How does seeing love through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help us to see it as an aspect of evolutional energy?

Today’s Post

Last week we moved from seeing love as depicted in popular culture (as well as traditional religion) as emotionally based, to seeing it through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ as ontologically based.  To Teilhard, love is much more than an emotional stimulus to procreation, the stability of society, or an act that qualifies us for the next life.  To him, Love was nothing more (and as he would add, “nothing less”) than the current manifestation of the universal energy of evolution as it rises in the human person.   Without denying the significance of love as an ‘act’, Teilhard asserts that it must be understood as an ‘energy’ with which we can cooperate to increase our wholeness, and recognizes it in the context of the wellspring of cosmic evolution.

This week we will move on to address how such an energy can be seen to work among humans to energize our increasing ‘complexification’, both as a species as well as in our individual lives.

 Love as A Force of Evolution

   In Teilhard’s unique ‘lens of universal evolution’, he notes that each step of evolution results from an action and a consequence which effects the increase of complexity in a product. He understands such increase as the primary metric of evolution.  Without this metric, as he points out, universal evolution would have been still born, stagnant, and static.  Everything that we can see around us came into existence from such a process.

The action in each evolutive step going back to the Big Bang is simply the joining of two products of like complexity in a way which results in the consequence of a new product of increased complexity.  John Haught sees this as

“The obvious fact of emergence- the arrival of unpredictable new organizational principles and patterns in nature”

Effectively, in this process, two ‘parent’ entities join on a ‘two dimensional’ plane of common complexity, but the result occurs ‘vertically’, in a third dimension of increased complexity, turning what started out as a two-dimensional activity into three dimensions.  Teilhard sees this simple but profound process underlying the appearance of everything that we can see in the universe.

He notes, however, that science is unable to account for this vertical aspect, even though without it, as he notes, the universe remains static.  Next to the “vast material energies” studied by science, this agent of complexity “adds absolutely nothing that can be weighed or measured”.  Hence there is no branch of science that acknowledges it, much less addresses it.  Again, from Haught

“Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ (the ‘person) 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.”

   Teilhard devotes a significant amount of his writing to address this aspect of cosmology.  In doing so he notes that this dyadic activity, two entities joining in such a way as to produce a product of higher complexity, occurs at the very basis of cosmic becoming, as described in the fundamental scientific treatment of the Big Bang, and continues unabated all the way to the present day.  Therefore, he sees this simple but profound activity as still at work in human relationships and their resultant contribution to human evolution.  Our love relationships aren’t unique to humans, they are simply the latest echo of the rise of this dyadic activity through each wave of evolution.

How did Teilhard understand how love between humans can be seen to reflect such activity?

 Excentration and Centration

We have frequently adverted to John’s classic assertion that “God is Love and he who abides in Love abides in God and God in him,” to address the nature of love as an ontological effector rather than just an emotion.  Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, this statement by John speaks volumes about God, about us and about our ongoing genesis as humans.

As we saw last week, Teilhard’s less metaphorical (and more empirically correct) understanding of John is that God is the ground of being which manifests itself in the energy of love, and that when we love we are participating in our individual current of this universal flow of energy.  To Teilhard, as we saw, God is not a ‘person’ who ‘loves’, ‘He’ is the ultimate principle of the energy by which the universe unfolds and by which it eventually manifests itself in the evolutionary product of the ‘person’.

    Teilhard articulates this dynamic further, seeing it in the light of cosmic evolution and particularly in its continuation in the human person.  In relationships between persons, Teilhard sees the workings of love coming about through the dynamics which he refers to as “excentration” and “centration”.

“Excentration” occurs when we are able to grow beyond our biases, assumptions and thought structures and become aware of different and more meaningful aspects of life: the “aha” moments in which we realize the limitation that incomplete presumptions or positions are imposing on us.

“Centration” occurs when this scaffolding of ego gradually falls away and excentration naturally leads to increased transparency, openness, and honesty.   Thus as we, in Jesus’ metaphor, ‘die to ourself’ we become more authentically ourself.  In this new state, our capacity for relationship is also increased, as we saw when we addressed ‘Psychology as Secular Meditation’, as quantified by Carl Rogers.

Engaging in a deep relationship, or deepening the relationship that already exists, enhances not only our self but also our relationships, and contributes to the ability of those that we love to “excentrate”, and thus increase their own maturity and capacity for love.  As their level of person is enhanced and the love returned, this results in an increased level of self-understanding in both persons.

Seen ‘ontologically’, love is a way of making ourselves by making others.  As we have seen, Confucius seems to be the first to have discovered this ontological essence, when he said

“If you would enlarge yourself, you must first enlarge others.  When you enlarge others, you are enlarging yourself.”

The Next Post

This week we followed Paul’s assertion that Love was the most important of the three ‘Theological Virtues’ by following Teilhard’s expansion of love from the traditional understanding as an emotional energy which connects us for procreation, social stability and ultimately salvation to a more universal

perspective in which love can be seen as the energy of universal evolution become manifest in the energy by which we become persons, and so continue the rise of complexity in human evolution.

Next week we will take a fourth look at Love, going a little deeper into how Teilhard’s mapping of ‘excentration’ and ‘centration’ as the principle actions of the dynamic of Love can contribute to our personal ‘complexification’.

How can seeing love through Teilhard’s lens refocus it as an aspect of energy which moves us forward?

Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at the so-called ‘Theological Virtue’ of love by seeing it in the context of an emotion-based ‘act’ of personal relationship in which we are connected for procreation, social stability and ultimately salvation.  This week we will take a second look informed by Teilhard’s understanding of it as the universal energy of evolution become manifest in human life by which we continue the fourteen billion years of evolution’s process of increase in complexity.

We will see Love through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’, as less emotional than ontological. 

The Ontological Side of Love

Maurice Blondel articulated what had long been experienced by the great mystics when he asserted that:

“It is impossible to think of myself…over here, and then of God as over against us.”

  He goes on to explain why he asserts this:

“This is impossible because I…have come to be who I am through a process in which God is involved.”

   This process by which we “come to be who we are” is part of Teilhard’s essential insight: love is the manifestation of the energy of universal evolution as it rises through the human person.  He compares love to the phenomenon of gravity which pulls the grains of matter together to effect higher forms of reality when he asks:

“Can we not say quite simply that in its (love’s) essence it is the attraction exercised on each unit of consciousness by the center of the universe in course of taking shape?”

   This process by which we “come to be who we are” is part of Teilhard’s essential insight: love is the manifestation of the energy of universal evolution as it rises through the human.  He saw a distinctive facet of this energy of evolution at work in every step of the universe’s emergence, such as the forces which forge atoms from particulate electrons, electro-chemical forces forging millions of types of molecules from a few hundred types of atoms, the energies escorting molecules across seemingly impenetrable thresholds to cellular formation and so on to those forces which unite us in such a way that we are ‘differentiated’ into distinct but highly ‘connectable’ persons.  Every change of state that can be seen to have occurred in cosmic evolution has been powered by a more complex facet of the single integrated energy by which the universe unfolds.  In the case of the ‘change of state’ that saw conscious entities (the higher mammals) evolving into entities that were not only conscious, but conscious of their consciousness, the aspect of the universal evolutionary force that we know as love was necessary for the transition to this new mode of being.

This brings us back to Teilhard’s ‘articulation of the noosphere’.  The entire history of science can be seen as the quest for (and the success of) understanding both the entities produced by evolution (such as molecules) and the energies by which their component parts are united in such a way as to increase the resultant complexity (such as the electro-chemical forces).  Teilhard simply extrapolates this past history into a future in which the process of evolution continues to effect more complex entities through more comprehensive energies.

In scientific parlance, the amount of ‘information’ contained in an emergent product of evolution is not only substantially larger than that present in the entities whose interconnection produced it, the potential of the new entity to parent offspring of similarly increased complexity is itself increased.

Teilhard’s ‘articulation of the noosphere’ simply recognizes that, just as there are electro-chemical ‘laws’ by which atoms are combined into molecules, expressed in terms of descriptions of matter and rules of combination (‘information’), humanity is in the early stages of understanding our nature as human persons and the energies of both individual and collective human ontology.   As we saw in recent weeks, these ‘human laws’ can be expressed in terms of sacraments and morals.

Simply put, just like the electrons, atoms, molecules, and cells before us, we are simply the latest products of evolution, and are therefore capable of moving forward in complexity by cooperation with the energies which Teilhard insists can be found in these ‘articulations of the noosphere’.

Just as Teilhard expands evolution both rearward and forward from ‘natural selection’ to ‘universal complexification’, he expands ‘love’ from ‘emotion’ to ‘ontological energy’.

”So as long as our conceptions of the universe remained static, the basis of duty remained extremely obscure.  To account for this mysterious law (love) 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.”

  We have seen how Christianity has reduced John’s assertion that “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him” from a highly intimate expression of the relationship between God and man to a belief that we need to love as God loves us if we are to merit the afterlife.  Teilhard restores John’s astounding assertion to its ontological and non-metaphorical truth: among the multifaceted manifestations of the energy by which the universe evolves is a principle by which its increasing complexity eventually manifests itself in the personal.

The less metaphorical understanding of John proposed by Teilhard is that God is the ground of being which manifests itself in the energy of love, and that when we love we are participating in our individual current of this universal flow of energy.  To Teilhard, expanding John, God is not a ‘person’ who ‘loves’, ‘He’ is the ultimate principle of the energy by which the universe unfolds and by which it eventually manifests itself in the ‘person’.

The Next Post

This week we followed Paul’s assertion that Love was the most important of the three ‘Theological Virtues’ by following Teilhard’s expansion of love from the traditional understanding as an emotional energy which connects us for procreation, social stability and ultimately salvation to a more universal perspective in which it can be seen as the energy by which we become persons and so continue the rise of complexity in human evolution.

Next week we will take a third look at Love as a force of continuing evolution by seeing how Teilhard understands its action in assuring our continuing ‘complexification’.

   How can human love be seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ as the key structural link in human evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the Theological Virtues of faith and hope intersect in an ‘extrapolation/interpolation’ dynamic that extends our knowledge of the past to build confidence in the future.

This week we will continue with a look at the third Theological Virtue, ‘love’ as it is a manifestation of the universal energy of evolution.

The Traditional Approach to Love

Paul, who first delineated the three ‘attitudes’ of the ‘Theological Virtues’, saw love as the primary of the three, mainly because it was most essential to Jesus’s message.  While he saw faith and hope as necessary to fullness of being, he understood that love was that which brings the whole picture together.  Paul goes into some detail in his description of Love in 1 Corinthians 13:4:

“Love is patient and kind, Love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude.  Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

As is commonly understood in contemporary society, the traditional theological approach treats love as an ‘act’.  We are to “love one another” as one of the many criteria for eternal life after death.  As Jesus taught, we are to love God, love ourselves and love our neighbors as ourselves, restating and building upon Confucius’ statement of the Golden Rule from some 500 years earlier.

As Teilhard insists, however, even though humanity may be only in the early stages of such ‘articulations of the noosphere’, at least in the West the values of the uniqueness of the person and the necessity of relationships that enhance this uniqueness are paramount.  Any approach to regulation or enhancement of this relationship that impedes this understanding of personal growth also impedes the continuation of the evolution of the human species.

Nearly all the ancient thinkers recognized that a key to human maturity lay in the person’s rise above “egoism” both as a building block for personal growth and as a necessary component of relationship.  The concept of “losing” oneself, overcoming ‘ego’, as a step toward spiritual fulfillment is common in many venerable systems of thought.  The actual practice in which these results occur varies significantly among the religions and philosophies in which they are critical, but all the thinkers of the “Axial Age” recognized that you needed other people to elicit your full humanity; self-cultivation was a reciprocal process. As Confucius put it:

  “In order to establish oneself, one should try to establish others.  In order to enlarge oneself, one should try to enlarge others.”

   Karen Armstrong sees this perspective as common to the thinkers of the Axial Age.

“In one way or the other, their programs were designed to eradicate the egotism that is largely responsible for our violence, and promoted the empathic spirituality of the Golden Rule.  They understood that this reciprocal process required that we treat others as we would be treated.  This requires us to be able to rise above the limitations of our self, to become less focused inward and more open to “the other”: the overcoming of egoism.”

   Gregory Baum rephrases Blondel on this process.

“At the moment when we shatter our own little system and recognize another person, we become more truly a person ourself.  What takes place here is a conversion away from self-centeredness to the wider reality of life and people.”

Understanding Love – From Relating to Becoming

Of course, even the most emotional treatment of love would acknowledge its effect on our personal development, but the traditional approach tends to emphasize the action itself over the effect.  The evangelist John proposes a more fundamental understanding of Love as both the nature of God and the nature of man in his astounding assertion (1 John 4:16) that:

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

   As Teilhard asserts and Richard Rohr frequently observes in his Weekly Meditations, this ‘ontological’ aspect of Love has been less stressed in favor of Christianity’s seemingly endless need for the promulgation of rules and society’s need for the stability that it affords.  As a result, it is far more common to see Love treated by religion as an act which gains favor with God than as a natural facet of the evolutionary forces with which we can cooperate to assure our personal growth towards wholeness.      The intimacy asserted by John, even though it has been diluted by Christianity’s love affair with Plato, is nonetheless the perspective which not only fosters a reinterpretation of the venerable religious concept of ‘immanence’ but provides a much more universal context to the idea of Love itself.

The Next Post

This week we followed Paul’s assertion that love was the most important of the three ‘Theological Virtues’ and explored the historical development of this undeniable but often bewildering aspect of human life.  We saw how the popular concept of love focusses on the ‘act’ of personal relationship in which we are connected by instinct and emotion for procreation, social stability and ultimately salvation.  We also saw how seeing it through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ opens it up to be recognized as the most recent manifestation of the energy of evolution.

Next week we will continue our shift from seeing love as simple relationship to follow Teilhard’s expansion of Love as a more universal perspective in which it can be seen as the energy by which we become persons and in doing so continue the rise of complexity in human evolution.

  How can Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help us to use faith and hope to build a bridge to the future?

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 as we ‘articulate 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 further into this significant intersection.

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 recursive 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 rationale 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.  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 when we addressed “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 last week 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 phenomenon 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, which is 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 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 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, as it turns out, neither 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 through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ 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 can seeing universal evolution through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ enhance our confidence in life?

Today’s Post

Last week we explored how a shift in perspective in the search for meaning in traditional science and religion can open a more positive stance towards understanding and living out the ‘articulations of the noosphere’.  As reflected in the sacraments, values, and morals, we have addressed this stance from

Teilhard’s evolutionary perspective.   We saw last week how the concept of Paul’s ‘Theological Virtues’ expresses three key such attitudes which underlay our employment of these articulations.

In the series of posts on discovering the thread of evolution within each of us, which we saw as ‘finding God by finding ourselves’, we examined the thoughts of Carl Rogers, whose optimistic approach to psychology was infused with a secular approach to faith.  In this series, we saw how the virtues of Faith, Hope and Love are strongly woven into his insights on human evolution

This week we will explore this weaving as it can be seen in the virtue of ‘Faith’.

The Traditional Approach to Faith

Faith is the first of the virtues to be addressed by Paul and has been traditionally expressed as a ‘belief in things unseen’.  As interpreted by the Christian church, it asserts that we must believe in ‘revealed truths’ (eg ideas that appear in our ‘sacred’ texts and as interpreted by the church) which we do not (even often cannot) understand, and that such belief is necessary for a successful eventual passage from this world to the next.  In the more conservative Christian expressions, ‘understanding’ is unnecessary for salvation as long as ‘belief’ is present.  Since belief is pleasing to God, by this interpretation, it will therefore insure one’s salvation: the entry into ‘the next life’.  At the extreme, the more difficult the ‘truth’ is to understand (eg the virgin birth), the higher the value of belief.

Karl Rahner was one of the theologians who influenced the changes of Vatican II.  His acute theological insight into identifying issues facing the church as it progressed into the future was resonant with Pope Francis’s current project of ecclesial reform and sharply critiqued this approach to faith.

“We are often told that it is difficult to believe, and by this is meant that the truths revealed by God are beyond human understanding, that they demand the sacrifice of the intellect, and that the more opaque they are to human understanding, the greater the merit in believing them.”

    Gregory Baum expands on this critique in his book on Maurice Blondel, “Man Becoming”:

“When Christians have difficulties with certain dogmatic statements, for instance with the those on the Trinity or the eucharist, they are sometimes told by ecclesiastical authorities that there is a special merit in not understanding, in being baffled by a teaching that sounds unlikely, and in obediently accepting a position that has no other link with the human mind than that God has revealed it to men.”  “Faith in this context appears as the obedient acceptance of a heavenly message, independently of its meaning for man and its effect on human life.”  (Italics mine)

Reinterpreting Faith

As we developed our ‘principles of reinterpretation’, we saw how Maurice Blondel considered that this inability of religion to bring “meaning for man and its effect on human life” was one of the great failures of modern religion, as it severely limited the relevance it could afford to human life.  As he saw it:

“Faith in this context appears as the obedient acceptance of a heavenly message, independently of its meaning for man and its effect on human life   Man cannot accept an idea as true unless it corresponds in some way to a question present in his mind.”

And, presaging both Teilhard’s recognition of God as manifest in the threads of evolution which are at the core of each life, as well as a principle of reinterpretation of traditional religion, Blondel goes on to say:

“To the man who accepts the Gospel in faith, it is not a message added to his life from without; it is rather the clarification and specification of the transcendent mystery of humanization that is gratuitously operative in his life.”  (Italics mine)

As we have discussed earlier, such reinterpretation in terms of human life is necessary for religion to regain its lost relevancy.

On a purely secular level, there are few things more fundamental to human action than ‘faith’.  Surely, we act only to the extent that we believe in both our capacity to act and success of the outcome, and this has nothing to do with religion.  Our history is filled with ‘acts of faith’ which lead to actions profoundly affecting the evolution of society.  We earlier saw, for example, how the evolution of the belief in human equality leads to the West’s practice of democracy.

The difference between secular faith and religious faith can be seen in the question: what is the basis for the act of faith?  Why should we believe what we believe?  Or as Blondel asks, “what difference does a belief make in our lives?”

In the secular case, faith is built up over time, in a trial-and-error approach in which the consequences of beliefs can be evaluated as positive or negative.  Those seen as positive can be filtered through society and passed forward as laws, standards, or practices through the mechanism of culture.  An example is those recognized and adopted by society at large.  The U.S Constitutional Bill of Rights is the result of such an approach.

The many laws of science are themselves based on secular faith.  Science is based on two unprovable beliefs:  that the universe is intelligible and that humans are capable of understanding it. Over time, this belief has led to the ‘scientific method’, a sort of set of secular virtues which has proved successful in building our understanding of the universe.  Without adherence to these elements of faith, neither Western society nor its pillar of scientific endeavor would survive.

Teilhard’s perspective recognizes that in each of us there is a continuation of the fourteen or so billion years of universal activity that has brought us to this moment.  Secular faith is the intuitive, unprovable sense that not only is evolution carrying us along with it, but that its direction is from a past simplicity of the earliest components of matter to a yet unknown future state of complexity and completeness.  It is the expectation that while we are as yet unfinished, we are nonetheless embraced by a current that will carry us to future wholeness.

The Next Post

This week we began our look at the stance we can take if we are to live out Teilhard’s ‘articulations of the noosphere,’ beginning with that of ‘faith’.  We saw how the religious attitude of faith 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.

Next week we will address the second of the ‘Theological Virtues’ that of ‘hope’.

How can Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ help us to be confident about the future? 

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 hence leads 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 our series on reinterpreting science and religion, we looked at ‘principles of reinterpretation’ which could be applied to traditional Christian teachings if we were to examine them through Teilhard’s ‘lens’.  In this series, we noted our use of his insights 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 few 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 through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, 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, summarized 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, focus, 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 and 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 Teilhard’s terms, we are orienting ourselves to the ‘currents which bear us towards the open sea’, the energy of evolution.  We are aligning our lives to the ‘axis of evolution’.

So, seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, 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 through Teilhard’s ‘lens’:

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 of 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 arises 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 as we 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’.

   How can Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ help us to develop attitudes which can lead to increased ‘fullness’?

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.  Seeing this potential coherence through his ‘lens’, 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 principles.  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 biological 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 principle as discussed last week, is to be found in the interaction among elementary particles as increasingly understood by science.

Also, as discussed last week, both approaches are rooted in the past:  Religion with its doctrines of ‘truth’ firmly rooted in ancient divine pronouncements, 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 inorganic matter.  In our exploration of psychology, in which Science turns its lens on the human, we have seen that there is considerable dualism.  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 John 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 both 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 set of principles?

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 richer and more relevant when reoriented from the past to the future.  This reorientation occurs with the simple recognition that the universe is 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 increasing irrelevance of religion but the increased 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’.

  How can Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ aid in seeing the potential confluence between science and religion?

Today’s Post

For the last several weeks 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 place us on Teilhard’s “current to the open sea”.

This week we will continue this exploration into a clearer view of human life which capitalizes on these structures.

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 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 (.https://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=202303)

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”.  This approach leads to such beliefs as random determinism (our thoughts are the result of random firings of neurons precipitated by molecular activity), and often lead to a denial of human free will.  In other words, from this approach, 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, Haught, 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 future 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 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’, we must find new meaning in the old pronouncements.  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’.

To see ourselves caught up in Teilhard’s process of ‘anthropogenesis’ is to recognize that meaning is always to be sought in the future.  There can be no doubt that our bodies can be boiled down to masses of molecules and that the insights of the past are worth our attention.  However, 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 ‘virtue’.

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’.

   How can Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ serve to reconnect the spiritual and materialistic understanding of morality?

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 see how these two perspectives can be brought into coherence by employment of Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.

From Teilhard’s Insights

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.  Teilhard’s 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?”

   Teilhard notes that 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 hundred 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.

He also 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 to a national stability which increasingly accomodates 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 continuing evolution, if it is to continue ‘upwards’ must now focus ‘inwards’.

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 necessity’,

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 downside, 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.