionary process.

Again, from Teilhard:

   “Under the influence of a large number of convergent causes (the discovery of organic time and space, progress in the unification or ‘planetization’ of man, etc), man has quite certainly become alive, for the last century, to the evidence that he is involved in a vast process of anthropogenesis, cosmic in plane and dimensions.”

   So, if we are to find new ways of ‘employing our neo-cortex brains to modulate the instincts of our limbic and reptilian brains’, or more prosaically, ‘becoming what we are capable of becoming’, understanding and living life in terms of the sacraments, morals and values that we have explored can take on new meaning when we begin to understand that we are part of an evolutionary process by which we are brought into ‘greater possession of ourselves’ when we engage in these activities.

To see ourselves caught up in Teilhard’s process of ‘anthropogenesis’ is to recognize that meaning is always to be sought in the future.  No doubt that our bodies can be boiled down to masses of molecules and that the insights of the past are worth our attention, but recognition that we are ‘borne on a current to the open sea’ requires us to look past the ”explicit commands issued from the outside” as proposed by Religion, and the “… irrational but categorical instincts” proposed by Science to a future that, to our opening eyes, is truly open to us.  .  Teilhard proposed a spherical image of the actualizing of potential for Science and Religion to mutually foster our future evolution:

 “Like the meridians as they approach the poles, science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.”

   The shift in our stance with respect to life that Haught explores is one that turns our expectations, hopes and actions, as Teilhard says, “Towards the future”.  This leads us to the religious concept of ‘the virtues”.

The Next Post

This week we have explored how Teilhard’s understanding of cosmic evolution can bring new clarity to both the meanings proposed by materialists as well as those asserted by theists.  Next week we will extend this exploration to the stances that we take when we seek to apply the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ (sacraments, morals and values) to our life.  It makes a difference whether or not we see such articulations as rules to be followed to achieve ‘salvation’,  or the acceptance of the fate of a faceless, indeterministic universe, and we will take a look at such stances in the light of religion’s ‘theological virtues’.

The secular side of values, morals and sacraments 

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how legacy religious and scientific perspectives on morals are very orthogonal.   Where traditional religion insists on an absolute basis of morals, science proposes one which is relative to our understanding of science’s key agency of evolution: ‘survival’.  Today we will take a look at how these two perspectives can be brought into coherence.

From Our Secular Viewpoint

There are many ways in which the orthogonal perspectives of Science and Religion can be seen to align.  As we have seen many times, both Religion and Science are rife with ‘dualisms’ which choose a viewpoint from the many shades of belief on any subject.  Our secular approach seeks to bring the opposing sides into confluence by understanding them in the holistic context of universal evolution and applying the techniques of reinterpretation that we have proposed.  The subject of ‘morals’ is no exception.   One way to effect such confluence is to return to Teilhard’s treatment of the two seemingly contrary positions:

“So as long as our conceptions of the universe remained static, the basis of duty (moral standards) remained extremely obscure.  To account for this mysterious law (the energy of evolution which effects increasing complexity) which weighs fundamentally on our liberty, man had recourse to all sorts of explanations, from that of an explicit command issued from outside to that of an irrational but categorical instinct.” (parenthetical statements and italics mine)

   Teilhard noticed that science’s new understanding of evolution can offer an improved understanding of morality:

“And, conventional and impermanent as they may seem on the surface, what are the intricacies of our social forms, if not an effort to isolate little by little what are one day to become the structural laws of the noosphere. In their essence, and provided they keep their vital connection with the current that wells up from the depths of the past, are not the artificial, the moral and the juridical simply the hominized versions of the natural, the physical and the organic?”

   As we saw in our post on ‘Navigating the Noosphere’, Teilhard notes than in the slow transition from ‘expansion’ to ‘compression’ that is occurring in human history, new beliefs and tactics must evolve for humanity to survive its infolding on itself.   Those practices that could be understood as normative in the ‘expansion’ stage of evolution, in which the ‘open’ capacity of the Earth allowed unlimited spreading, have worked poorly as there became less space to expand into.  The last two centuries, with their incessant and ever widening wars, offer clear evidence of it.

As we looked into finding evidence for our own evolution, we saw how Johan Norberg suggests that new paradigms, emerging in the West, are causing a reversal of the slope of this curve in the past fifty years.  He suggests the cause of this change in direction to be rooted in such phenomena as

• The ridiculing of war by Enlightenment thinkers
• The calming of Religious fundamentalism
• The recognition of the horror of war as improved education and increased social stability permitted a more objective look at the past.

A more profound insight is suggested by Norberg.  He suggests that globalization has offered a milieu in which the fruits of Western personal autonomy and social cohesion can spread quickly across the globe.  As a result, the global awareness that has emerged not only recognizes that it is cheaper to buy resources than to take them by force, but that fostering individual autonomy and improved human relationships can lead a national stability which is increasingly comfortable the inevitable compression of society.

In a nutshell, just as the instincts evolved in our mammalian ancestors worked well for their evolutionary history but need to be modulated by our neocortex brains to manage our own history, the ‘morals’ that guided our human ancestors as they evolved ‘upward and outward’ need to be modulated and recast as our evolution, which still continues ‘upwards’ much now focus ‘inwardly’.

To aid in such an ‘inward’ focus, Teilhard proposes the same principle of reinterpretation that was previously suggested by Blondel: to understand that human persons are products of an evolutionary process, as science teaches, requires the acknowledgment of the existence of a principle which ‘effects our becoming’, as religion teaches.  This suggests common ground between the materialist and theist perspectives:

• The materialists are correct in asserting that the basis of morals can be found in the principles of evolution. However, it is necessary to expand the understanding of evolution from terrestrial biological phenomena and open it to its universal perspective.  In doing so evolution can be seen in three distinct phases which are united by a continuation of the increase of complexity in their products.  In this integrated perspective, there are indeed ‘articulations of the noosphere’ which foster the continuation of evolution in human life, and these can be expressed in terms such as sacraments, values and morals.
• The theists are correct in asserting that these morals are indeed, at their basis, absolute. The absolute nature of these standards of behavior are, as the materialists assert,  intelligible, but require our continued search for a more complete understanding of them.

So the materialistic approach to morals needs to be placed in the full picture of evolution and take into account the presence of the agent of universal evolution in each personal life.  By the same token, the theist approach needs to be shorn of its premature dogmatism and be open to both the intelligibility of the universe and our part in it as we continue to evolve our understanding of it.

Science, with its grasp of the universe as ‘becoming’ can bring new life to religion, as asserted by John Haught and Teilhard.  As Blondel and Teilhard understood, recognizing that the human is a product of a continuously evolving universe permits a deeper understand of God as the universal principle of such evolution.  By the same token, their fresh approach to religion also serves to expand science’s understanding of this process to include the human as not only a product of evolution, but one able to respond to a new mode of evolutive energy which goes beyond the Darwinian principles of ‘chance and

The question can then be asked, how can humans employ their new-found capacity of being aware of their consciousness in service to their continued evolution How can they be seen to be capable of ‘effecting their own complexification’?

The answer involves developing the skill of the neocortex brain in modulating the instinctive stimuli of the lower limbic and reptilian brains.  Examples of practices and beliefs that develop and strengthen this skill abound in every religious and philosophical school of thought that has emerged in human history.  The down side, of course, is that they are enmeshed and deeply entangled in hierarchies, sentimentality, and supernaturalism that can undermine their validity as ‘articulations of the noosphere’.

So, in order to be able to (paraphrasing Richard Dawkins) “explicitly divest religious belief of all the baggage that it carries in the minds of most religious believers”, it is necessary to reinterpret these beliefs in terms of human ‘complexification’ (human growth) so that their relevancy to human life and continued evolution can be more fully understood.

In simpler terms: in the human, the mechanism of evolution transforms from ‘evolutionary selection of entities’ to ‘entities which select their evolution’.

The Next Post

This week we have contrasted the ‘materialistic’ (‘atheistic’) position with that of the ‘theists’ on ‘how we should be if we would be what we can be’, and saw how a holistic perspective on evolution offers a common ground of belief that seems more consistent with both our general religious and scientific understanding not only of the universe but of our part in it.

Assuming that there are indeed ‘articulations of the noosphere’ that when observed, lead on to, as Teilhard put it, “being carried by a current to the open sea”, what do we do with them?  How can we orient ourselves to these ‘currents’?

Next week we will take our explanation of sacraments, values and morality to the next level and explore an approach to evolution which finds common ground between these seemingly orthogonal approaches to understanding human evolution.