March 4, 2021 Values, Morals and Sacraments

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The evolutionary basis of morality

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how religion is not the only cultural artifact which calls attention to the energy of evolution in our lives, and how our very Western culture itself is infused with such recognition.  Looking at sacraments in the context of human values and morals, this week’s post addresses the secular perspective on morals and their basis.

The Basis of Morals

Humans do not generally agree on the best way to make sense of their existence, much less the most effective way to conduct their lives.  Among the many religious expressions, for example, there is wide divergence on understanding human ontology: do we emerge from a generally linear process of evolution or creation, or are our lives simply repetitions of previous lives?  Are we doomed to complete extinction when we die or in some sense do we continue existence on a separate plane, and if so will we retain our personal uniqueness or be dissolved into an impersonal ‘cosmic all’?  Is there a ‘way’ to live life to the fullest, or is each life sufficiently unique and autonomous to ignore traditional behavioral guidelines?  Is the basis for morals ‘universal’ or unique for each person?  Are morals, standards for the conduct of human life ‘absolute’ or ‘relative’?

Whichever of the many beliefs about human life we claim, such beliefs come with their own specific standards of behavior.  The last few posts have explored the concept of ‘sacraments’, in which certain beliefs about existence manifest themselves in the form of behaviors which are thought to be ‘normative’ to human existence.  In participating in these behaviors the concept of sacraments suggests that we are acting in a way which is more resonant with the basic flow of energy by which our lives, and hence our society, and ultimately the universe, unfolds.  The idea of the sacraments suggests that there is indeed a ‘way’ to live life which is resonant to the rise of evolutionary energy within us, and which will lead to ‘fuller being’.

While this perspective is certainly resonant with our secular approach to the reinterpretation of religious beliefs, it is obvious that belief in the basis of morals is quite diverse across the patchwork quilt of Christianity, much less in the West and even more so in the wide ranges of belief found in other parts of the world.  It seems equally obvious that such a wide diversity of standards for behavior can be traced to the divergence on beliefs about human ontology.  If we disagree on how to make sense of our existence, frequently manifest as a difference in the belief in god, our standards for behavior will be strikingly different.

From the Materialist Viewpoint

A similar divergence can be seen in the increasing disagreement between ‘theists’ and ‘atheists’.  At least in the West there seems to be an increasing number of individuals who, instead of disagreeing on the nature of god, disbelieve in the existence of a ground of being itself.  This disbelief frequently manifests itself in disbelief not only of such traditional concepts as love, sin and morality, but in the existence of meaning itself.  Such a philosophical trend is often seen as the only logical conclusion which can be drawn from basing our personal accommodation of life on the provable findings of science.  Science’s theory of evolution is a case in point.

In the case of universal ontology, as a general rule science avoids the term ‘evolution’ to address the process by which its Standard Model articulates the universe’s increasing complexification as molecules emerge from clusters of bosons upwards through atomic structures.  While this model tracks this ‘rise’ of matter, for example, and implicitly acknowledges the increase of complexity which emerges in this emergence, it offers thus far no term which identifies this obvious phenomenon.  Further, many scientists vehemently object to using the term ‘evolution’ to describe the eight billion year process by which the universe effects highly complex molecules from bosons.  While they have no term for the process itself, they insist that the term must be restricted to the biological processes addressed by the Theory of Natural Selection.

In the phase of evolution that emerges with the onset of living things, the ‘biosphere’, it is a common scientific concept that the living things which emerge within are ‘selected by evolution’.   This idea is based on the theory of Natural Selection which sees the evolutionary process of living things as guided by the principle that they are ‘selected’ by the criteria of ‘survival’.  In this perspective, new entities which emerge in the history of evolution are either successful in surviving their environment and thus go on to continued procreation or they are unsuccessful and fade from the ‘tree of life’ as it continues to develop.

Many scientific thinkers extend the rationale of Natural Selection to evolution as it continues through the human species.  While generally agreeing that ‘morphological’ evolution still continues in humans (physiological changes due to changes in DNA) they posit that Natural Selection continues its work of ‘survival’ via cultural means found in the organization of human society.  Not only does this approach offer a partial understanding of how changes take place in human society, it notes how such changes are occurring much faster than those found in morphology. Thus a common approach to articulating this mode of evolution is to understand the structures of human edifices in terms of their ‘evolutionary selection’.  In other words, as envisioned by Richard Dawkins in his book, “The Selfish Gene”, a given philosophical, legal or cultural idea can be seen as a ‘meme’, which performs the same function in human culture as the gene in cellular evolution.  The evolutionary value of memes are judged by their contribution to the continuing survival of the human species.  Even in the human, evolution is still ‘selecting’ us.

In the scientific approach to making sense of things, therefore, concepts such as meaning, values and their associated standards of behavior, carry much less weight.  Although science does not directly address such things, some modes of science, such as evolutionary psychology, touch upon the ‘correct way’ to live.  Evolutionary psychology reduces the basis of human action to the precepts of Darwin’s theory of ‘natural selection’, in which each of our personal choices either act in support of the ‘principles’ of evolution or act against them.  Since the key principle of Darwinistic evolution is understood as ‘survival’, human actions are considered to be ‘correct’ when they increase both our personal survival (so that we can contribute our genes to the ‘gene pool’) and that of our species (and our ‘memes’ to the ‘meme pool’) and in doing so insuring that the species does not become extinct.  Where this mode of science proposes behavioral correctness, it is effectively proposing values and morals consistent with this standard.

Further, since those morals and standards of behavior are relative to our unfolding understanding of evolution, they themselves unfold over time.  Therefore since such understanding is quite diverse, personal morals can then be different for different persons.  Morals are therefore ‘relative’.  Still further, as in the case of genes, a wide diversity in memes may well be necessary to insure a rich ‘meme pool’ to enhance our survival potential.  From such a perspective, ‘relativity’ among morals is necessary to insure that human evolution produces the diversity necessary for nature to take all possible avenues of development, thus continuing the ramification that has been seen across the wide expanse of biology.  To evolve, therefore, we must ‘diverge’.

The Next Post

This week we continued to expand our view of sacraments, morals and values to the basis of ‘correct behavior’, and seen how the materialistic perspective is based on science’s proposition that the basis of biological evolution is ‘survival’.   Next week we will contrast this materialistic approach to the traditional religious view of this basis, and explore how our secular reinterpretation approach can bring these two seemingly contradictory viewpoints into synergy.

February 25, 2021 – ‘Secular’ Sacraments

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 Today’s Post

Last week we explored how the concept of ‘sacrament’ can be interpreted as ‘articulations of the noosphere’, helping us to navigate our lives by the compass of and in cooperation with the energy of evolution, ‘grace’, as it flows through our lives.

Although the concept of sacraments seems to have risen in the theological evolution of the West, there are many other ‘occasions of grace’ (instantiations of the energy of evolution) in our lives which are more secular but just as important to our continued personal evolution as they are to the evolution of our society.

This week we’ll take a look at some of these.

Evolutionary Beliefs and ‘Secular Sacraments’

One of the ways of moving human evolution forward that we have explored in this blog is the development of the skill of employing our neo-cortex brains to modulate the instinctual stimuli of the lower ‘limbic’ and ‘reptilian’ brains.  Such skill is called for in nearly every religious tradition in human history, but requires guidelines, ‘signposts’ to insure that such employment really does align with the ‘axis of evolution’ as it rises in our lives.

Another way to look such evolutionary ‘signposts’ is provided by Richard Dawkins, as he sees human evolution proceeding by way of ‘memes’, nuggets of cultural evolution which foster our way forward.  In his vernacular, such ‘memes’ constitute the human counterpart to molecular ‘genes’ which shape the manifestations of matter as they emerge into living things.  From this viewpoint, sacraments can be seen as the ‘memes’ which we use as we evolve.

An example of such a signpost is the simple adage, seemingly first voiced by Confucius in 550 BC: “Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you”.  While simple to state, it nonetheless requires a conscious decision to first understand what you would like to have done to you, then to make the conscious decision to act against what might be an instinctive motivation, such as to react in kind to a perceived threat.

Most thinkers agree that development of such skill is difficult, which acknowledges both the strength of our inherited instincts (which served our reptilian and mammalian ancestors so well) and the immaturity of the use of our human-unique neo-cortex brain.  The writings of both religion and philosophy abound with rituals designed to help the human person transcend his ‘lower’ roots.

As ‘articulations of the noosphere’, sacraments fall into this category.  They offer examples of human actions that require activation of our neo-cortex thinking centers instead of reactions to our instinctual stimuli.  In the ‘eucharist’, for example, we are called to replace our instinctive recoil from others with the conscious understanding of our common natures as ‘all made in the image of god’, or in our secular vernacular, as each possessing the spark of the ‘ground of being’ which energizes the evolution of our person.  We have taken a look at such examples proposed by religion, but our entire social systems are rife with those that stress objectivity over subjectivity, and deliberation over instinct, as a basis for action.  All of these activities, encoded in our laws and cultural norms, are based on values that are uniquely human and which transcend such instinctive goals as survival and procreation.

We have seen how Richard Dawkins understands that evolution in the human species continues by way of ‘memes’, which constitute the fibers of the fabric of culture.  These ‘memes’ are simply those insights, which when shared among the members of a group, contribute to its endurance.  Some examples of ‘secular sacraments’ can be found in such shared values as:

Human Equality 

At least in the West, the underlying concept of human equality has become widely accepted.  This simple value qualifies, in our secular search, as the basis for a true ‘articulation of the noosphere’ as it underpins several practices which can be seen to contribute to both material and spiritual (by our secular definition) successes of the West.  While there is little doubt that Western societies are still evolving, the current of human evolution can be readily traced in the rapid (by evolutionary measure) evolution of societal organization from monarchies, through monarchies with ‘charters’ which recognized rights of the non-monarchy, to the United States Bill of Rights.

Thomas Jefferson expresses this value in very clear terms in the Declaration of Independence:

 “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”.

   This fundamental value, an example of a Dawkins ‘meme’, leads on to a belief that is essential to Western democracy: if each individual has the same rights, an opinion of the majority will serve as a mandate to society.  Effectively this leads to the belief that ‘majority rules’ in the enacting of laws.  As Thomas Jefferson puts it succinctly there is

“. ..no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves.”

   This, in turn, leads to the act of articulating “the will of the people”, voting.  From our secular perspective, voting, then, is an example of a ‘secular sacrament’.  When we vote we are effectively acting out the belief that the majority opinion is normative in human society, based on the value that each person has the same rights, and hence the same potential for understanding how society should work.  Thus, by our secular definition of ‘sacrament’, the act of voting is one by which the energy of evolution can be seen as active in the evolution of society.

Psychology

As we saw in in the posts beginning December 8, 2016,, psychology is an activity in which we explore our basic self, which from our secular perspective involves finding the ‘ground of being’ via the as the manifestation of universal evolution in our personal lives.  As such, psychology can be a profoundly human activity, a sacrament, since what is found is that which is most human in us.
The practice of psychology depends upon the belief that an essential characteristic of the human person is ‘improvability’.  Like ‘human equality’, this is another example of a Dawkins ‘meme’ which, when acted upon constitutes yet another contribution to the continuation of human evolution via the enrichment of human life.

The Next Post

This week we expanded the view of perspectives from church-developed sacraments to ‘secular sacraments’, ones in which we engage in our everyday lives.

Next week we will take a final look at sacraments in the light of values and morals.

February 18, 2021 – Reinterpreting ‘Sacraments’

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how human evolution proceeds through the trial-and-error process seen in human attempts to ‘articulate the noosphere’, and how successful attempts are captured in the ‘cultural DNA’ through the ‘tissue of culture’ as found in religion, philosophy and laws.  This week we will continue this exploration by looking how sacraments can be seen as examples of human activity in which the work of grace, now understood as the energy of our personal and cultural evolution, can be seen to occur.

Sacraments as ‘Signs of Grace’

In the posts on Jesus (beginning with November 12, 2020) we looked at Jesus as a signpost to God, and discussed how he can be seen as ‘evolution becoming aware of itself’.

As Western religious tradition has seen it, there are seven activities of human life that Jesus recognized as critical to our ‘salvation’.  Just as Jesus was a ‘signpost to God’, these events were ‘signposts to grace’, events to which we should pay special attention as they are examples of times in human life in which this ‘evolutionary energy’ is most active in human life.

The idea of seeing some human activity as more significant to human life is found in other religions as well.   In his book, ‘The Souls of China’, Ian Johnson addresses the trend in which many Chinese are beginning to identify themselves as Daoist, Buddhist, Christian or Muslim after decades of having religious expression outlawed.  He explains how traditional rituals help people overcome urban anomie and answer the “pragmatic but profound issue of how to behave at critical life junctures”, such as weddings, funerals, pilgrimages, social work and meditation.

So, as we proceeded with other religious concepts in our search for the “Secular Side of God”, the key step in this search is the reinterpretation of those traditional teachings from the secular perspective that we have developed.  The sacraments are no exception.

What Are ‘Sacraments?’

   Christianity identifies seven events in human life that are ‘occasions of grace’: events in which our lives are enriched by the energy of grace.  Although the church places great emphasis on the action of the church hierarchy in ‘conferring’ the grace that flows in these events, a secular approach simply sees them as events in our lives in which we must ‘pay attention’ so that we can cooperate with this flow of grace in such a way that our personal evolution, our ‘spiritual growth’ is enhanced.  Paraphrasing Teilhard, when we participate in these events we are ‘trimming our sails to the winds of life’, aligning our lives to the flow of energy that arises in the axis of evolution.

Traditional church teaching identifies seven such rituals, all of which require church hierarchy for the ‘conferring’, and all of which recognize the action of grace which takes place.  These teachings place great emphasis on the both the need for the church to perform the ritual to effect the outcome of the giving of grace, and the need for our participation in them as a condition for church membership.

From our secular perspective, however, we can set aside such ‘scaffolding’ and concentrate on reinterpreting the concept of the sacraments in terms of our understanding of grace as the energy of both our personal evolution and the resulting evolution of our species.  From such a perspective, the role of the church is less ‘conferring’ to calling attention to the ‘signposts’.

Reinterpreting ‘The Seven Sacraments’

Baptism

The traditional church teaching sees baptism as the ‘conferring’ of the grace that will enable our eventual entry into heaven by taking away the stain of ‘original sin’.  In our secular perspective, this ‘first’ sacrament, baptism, is that which understands human birth to be a personal extension of the evolution of the universe.  Each life is another small limb on the branch of the tree of evolution, in which the energy of evolution manifests itself yet again as an element of consciousness to be valued, cared for, fostered, and understood for what it truly is.

Like all sacraments, the ritual of baptism involves the ‘cultural tissue of the DNA of evolution’ (the church and society) which is made up of the parents, the family and the community.  The ritual not only calls attention to the unique potential of human life, but does it in a way that recognizes the essential nature of the community in bringing this life to maturity.  It is a stepping stone to Teilhard’s mapping of the energy of love as the play of ‘centration’ and ‘excentration’ by which we come to be what we can be.

Confirmation

In church tradition, the sacrament of confirmation confers the grace of human spiritual growth.  In our secular perspective, the sacrament of confirmation goes on to ‘confirm’ the actuation of potential which occurs as we mature, recognizing that our potential for growth is assured by our cooperation with grace, ‘the energy of human evolution’.  Just as this grace is ‘gratuitous’, unearned, so our potential for maturity is assured and can be trusted if we but recognize and cooperate with its presence in our lives.

Eucharist

In the traditions of the church, the sacrament of the Eucharist, known as ‘communion’, is the central sacrament of church unity.  From our secular perspective, it is perhaps the sacrament most germane to human evolution.  In it, we participate in a symbolic communal meal, in which we recognize that we are all part of a wider community.  As we saw in our posts beginning Oct 29, 2020, Seeing Jesus as the ‘Christ’ recognizes the human person as an eventual product of universal evolution, and as such each of us consists of a ‘branch’ of the axis along which this process of evolution proceeds.  From this perspective, all persons are not only ‘children of God’ (products of evolution) they are ultimately united by their share of the cosmic spark by which they come to be.  By participation in this ritual, we are reminded of this essential ground of unity, and of the necessity for cooperating with the energies of love by which we can be brought into a ‘greater possession of ourselves’ as we overcome our instinctual sense of separation from others.  In Teilhard’s words, the Eucharist is the most important of the sacraments because:

 “(The eucharist) ..is but the expression and manifestation of the divine unifying energy applying itself little by little to every spiritual atom of the universe.”

Matrimony

The church teaches that the sacrament of matrimony is necessary for the natural joining of human persons in the process of procreation and child rearing.  In our secular perspective, it reminds us that the road to the more complete possession of ourselves that we refer to as ‘maturity’ must be undertaken in the context of relationship.  In the joining of two persons, the play of ‘centration’ and ‘excentration’ is essential to our continued growth.  It is a reminder that we can only become who we can be by engaging in relationship: our growth is assured as much by our ability to give love as it is by our ability to receive it.  In Teilhard’s vision, love is much more a structural energy which unites us in such a way as to expand our ‘person-ness’ than an emotion which draws us to each other.

Penance

The church teaches that the sacrament of reconciliation (referred to as ‘confession’ or ‘penance’) is necessary to return our soul to a state of grace by erasing the stain placed on it by our sin and thus restoring our potential for salvation.  Our secular perspective recognizes that the many impediments we can build to our relationships reflect a failure to cooperate with grace, thus impeding our personal growth.  As can be seen from a casual glance at ‘self-help’ publications, alienation is a never ending threat, whether we find ourselves in search of internal reconnection, or in search of reconciliation to repair our relationships.  And, as in all the sacraments, this sacrament offers the church as a media for the internal reconciliation that is necessary to overcome these impediments.

Last Rites

The church teaches that the sacrament of the sick (also referred to as the “Last Rites’, or ‘Extreme Unction’) is sort of a ‘last chance’ for cleansing the soul before death, and therefore effecting our ‘salvation’.  However, it also recognizes material benefits, such as bearing up under pain, overcoming fear and even improving how we feel.  Our secular perspective calls attention to the fact that grace is present even in death.  As one theologian expressed it, “The sacrament of the sick means we do not have to die alone.”

Again, the church provides the presence of the community and recalls our common connection.

Holy Orders

The sacrament of “Holy Orders” is often referred to as the ‘sacrament of service’.  It recognizes the church’s basic role in providing the ‘tissue of the DNA of human evolution’.

As we have seen elsewhere, this aspect of the milieu of grace can be articulated in many other ways as well.  A prime example can be seen in our political systems which attempt to codify the practices by which the fabric of our society can be knotted in such a way which insures stability without eroding the personal freedom and innovation necessary to insure the increases in human welfare such as those outlined by Johan Norberg on February 13.

The Next Post

This week we moved from recognizing that the milieu of grace in which we live, the energy of evolution, can be articulated to locate those sparks of energy that are most relevant to our human growth, to some specific articulations expressed in the concept of ‘sacraments’.

As we have seen elsewhere, this milieu of grace can be articulated in many other ways as well, such as in our political practices which highlight the necessity to trust the basic goodness of the human person as reflected in our belief in ‘inalienable rights’ and ‘the will of the people’.

Next week we will look into the idea of ‘secular sacraments’ in more detail.

 

February 11, 2021 – Grace, Sacraments, and the DNA of Human Evolution

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  If Spirituality occurs naturally in Human Life, How it be Seen?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the energy of evolution can be seen as active in the milieu in which we live our human lives, ‘grace’.  We also saw how the concept of ‘sacrament’, reinterpreted into in our secular context, is simply identification of some of the ways that this energy can be encountered.  In Teilhard’s vernacular, they point to instantiations of ‘articulations of the noosphere.’

This week we will look a little more closely at the way that Teilhard viewed the ‘noosphere’, and how such articulation is necessary to light the path to the advance of evolution through our lives.

The Noosphere

As Teilhard sees it, the evolution of our planet can be seen as the appearance of ‘spheres’, layers of evolutionary products which have appeared in succession on our planet.   He sees these spheres as:

  • The ‘lithosphere’, the conglomeration of molecules which pack together under the influence of gravity, the same force by which our planetary disk precipitated out into distinct planets surrounding the Sun.
  • The ‘atmosphere’ which forms as the gas molecules separate from the solids
  • The ‘hydrosphere’ which forms as the atmosphere evolves into water and air
  • The ‘biosphere’ which emerges as some molecules become complex enough to form cells

These ‘spheres’ are well recognized by science, and their appearance in evolutionary history is well established.

To these fundamental spheres, Teilhard adds the ‘noosphere’, literally the ‘sphere of thought’.  He sees that with the appearance of the human, our planet acquires a new layer.  As humans emerge and begin to cover the planet, he sees it as obvious that the planet is in the process of assuming a new form.  Today’s controversies over such subjects as ecology and global warning are evidence of the emerging awareness of just how significant the noosphere has become.

The Articulation of the Noosphere

As we have seen, Teilhard sees evolution proceeding through the human as a continuation of the increase of complexity that can be observed to have occurred over the preceding fourteen or so billion years.  He also notes that in each phase of evolution, from the ‘physics’ phase, through the ‘biological’ phase, this complexity ‘changes state’ as it increases.  In his view, the energy which drives complexification itself becomes more complex.  The Standard Model of Physics is still evolving (note the emerging theories of Quantum Physics and ‘dark’ matter) and thus offers new paradigms by which complexification in this phase can be articulated.  The theory of Natural Selection is also still evolving as it struggles to address the phenomenon of the increasing complexity of living things.  However, when it comes to understanding, much less measuring, the process of how the continuation of the rise of complexity can be seen in the human person and his culture, it is much less clear.  As many thinkers have mused, making sense of ourselves while we are evolving is like traversing a bridge while we are still building it.

Teilhard notes that all religions attempt to identify ‘how we should be if we would be what we can be’.  With the strong infusion of myths, superstitions, dualities and cohesive values to the state that are inevitable over such long periods of development (arising in the prescientific world of thousands of years ago), we are left today with inconsistent and even contradictory guidelines for our continued development.  Science does not offer much help in this area.  Those expressions of belief that claim scientific foundations are simply attempts to derive meaning from empirical data, and offer little support for the faith needed to deal with the daily effort of human life.

But as Teilhard sees effective human life as learning to ‘set our sails to the winds of life’, the skills of reading the wind and tending the tiller are first necessary to be learned.   As he sees it:

“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?”

   It seems obvious that moving the human enterprise forward comes down to ‘trial and error’.  Seen thusly, this is simply ‘survival of the fittest’: those things that we learn which enhance our life are collected, refined through the development of our culture, and encoded into morals and laws.  Those which don’t atrophy over time as they become seen as less valuable.

As we have seen, Richard Dawkins offers yet another insight into the issue into human evolution.  Like Teilhard, he recognizes the difference between evolution in society and as understood as ‘Natural Selection’ by biology.  In his book, “The Selfish Gene’, he proposes that evolution continues through human society by way of ‘memes’, packets of cultural information that act as the cultural parallel to biological genes.  Such ‘memes’ are echoed in what Teilhard refers to as the ‘noosphere’, which is the body of human thoughts, ideas and inventions which accumulate in human lore, rituals, books, schools and networks over time, and is thus ‘spiritual’ in nature.

The quantum of insights and skills that we accumulate in our culture are, as Teilhard sees it, ‘articulations of the noosphere”.  They can be understood, as Dawkins suggests, as the ‘genetic material’ of human evolution, weaving their way into the thread of universal evolution as they prompt the rise of the human person.

By this criterion, sacraments can be understood as examples of behavior that are passed from generation to generation via the cultural ‘tissue’ of religion.  Effectively they are signs of the play of evolutive energy as it flows through human life: the ‘DNA of human evolution’.

Religion is not the only place that such noospheric articulations can be found.  As we saw in the post of December 31, 2020 on the secular basis of spirituality, a secular example of spirituality can be found in a fundamental axiom of our government.  It is at the basis of the idea of a ‘representative government’, and often described as the ‘will of the people’ so essential to democratic governments.  While not finding articulation per se in the new American constitution and bill of rights, Thomas Jefferson was very clear in his concept of the validity of this ‘consensus in government’ as an ‘articulation of the noosphere’:

“I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be other that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.  I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves.”

   This exercise of ‘trust of the people to govern themselves’ is a secular example of an ‘articulation of the noosphere’.  The ‘meme’ of human equality can be seen here as one which rises in the teachings of Jesus, evolves through such things as societal norms, then ‘charters’, and finally blossoms unequivocally in the laws which flow from the Constitution of the Unites States.  When we engage in such activity as the process of voting, we are implicitly connecting with one of the threads of evolution as it runs through human evolution.  This activity is effectively a ‘secular sacrament’ which, if we choose to see it, points to an underlying agency of the energy which moves us forward: ‘grace’

Grace

As we have seen, the coming to be of the universe involves an underlying energy by which things unite in such a way that results in increased complexity of the product of the uniting.  Or, as Teilhard puts it

“Fuller being from closer union and closer union from fuller being”

   We have also seen how this energy is just as essential to matter as matter is essential to it.  This is the core of Teilhard’s insight into applying the term ‘spirit’ to this agency which is the essential manifestation of this energy.  We also saw how science is beginning to address this elusive agent in its approach to ‘information’.

Traditionally, religion has addressed this agency in metaphorical terms, seeing it as a ‘flow’ of supernatural life in human affairs.  With Teilhard’s insistence that this flow is the natural manifestation of evolutionary energy in human life, he moves its focus from the emotional connection between humans to the ontological connections which effect their personal evolution.

From this perspective, the metaphor of ‘flow’ becomes stronger.  Teilhard uses it when he says

“Those who set their sails to the winds of life will always find themselves borne on a current to the open sea.”

   The term ‘grace’ is very common in Western religion, but it finds many diverse expressions in the many forms that Western religion takes.  From our secular perspective, grace can now be seen as the current into which we can insert ourselves if we are to be borne to fuller being.  Grace is simply the current manifestation of that same energy which has, for fourteen billion years, ‘raised the complexity of the universe to its current level’ (paraphrasing Dawkins).

But, as we have noted, it is very elusive indeed, as science has been yet unable to quantify it, and religion seems to require supernatural sources for it.  Teilhard insists that recognition of it is necessary for our continued evolution.  To ‘set our sails to the winds of life’ we must first learn to recognize the wind.

That’s where the idea of ‘sacrament’ comes in.

The Next Post

This week looked a little deeper into Teilhard’s insights; the evolving understanding of ‘how we should be if we would be what we can be’, which he refers to as ‘articulation of the noosphere’, and saw how such insights contribute to the continuation of the thread of evolution as it rises through the human.

We saw that such articulations are essentially the ‘cultural DNA’ of our evolution, but that their recognition is essential if we are to cooperate with them.

Next week we will move onto reinterpreting sacraments in the light of this secular perspective.

February 4, 2021 – Spirituality, Grace and the Sacraments

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If spirituality is everywhere, how can we see it?

Today’s Post

In the last two weeks, we have taken a look at the Christian idea of ‘spirituality’ in the light of our ‘Secular Side of God’.   We saw how from Teilhard’s secular mode of reinterpretation, ‘spirit’ is neither supernatural nor ‘other-worldly’, but simply a word for the energy that propels evolution in the direction of increasing complexity.  Or, as Paul Davies reimagines it, it is the ‘software’ embedded in the ‘hardware’ of matter.  We saw how Teilhard sees ‘spirit’ as neither an ‘epi’ nor a ‘meta’ phenomenon, but instead the critical phenomenon in the evolution of the universe.  Although, as Richard Dawkins acknowledges, science has not yet addressed it per se, the religious term for the energy “which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence”, is ‘spirit’.

This week we will move on to some consequences of understanding that spirituality not only underlies the evolutionary process by which the universe becomes more complex, it is the milieu in which we live.

The History of Grace

Grace is one of the basic concepts of Christianity, which traditionally understands the ‘love of God’ as a tangible thing by which God interacts across the divide between supernatural divine life and natural human life.

As we will see, the Christian teachings on this interaction with God can be reinterpreted to have much in common with our secular understanding of spirituality.  Not that the traditional dualisms of supernaturalism and otherworldliness are absent in these teachings, but the idea that grace makes up the milieu in which we live is pervasive in both of them.

The teaching on grace, however, can also be seen to be tarnished by the gradual drift of Christianity towards a hierarchy which effects a social stability by requiring a system of beliefs necessary to secure successful promotion into heaven.  This can be seen in the Baltimore Catechism’s description of grace as a

“Supernatural gift of God bestowed on us through the merits of Jesus Christ for our salvation.”

   It goes on to say,

“The principal ways of obtaining grace are prayer and the sacraments.”

   In this teaching, grace is less a milieu in which we exist than a gift, not gratuitously given by God but ‘earned’ by Jesus and mediated by the church.

(This structural connection between Jesus and Grace raises yet a new dualism: grace must have been absent in ancient history, lying dormant until Jesus arrived.  With the absence of grace, salvation must have been also absent, dooming all pre-Christians to damnation and supporting prejudice against Jews to this day.)

Grace, to legacy Christianity, is a ‘gift’ necessary for our ‘salvation’ which must be ‘obtained’ by asking for it (prayer) and participation in church-provided rituals (sacraments).   To a large extent, it is seen as a commodity to be obtained from the church.  Luther certainly understood it this way.

Sacraments, as defined in the Baltimore Catechism, are

“outward signs, instituted by Christ, to give grace”.

   They are only available if conferred (dispensed) by church officials.  In this teaching, the sacraments only ‘work’ (only dispense grace) if they are performed by the correct rank of church hierarchy (eg ‘Confirmation’ by bishop) and according to the established ritual (eg ‘Baptism’ by water).

The excesses of the medieval church which led to Luther’s reformation are well documented, but one of the more egregious practices that Luther attacked was the ‘selling’ of sacraments.  To the church of this era, grace had become a hierarchy-controlled commodity without which salvation could not be accomplished but from which the church could profit.

So, What is Grace, and Where Do The Sacraments Come In?

As we saw last week, spirituality is fundamental to the process of evolution, from the ‘big bang’ to (so far) the human.  From our secular perspective, grace is simply the quantification of this energy as it is active in human evolution.  Paraphrasing Richard Dawkins, we can say,

“There must be an energy of evolution, and we might as well give it the name Spirit, but Spirit is not an appropriate name unless we very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word ‘Spirit’ carries in the minds of most religious believers. The energy that we seek must be that which was active in eventually raising the world as we know it into its present complex existence”.

Just as we saw in our discussion of God, the sap of complexity rises through every branch which emanates from the ‘axis of evolution’.  The specific branch that rises though each human is fed by this sap of evolution and it is manifest in its potential in our lives.

The long legacy of dualism that has risen in Christianity came to understand sacraments as a means by which the spiritual energy of God could be managed for delivery across the wide gulf between the supernatural and the natural, and that this aperture was opened by ‘the merits of Christ’ and therefore contributes to ‘our salvation’.

Setting aside the issue of ‘salvation’ for now, we can see how our secular approach to the concept of the energy of evolution, and our understanding of God as ‘supremely’ natural (as opposed to ‘super’ natural) permits the idea of the sacrament to be seen in a secular context.  While we may well be immersed in this milieu of grace, the very nature of its intangibility calls for reminders, ‘signposts’ of its activity in our lives.  Therefore sacraments can be reinterpreted from our secular perspective into religion’s attempt to erect these signposts.  They are, in Teilhard’s words, examples of “articulation of the noosphere’.

The Sacraments and Evolution

As we have frequently suggested, the continuation of evolution through the human species can be understood as the skill of using our unique human neocortex brains to modulate the instinctual stimuli of the ‘lower’ limbic and reptilian brains.  In the post of February 2, 2017, as well as several others, we saw this skill requiring two actions.  The first action was to recognize the axis of evolution as it rises in us, and the second was to learn how to cooperate with it.  In religious terms, this is “finding and cooperating with God”.

In the posts which addressed ‘finding God’, we addressed the concept of meditation as a process for finding God as understood by Teilhard, and how it has been carried through to the current day by psychology.  In these posts we saw how the idea of ‘finding God’ happens in the quest to find ourselves.

The second step is less obvious, and less treated by psychology.  To ‘cooperate’ with this manifestation of the ground of being in our lives, it is necessary to see how the energy of evolution is specifically manifest in our life so that we can learn how to cooperate with it and enhance its effects in us.  Effectively, to cooperate with the energy of evolution, we need to learn to recognize how the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ occur in our lives.

This is where the sacraments come in.

The Next Post

This week we saw grace as the manifestation of the ‘energy of evolution’ as it flows through our lives, and addressed the idea of ‘sacrament’ as articulation of how the action of grace can be seen if we know how to look.  Next week we will look at the sacraments in more detail to better understand how the seven traditional sacraments can be seen as pointers to the action of grace in our personal evolution.

January 28, 2021 – Spirituality and Evolution

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      How can the phenomenon of spirituality be seen in evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we introduced the concept of spirituality as a natural phenomenon, and saw how it can be understood as underpinning the continuation of human evolution as seen in the development of human ideas.  This week we will broaden our look to see the essential part played by spirituality in universal evolution.

The Spiritual Basis of Evolution

We have seen in our secular perspective of God how the principle metric of evolution can be seen as the increase in complexity over time, and how this increasing complexity has yet to be quantified by science but yet is critical to science’s understanding of how the universe unfolds.  As John Haught puts it

“The obvious fact of emergence- the arrival of unpredictable new organizational principles and patterns in nature- continues to elude human inquiry as long as it follows … naturalism in reducing what is later-and-more in the cosmic process to what is earlier-and-simpler.   A materialist reading of nature leads our minds back down the corridor of cosmic time to a state of original subatomic dispersal- that is to a condition of physical de-coherence.”

  We have also seen how the emergence of complexity in universal evolution underpins the principle by which “later-and-more” entities can emerge from those which are “earlier and simpler”.  Teilhard sees an energy at work by which this happens at every rung of evolution.  At the rung of fundamental particles, it can be seen in the effecting of electrons from bosons, then the effecting of atoms from electrons, and the effecting of molecules from atoms.  At the rung of the human person, it is the energy which unites us in such a way that we become more complete.  Teilhard recognizes that at the human level this energy manifests itself as ‘love’.

   Thus, as Teilhard see it, the essential process at work in the universe can be seen in every stage of its emergence as

 “Closer union from fuller being, and fuller being from closer union”

   It is at work, therefore, as we look backward in time at all previous steps of evolution.  While science does not yet have a term for this energy, the religious term is ‘spirit’.

As Teilhard points out, in the collection of his thoughts, “Human Energy”, therefore, the roots of this essential ‘complexifying’ energy of evolution are deeply embedded in the ‘axis of evolution’.

“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 neither super-imposed nor accessory to the cosmos, but that 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.”

   As Teilhard sees it, this ‘secular’ approach to spirituality overcomes yet another dualism that is common to religion: spirit vs matter.

“Spirit and matter are (only) contradictory if isolated and symbolized in the form of abstract, fixed notions of pure plurality and pure simplicity, which can in any case never be realized.  (In reality) one is inseparable from the other; one is never without the other; and this for the good reason that one appears essentially as a sequel to the synthesis of the other.  The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals (itself in) a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self-conscious.”

   Teilhard is making an essential point about spirit and matter, the ‘stuff of the universe,’ here.  He sees matter evolving to higher levels of complexity (‘synthesizing’) under the influence of the energy of complexification (‘spirit’), and the increased complexity which results from such synthesis is therefore capable of more complex interaction.  This increased material level of complexity is a manifestation of an increased level of spirit.  To Teilhard, spirit is “nothing more; and also nothing less” than the energy of evolution.

Universal Spirituality and Dualism

He goes on to elaborate how the ‘spirit/matter’ dualism so endemic in religion is resolved by the realization that instead of spirit and matter in opposition to each other, they are simply co-operative aspects of the ‘stuff of the universe’ as it emerges and continues to evolve to levels of greater complexity:

“The problem of the world, for our minds, is the association it presents of two opposed elements (spirit and matter) in a series of linked combinations covering the expanse between thought and unconsciousness.  Now if consciousness is taken to be a meta-phenomenon, this dualism in motion is simply and verbally noted, without any attempt or even any possibility of interpretation.  If this dualism is pushed aside as an epi-phenomenon, it is conjured out of sight.  But it is simply and harmoniously resolved, on the other hand, in a world in which consciousness and its appearance are regarded as the phenomenon.  Everything then takes its natural place in a universe in process of changing its spiritual state…And hominization (the appearance of the human) merely marks a decisive and critical point in the gradual development of this change.”

   In Teilhard’s perspective, therefore, the basic process of universal evolution can now be seen as a process of matter “changing its spiritual state’.  ‘Spirit’ can now be seen as that which underlies the very axis of evolution, finally becoming fully recognizable in the human person and his society.

Science and The Agency of Spirituality

If spirituality is indeed an agency by which matter becomes more complex over time, it should be capable of being addressed empirically by science.  Richard Dawkins suggests that it will ultimately be found to consist of a simple process, a “’bootstrapping crane’ which raises the complexity of matter over time”.

As we saw in our look into ‘spirit’ as the ‘third person’ of the Trinity, Paul Davies notes that a new branch of science, ‘Information Theory’ posits a ‘quantum of information’ in each grain of matter which directs it toward connections with other grains which result in products whose characteristics are more complex than the original components.  He sees such activities in the capability of the complex molecule, DNA, to direct the production of the cell’s energy source, ‘proteins’ by RNA molecules.  In this action, the ‘blueprint’ of DNA amounts to a ‘software’ which guides the RNA’s enrichment of the ’hardware’ of the cell.

Teilhard simply extrapolates this process backward to the subatomic processes described in the Standard Model of physics and forward to the cellular complexification charted by the biological theory of Natural Selection, thence to the commonly observed interactions among human persons which stimulate both their personal growth and the development of their societies.

The Next Post

This week we took a look at the concept of spirituality from Teilhard’s secular perspective, and saw how spirituality is a phenomenon essential to the process of evolution as it lifts the universe to ‘its current level of complexity’.

Next week we will continue our exploration of Christian concepts by applying this perspective to the Christian concept of ‘grace’.

January 21, 2021 –The Concept of Spirituality

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         How can the concept of spirituality be understood empirically?

Today’s Post

Over the last several weeks we have taken our second approach to religion, looking at the fundamental Western concepts of God, Jesus and the Trinity from our secular viewpoint.  Starting this week we will begin to apply this same secular approach to the many beliefs and practices which make up the complex but often confusing tapestry of Western religion as found in Christianity, beginning with the concept of ‘spirituality’.

What is Spirituality?

Along with many of the premises of religion, spirituality is a difficult concept to grasp with the empirical tools of science.  At the same time the reality of spirituality can be seen to underlie human life in a universal way.  As John Haught addresses it

“Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ has been part of the universe from the start. So hidden is this interior side of the cosmos from public examination that scientists and philosophers with materialist leanings usually claim it has no real existence.”

   Thus Haught offers us a very rudimentary but nonetheless secular first approach to ‘the spirit, as the ‘interior side of the cosmos’.  How can his insight play out in the teachings of Religion?

One of the most fundamental dualities found in traditional religion divides reality into ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’.  From this perspective, spirituality exists at the level of the ‘supernatural’, above nature, and while this layer of reality can impinge upon the ‘natural’ world in which we live, it is nonetheless separate and unobtainable ‘in this life’ (another duality).

In following Teilhard in our secular approach, all of reality is understood as a single, unified evolving thing.  While there are indeed layers, such as Teilhard’s ‘spheres’ of complexity which unfold over time, at its basis Teilhard sees the universe as united in its basic principles, such as those articulated in the Standard Model of physics.  These principles are assumed by science to apply everywhere in the universe, in all phases of its evolution.  With Teilhard’s addition of the principle of increasing complexity over time (assumed by science but poorly addressed, as Haught points out above), these principles unite the three major stages of evolution (pre-life, life, life conscious of itself) and thereby account for everything that we can see.

Instead of them being understood as ‘super natural’ (above nature), in Teilhard’s perspective these principles become ‘supra natural’ (supremely natural).

If we define ‘spirituality’ as simply ‘supra-material’, we can begin to see spirituality as simply a milieu which surrounds us.  We live our lives enmeshed in intangible but very real fields of such spirituality.  These are reflected in our laws, the principles of behavior that shape our cultures, our financial systems and the everyday facets of relationships that inform our lives.  As we have proposed many times, the many historical theological concepts boil down to attempts to ‘articulate the noosphere’, to make sense of things.  At their root they are nothing more than attempts to articulate these principles so that we can understand and cooperate with them to make the most of our lives.

A secular example of such spirituality can be found in a fundamental axiom of our government.  It can be seen at the basis of the idea of a ‘representative government’, and often described as the ‘will of the people’ so essential to democratic governments.  While not finding articulation per se in the new American constitution and Bill of Rights, Thomas Jefferson was very clear in his concept of the validity of this ‘consensus in government’:

“I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be other that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.  I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves.”

   Jefferson expresses a very revolutionary concept of the human person and his society with these views.  Hints of them can be found in earlier attempts to articulate how governance should be undertaken, such as in the Magna Carta, but none expressed as unambiguously as Jefferson’s.  At the time, the precedent for government was clearly to trust only in the provenance of royalty in the belief that if government were left to ‘the masses’, so the prevailing opinion said, chaos would result.  The belief that a consensus resulting from ‘the masses’ could result in setting the course of the ship of state in a positive direction was indeed very unprecedented.

This ‘will of the people’ is essential to our democratic form of government, but intangible and difficult to quantify.   Believing it to the extent that it is established as the basis for government has nonetheless resulted in a form of government that can be clearly seen to be more productive of human welfare than previous forms.

The Evolution of Spirituality

Seeing how such spirituality can be understood as underpinning our very concept of government, we can apply this perspective rearward in time to see the evolution of an idea without material substance:

–  the intuition that “we were made in the image of God” expressed around campfires over three thousand years ago

–  which evolved into ‘prophets’ with their intuition of ‘rights’ and  ‘justice’ against the wrongdoing of the establishment

– to one that recognized love as the energy of unity which effects the uniqueness of the person

– to the adoption of this principle as a way of insuring the cohesiveness of a highly diverse empire

– rising through the many ‘charters’ (contracts between rulers and ruled) of Western medieval and Renaissance society

– to an expression that “all men are created with inalienable rights”, ones not granted by birth, wealth, education, or good fortune, and established as a cornerstone of the constitution of the most powerful nation on earth.

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at the concept of spirituality from our secular perspective, and saw how spirituality can be seen to play a part in the evolution of human ideals and their incorporation into the processes of governance.

Next week we will take a look at the part that spirituality plays in evolution itself.

January 14, 2021 – The Secular Side of The Trinity

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Understanding the ground of being from three perspectives

Today’s Post

Last week we summarized the history of the last facet of the complex God that emerged in just a few hundred years after the death of Jesus: the ‘Trinity’.  We also noted how this concept emerged at the same time that the new church began to become part of Roman society and how it began to evolve into a hierarchical institution which became increasingly dependent on adherence to dogma.  As its teachings became more articulated, truth became more ‘an object of faith’ required to assure salvation than a collection of insights for living.  It didn’t help that the new church was now becoming an essential part of the Roman structure which in turn required a new level of adherence to dogma to insure a unified and therefore stable society.

Yet, as we saw from Karen Armstrong’s observation, the teaching of ‘Trinity’ was “simply baffling”, and from Richard Rohr that this teaching seems “furthest from human life”.

With all this, what secular sense can be of an assertion that God is “Three divine persons in one divine nature”?

The Secular Side of the Trinity

From our secular viewpoint, once the Trinity is put into Teilhard’s evolutionary context it becomes possible to see it as not only much simpler but more importantly, more relevant to human life.  From Teilhard’s perspective we have seen how God can be reinterpreted from a supernatural being which is the ‘over and against of man’ who creates, rewards and punishes; to the ‘ground of being’, the basis for the universe’s potential for evolution by way of its increase in complexity over time.  In applying this perspective to Jesus, we saw how he can be reinterpreted from a sacrifice necessary to satisfy such a distant judgmental God, to the personification of this increase in complexity as it rises through the human person: a ‘signpost to God’.  In the same way we can see a third manifestation of this ‘axis of evolution’, the ‘Spirit’, in the energy which unites the products of evolution in such a way as to effect this increase in complexity.

More specifically, we can begin to see how this ‘triune God’ can be seen to be ‘personal’.   The synthesized collaboration of these three principles of evolution effects what we know as the product of evolution that we refer to as ‘the person’.

Christianity puts names to these three aspects of the ground of being:

  • ‘Father’ as the underlying principle of the becoming of the universe in general, understood as the potential of the ’stuff of the universe’ to ‘make it make itself’
  • ‘Son’ as the manifestation of the potential for the products of evolution to eventually become ‘personal’; a potential which is active in every step of evolution in which increasing complexity emerges
  • ‘Spirit’ as the ‘energy’ by which particles of matter unite in such a way as to result in increases in complexity

As we have noted frequently, Teilhard describes this third ‘person’, this third manifestation of the ground of being as it exists in the human, as love:

“Love is the only energy capable of uniting entities in such a way that they become more distinct.”

   And, as he sees it, the essential function of the rise of complexity in the convergent spiral of cosmic evolution:

“Fuller being results from closer union and closer union from fuller being”

   In addressing this last agent of becoming, we can now see more clearly how John’s astounding statement begins to make secular sense:

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

  Thus, Teilhard locates the ’Spirit’ squarely in the axis of evolution, as the manifestation of the energy which powers evolution through its rising levels of complexity.  We have seen in Science’s ‘Standard Model’ how the energies which are manifest in forces such as the atomic strong and weak forces, electricity and magnetism, gravity and chemistry all collaborate in raising the universe from the level of pure energy at the ‘Big Bang’ to that of matter sufficiently complex to provide the building blocks of life.  With the concept of the ‘Spirit’ we can now see how this enterprise continues to raise reality into manifestations of complexity which are aware of their consciousness.

A purely secular approach to ‘spirit’ can be seen in the new scientific subject of ‘information’.  To Paul Davies, information is simply the quanta in each particle of matter which guides its unification with other particles.  His analogy is that this ‘quanta’ can be seen as the ‘software’ contained in each grain of matter, the ’hardware’.

An example of this dyadic action can be seen in the potential of Hydrogen to unite with Oxygen to form the molecule of water.  The ‘information’ of the Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms is not simply passed on to the new offspring, water, it itself is enriched by becoming more complex in the process.  The evolved quanta of information contained in the molecule of water has a new and enriched potential of unifying with many other molecules, and the resultant molecules also have new characteristics and potentials not found in their less complex components.  Thus, the three ‘triune’ aspects of evolution are evident in this simple example:

  • A component of matter has the potential to unite with other components (quantified by its ‘information or ‘software’’)
  • The process required to perform the connection is mapped in the ‘information’
  • The resultant new component (with new characteristics and potentials absent in its predecessor components) emerges with its new and more complex quanta of ‘information’

In this very simple but purely secular example we can see a reflection of the Trinity:

  • The ‘Son’ is reflected in the ‘information’, effectively the ‘software’ of the component
  • The ‘Spirit’ is reflected in the ‘energy’ necessary to effect unification according to the ‘information’
  • And the ‘Father’ is reflected as the ‘potential’ of the components to unite

In addition to how the Trinity can be seen in these examples, we can also return to Teilhard’s image of the ‘convergent spiral’ of cosmic evolution.   As we saw when we looked at Teilhard’s model of the structure of universal evolution, the three aspects of the Trinity can be understood as the human manifestations of the three basic steps by which the universe proceeds at all stages in its journey toward increased complexity.

We can also see how this energy continues to manifest itself in raising the complexity of living matter through the process of Natural Selection.  Natural Selection, first identified by Charles Darwin, offers a partial explanation of how species advance from one stage of evolution to another.  It does not address how the products of evolution at latter stages show evidence of increased complexity, but it does explain how the ramification of species offers many avenues of for ‘complexification’.

Human persons are clearly located on one of these avenues of evolution.  Understanding the ‘Spirit’ at the level of the human person is simply understanding how evolutionary products aware of their consciousness (human persons) can consciously cooperate with this energy to be united in such a way as to advance their individual complexity (their maturity) and therefore continue to advance the complexity of their species.

Last week we noted that Richard Rohr decried how the increasing hierarchy and dogmatism of the Christian church increased the distance between man and God by decreasing the relevance of its essential message.  From our secular perspective, we can now see how it is possible to understand the Trinity in terms now seen as relevant to personal life.  Rohr offers a reinterpretation of the traditional Christian trinitarian terms as an integrated understanding of the Trinity which is directly relevant to human life:

“I believe that faith might be precisely that ability to trust the Big River of God’s providential love, which is to trust the visible embodiment (the Son), the flow (the Spirit), and the source itself (the Father). This is a divine process that we don’t have to change, coerce, or improve. We just need to allow it and enjoy it.  Faith does not need to push the river precisely because it is able to trust that there is a river.”

The Next Post

This week we saw that how adding the concept of ‘Spirit’ to those of the ‘Father’ and the ‘Son’ completes an understanding of the ‘the ground of being’, the basis of the universe’s ‘coming to be’ in general.  More importantly, we saw how we can begin to understand how this agent of evolution which has “raised the world to its current level of complexity” (Richard Dawkins) is active in our individual lives, as we begin to understand ourselves as personal offspring of the ‘axis of evolution’.

Over the past several weeks, we have addressed the three fundamental beliefs of Christianity: God, Jesus and The Trinity, from our secular perspective, showing how ‘reinterpretation’ can empirically refocus their relevance to human life.

Christianity, however, piles many layers of belief and practices on top of these three precepts.  In order to, as Richard Dawkins suggests, ‘divest them of the baggage’ that they carry, is it possible to use our principles of reinterpretation to achieve a similar refocus?

Next week we will begin to do this, first addressing the underlying concept of ‘spirituality’, and how it can be seen in the light of our secular inquiry.

January 7, 2021 – The Cryptic Concept of the ‘Trinity’

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 What can ‘three persons in one God’ mean?

 Today’s Post

Last week we took a final look at Jesus from our secular perspective, noting how quickly the highly integrated understanding of John became a victim of the endless human trend toward dualism.  From our secular perspective, we saw how John’s vision strengthened the immediacy (immanence) of God in human life and how Teilhard sees Jesus as the ‘signpost’ for this spark of universal becoming.  From Teilhard’s insight, this spark, found in all the products of evolution, is only capable of being recognized as such by the human person.  In our final look last week, we saw how easily the labyrinthine statements emerging from the pronouncements of theologians can be ‘reinterpreted’ into statements about the human person, and by doing so increase their relevance to human life.

The evolution of the concept of Jesus and ‘the Christ’, did not end with the pronouncements of the Council of Nicaea, but set the stage for a following inquiry into the ‘nature’ of God.  This week we’ll take a look at this third stage of the theological evolution of the concept of God: the Trinity.

The History of the Trinity

As Bart Ehrman notes in his book, “How Jesus Became God”, unlike God, Jesus and ‘the Christ’, the Trinity isn’t addressed as such in any of the books of the Old or New Testament.  The idea of God as the supreme supernatural creator somehow intertwined in human life is a common thread of the Jewish scriptures (the ‘Old Testament’).   As we have seen, the understanding of Jesus and ‘the Christ’ evolves over time in the New Testament into the early days of the new Christian church, but the concept of a third ‘person’ wasn’t developed until late in the first three hundred years of its existence.

Richard Rohr relates the history of the idea of ‘the Trinity” as it began in the Eastern Church and later moved to the West:

“The Cappadocian Fathers of the fourth century first developed this theology, though they readily admitted the Trinity is a wonderful mystery that can never fully be understood with the rational mind, but can only be known through love, prayer, and suffering. This view of Trinity invites us to interactively experience God as transpersonal (“Father”), personal (“Christ”), and even impersonal (“Holy Spirit”)—all at once.”

   The idea of something (or someone) involved in the formation of the universe, and in how this process is reflected in human life, shows up even in the Old Testament.  It is strongly suggested by Jesus, for example, in his statement to the apostles that a ‘Spirit’ (an ‘advocate’) would be sent after he was gone.

It wasn’t until the early days of the church’s theological development that this agent began to be considered ‘God’ in somehow the same way that the relationship between Jesus and ‘the Christ’ was being considered.

In a nutshell, the new church began to consider God as being ‘triune’, somehow composed of three separate but unified ‘persons’ whose agency in reality was reflected in three separate facets.  The most commonly used terms ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Spirit’ are of little use in making sense of this complex concept.  Thus in the same way that the church required belief without understanding (as we saw in the final determination of Nicaea that Jesus was both God and Man) as an ‘act of faith’ necessary for salvation, it was soon to follow with the statement that God was also ‘three divine persons in one divine nature’.

And, in the same way that the controversy over the nature of Jesus was debated up until the Nicaean council, that of the Trinity continued to be debated.  As the Arian controversy over the ‘nature’ of Jesus began to dissipate following the Nicaean council, the debate moved from the deity of Jesus to the ‘equality’ of the ‘Spirit’ with the ‘Father’ and ‘Son’.  A key facet of this controversy lay in the lack of scriptural clarification of the ‘Spirit’ as a person of God in the same way as was the ‘Son’.  On one hand, some believers declared that the Spirit was an inferior person to the Father and Son, emerging as a result of the ‘love between the Father and the Son’.  On the other hand, the Cappadocian Fathers argued that the Spirit was a third person fully equal to the Father and Son.

This controversy was brought to a head at the Council of Constantinople (381) which affirmed that the Spirit was of the same substance and nature of God, but like Jesus, a separate person. Gregory of Nazianzus, who presided over this council offered this erudite but ultimately vacuous explanation:

“No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendor of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Three than I am carried back into the One. When I think of any of the Three, I think of him as the whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking escapes me”.

  As Karen Armstrong concludes in her book, “A History of God”,

“For many Western Christians . . . the Trinity is simply baffling”.

   Richard Rohr agrees with Armstrong that of all the Christian statements of belief, that of the Trinity can seem furthest from human life and thus can tend to reduce the relevance of Christian teaching to human life.  The church didn’t make it easier with Nazianzus’ cryptic statement, or by declaring such statements to be ‘objects of faith’ which must be believed without understanding even though such belief was a prerequisite for salvation.  But as we saw last week, faith is much more than adherence to precepts, it is an essential aspect of human existence.

So, what secular sense can be made of this strange teaching?

The Next Post

This week we saw how the new Christian church expanded its concept of God from the Jewish ‘Father’ to a complex triune but difficult to grasp concept.

Next week we will consider this concept of a ‘triune’ God from the perspective of our search for ‘The Secular Side of God’.

December 31, 2020 – Jesus: The Rest Of The Story

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 Reinterpreting the Theological Language of Jesus

Today’s Post

Last week we took a sixth look at aspects of Christianity’s traditional treatment of Jesus and ‘the Christ’, noting how our principles of interpretation permit a secular insight into religious concepts such as the relation between the two.  We have also seen how such reinterpretation can not only increase the relevance of ancient beliefs to human life but also decrease their distance from the findings of science.

This week we will take a last look at Jesus, focusing on the theological concepts that evolved along with the concept of Jesus and ‘the Christ’ in the many years of Western theological development, and explore their ‘secular’ content.

The ‘Incarnation’

In our look at Jesus from the perspective of the New Testament, we saw how the subject of Jesus evolved in a few short years from a holy man preaching about preparation for the immanent end times, to the human manifestation of an agency by which the universe can be seen to unfold.  In John’s vernacular, Jesus was ‘the word made flesh’, introducing a concept of this universal agency by which it finds human expression in the person of Jesus.

The traditional Christian approach to the appearance of Jesus in human history saw him as ‘the Son of God’, suggesting a unique manifestation of divinity among the human species.  But if we understand Jesus from Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ as the ‘fruit’ of universal evolutionary growth, the sap of which is the rising of complexity (‘the Christ’), then Jesus is simply one of such flowerings.  From this perspective, this ‘sap’ makes itself known in all humans who rise above their circumstances to see things in a more integrated, and hence more efficacious way.  Confucius is a good example, with his insights into human unity and behavior which unites us in such a way that we mature.  Thomas Jefferson is another such example when he asserts the existence of a common wisdom in a human society which is capable of self-government.

Teilhard carries this insight one step further.  He painstakingly documents the rise of complexity in universal history in his book, “The Phenomenon of Man”, calling attention to its many ‘changing of states’ of complexity.  Such changes illustrate how if complexity is to rise in the universe it must always find new and more complex ways of doing so.  These changes of state can be seen in such phenomena as the arrival of matter from pure energy, the emergence of ‘matter which makes itself’ in the form of complex molecules such as DNA, the appearance of the cell, then neurons, then brains then consciousness.  The final (to date) change of state can be seen in the new ability of conscious products of evolution to be aware of their consciousness.

Each change of state is indeed an ‘incarnation’, a flowering of capacity and capability resulting from the rise of complexity from their predecessor states.  As we have seen, Jesus is the manifestation of this rise which has most effected the continuation of evolution through the human species.

Jesus, as the manifestation of this agency of increasing complexity, ‘the Christ’, also shows us how matter and spirit (as understood by Teilhard as the two essential properties of ‘the stuff of the universe’ and by Paul Davies as the ‘hardware and software’ of matter) are more clearly understood as being combined in the human.  As Richard Rohr puts it

“Incarnation literally means enfleshment, yet most of Christian history has, in fact, been excarnational–in flight from matter, embodiment, physicality, and this world. This avoidance of enfleshment is much more Platonic than Christian. Incarnation means that the spiritual nature of reality (the immaterial, the formless, the invisible) and the material (the physical, the forms, that which we can see and touch) are, in fact, one and the same!”

Redemption and Salvation

A critical area for reinterpretation of religion is the understanding of ‘redemption’ as essential to ‘salvation’.  In the development of Christianity through medieval history, the structure of heaven was seen as an ideal of human structure: hierarchal, static, orderly and predictable.  God was recognized as the underlying creator and ultimate regent, all powerful and all knowing, humanlike and judgmental.  Even after the assertions of John, the association of the idea of ‘love’ with God was diminished with the increased understanding of ‘him’ as supernatural and remote.  The idea of salvation became based more on escaping from our natural milieu to living in a supernatural one which was more suitable to our longings.

With this perspective, religion was seen, as Richard Rohr phrases it, as a “high premium fire insurance for the afterlife”.  In this mindset, most liturgical prayers were less “a lifting of the mind and heart to God”, as the Baltimore Catechism puts it, and more focused on how to get to heaven or how to get what we want in this life.

Again, from Rohr

“If it is true that lex orandi est lex credendi, “the way you pray is the way you believe,” then it is no wonder Christians have such a poor record of caring for the suffering of the world and for the planet itself, and the Church has fully participated in so many wars and injustices. We have been allowed to pray in a rather self-centered way, and that fouled the Christian agenda, in my opinion.”

  Thus, as goes the traditional approach, if we are going to be ‘saved’ we must first be ‘redeemed’ from sin.  The traditional church teaching has been that, therefore, salvation is denied to those who die ‘in the state of sin’.  This belief can be seen in the flocking of congregations to church seeking the sacrament of ‘Confession’ when rumors of the ‘end of the world’ have been announced.  Going one step further, church teaching has included the belief that not only sinners, but all humanity, is at birth denied salvation due to the ‘sin of Adam’, better known as ‘original sin’.  As we saw three weeks ago, this view crept in during the controversy over the humanity/divinity arguments of Jesus which required the Council of Nicaea for resolution.  Although the final resolution decided that Jesus was both, the rationale for the resolution required Jesus to die to ‘atone’ for Adam’s sin and thus open the door to salvation closed by God due to the failure of his creation.

But if Jesus was to be the ‘door’ to salvation, the process itself was still open for debate.  Thus the teaching that for humans to benefit from Jesus’s sacrifice, to be ‘saved’, the elaborate Church teachings required Baptism to open the door for babies, and Confession to reopen the door closed by sin.  This in turn led to many dualisms, such as the beliefs that there was no salvation outside the Church, and that dead unbaptized babies were not saved.

The recognition introduced by John that God is active in each one of us sheds new light on the idea of ‘sin’.  In it, sin can now be seen as a refusal to acknowledge and cooperate with this spark, and the whole of religion therefore seen as attempt to articulate how this spark can be seen and what human actions will enlarge this perception.  This is not a modern concept, as it can be seen clearly in the sayings of Jesus and the writings of Paul and John.

Reflecting Teilhard, Richard Rohr offers his insight:

“I am convinced that the reason Christians have misunderstood many of Jesus’ teachings is because we did not understand his pedagogy. Jesus’ way of education was intended to situate his followers to a larger life, which he called his “Father,” or what we might call today God, the Real, or Life. When we could not make clear dogma or moral codes out of Jesus’ teaching, many Christians simply abandoned it in any meaningful sense. For this reason, the Sermon on the Mount—the essence of Jesus’ teaching—seems to be the least quoted by Christians. We sought a prize of later salvation, instead of the freedom of present simplicity.

   Going to heaven is not the goal of religion. Salvation isn’t an evacuation plan or a reward for the next world. Whenever we live in conscious, loving union with God, which is eventually to love everything, we are saved.

   Salvation is not a magical transaction accomplished by moral behavior or joining the right group. The only salvation worthy of the name is a gradual realization of who we are already in this world—and always have been—and will be eternally.”

   Thus the facets of incarnation, redemption and salvation can be seen as active in the human journey of human life from birth to death.  Life is ‘incarnated’ in human birth, gratuitously implanted in each human person as the potential for greater ‘possession of self’, then not only ‘redeemed’ from the failures that befall in this search for fullness, but moved forward, ‘saved’ in the success which occurs as such fullness is seen to unfold.  These three steps are recursive, as the wisdom that can emerge from the failures of experience fosters the confidence that new experience will lead to fuller being.

But they are not unique to human evolution.  As we saw when we looked at the structure of universal evolution, they are human manifestations of the three basic steps by which the universe proceeds in its journey toward increased complexity.  The religious term, ‘incarnation’ references the evolutionary aspect by which matter comes into being with the potential to grow, ‘Redemption’ to the reaction to this potential by which increased complexity is accomplished, and ‘Salvation’ to the increased potential for growth which results from the increase in complexity.  Religion simply glimpses these underlying currents in human life, and ‘intuits’ how they are active long before science can begin to address them.

And this completes the picture of Jesus as the human manifestation of this energy of complexification.  As our principles of reinterpretation can be brought into play, as seen in the last several posts, the subject of Jesus indeed can be seen as a ‘signpost to the future’.

The Next Post

Next week we will move to yet another historically new perception of God, one that is to be found in the concept of ‘the Trinity’.  We have seen how the subject of Jesus can be reinterpreted into a signpost to a human future filled with the potential of ‘fuller being’.  We will see now the concept of ‘the Trinity’ effects a synthesis of our reinterpreted Jesus with the other two Christian concepts of the three facets of ‘the ground of being.’