How can we use Teilhard’s lens to understand religion as necessary to evolution?

Today’s Post

For the past several weeks we have been tracing John Haught’s recognition that both religion and science need to evolve to effect the synthesis necessary to form a tool for dealing with the ‘risks of religion.  In this series we have noted that both science and religion clearly have developed ‘tools’ for dealing with our evolution, but that these tools, effective as they have been shown to be, are still a work in progress.
Last week we refocused Teilhard’ lens on religion’s ‘articulation of the noosphere’.

This week we will see at how religion’s side of this relationship must evolve if is to hold up its side of such potential synthesis.

Why Should Religion Evolve?

As Jonathan Sacks sees it, the secularization of Europe happened not because people lost faith in God, but because people lost faith in the ability of religious believers to live life peaceably together.  More gradually, but also more extensively, Western Christianity has had to learn what Jews had been forced to discover in the first century: how to survive without power.  From his perspective

– no religion relinquishes power voluntarily

– the combination of religion and power leads to internal factionalism, the splitting of the faith into multiple strands, movements, denominations, and sects

– at some point, the adherents of a faith find themselves murdering their own fellow believers

– it is only this that leads the wise to realize that this cannot be the will of God

What is needed, therefore, is for religion to continue to evolve, to recognize that many of the criticisms of the more well-spoken atheists are on target, and that most of the new findings of science only threaten the least reasonable aspects of religion as seen in such things as superstition, biblical literalism, dualism and focus on the afterlife.  The fundamental belief in a principle of reality that is ‘on our side’, an evolutionary process in which we can realize our potential, and a recognition of the need for love are only found in religion.  They need to be stressed anew for it to recover its relevancy to human life.

How can Religion Evolve?

What inhibits religion’s potential as a tool for ‘making sense of things’?  It was only a few generations ago that religion was at the focus of all societies, but most respected polls today show a trend of decline in religion’s importance to society.

Although still clearly in the minority, the atheist voice has risen strongly in this same time frame.  One consistent thread of this voice sees the religious viewpoint becoming completely replaced by an objective, materialistic and atheistic worldview in the near future.  Popular, learned, and eloquent voices, such as Richard Dawkins, Oxford professor of “Public Understanding of Science”, is one of many who have written copiously of the many contradictions and superstitions that can be found in Western religion as well as a significant lack of grounding in the physical sciences.  Science itself contributes to this trend as modern medicine and technology continue to extend their power to improve human welfare.

So, given these trends, how can religion move back to the center of human enterprise, equal to science in its application to the human need to ‘make sense of things’?  Maurice Blondel, an early twentieth century French philosopher, addressed the problem of relevance in religion:

“A message that comes to man wholly from the outside, without an inner relationship to his life, must appear to him as irrelevant, unworthy of attention and unassimilable by the mind.”

   With this succinct assertion, Blondel not only identifies the heart of the problem, but also opens the door to a path to returning relevance to religion.  His observation suggests that this path requires religion to understand and express its beliefs in terms of human life as opposed to providing information about the ‘supernatural’, that which is “wholly from the outside”.

We have discussed religion as a ‘tool’ for us to continue our evolution at both a personal and societal level.  Blondel proposes a ‘tool’ by which religion can realize its potential to improve its capability of helping us do just that.

The tool is ‘reinterpretation’.

The Next Post

This week we have seen how Jonathan Sacks echoes Teilhard’s call for a fresh approach to the potential synergy between religion and science.  Like Teilhard, he concludes that the success of the West requires a balanced synergy between science and religion if it is to continue.

Next week, we will expand Maurice Blondel’s suggestion of ‘reinterpreting religion’ to recover its relevance to human life.

   How can religion be seen as a tool for ‘articulating the noosphere’?

 Today’s Post

Last week we saw how religion can be seen as an attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’, in which the ‘laws’ of our personal and cultural evolution are sought and by which we can assure our continued personal and cultural growth.   This week we will see at how such articulation at the level of religion can slowly inform our cultural standards.

From Articulating the Noosphere to Managing Human Evolution

Society has long struggled to both understand the principles which underlie a ‘successful’ society and to codify these principles into what we now understand as ‘laws’.  As chronicled by Nick Spencer in his book, “The Evolution of the West”, religion’s role in this historic process has been dualistic.  In many cases it has found itself trapped in the perpetuation of its financial, hierarchic, legalistic, and power scaffolding, and in other cases it has contributed to the fundamental concepts by which the delicate balance between personal and cultural civilization has successfully evolved.

Thomas Jefferson captured both arms of this dualism.   While his approach was to discard the ‘otherworldly’ aspects of the “Stories of Jesus” and focus on Jesus as a secular moralist, he nonetheless drew the basis of his understanding of human nature and personal freedom from these teachings.  The result, of course, was a cornerstone for a set of laws which has underpinned a truly ‘successful’ society.

Larry Siedentop, in his book, “Inventing the Individual’, traces the history of ideals that form the basis of Western values.   It’s not so much that these ideals are absent in Eastern thinking, but do not enjoy the primacy seen in the West.  He summarizes the ‘articulation of the noosphere’ as it has emerged in the West:

• • Each person exists with worth apart from their social position
  • Everyone deserves equal status under secular law
  • Religious belief cannot be compelled
  • Individual conscience must be respected

As Teilhard (and many others) have noted, the Western evolution of understanding of the person and society is becoming a standard embraced elsewhere:

“…from one end of the world to the other, all the peoples, to remain human or to become more so, are inexorably led to formulate the hopes and problems of the modern earth in the very same terms in which the West has formulated them.”

   Johan Norberg, in his book, “Progress” documents in detail how this formulation, initially rising in the West, has made its way into many ‘developing’ countries.

The Perennial Philosophy

While considerable diversity and frequent contradiction is paramount among the threads of thought seen in the evolution of religion, Aldous Huxley saw common elements in all of them.  He defines the immemorial and universal ‘Perennial Philosophy’ which permeates all religions as:

“…the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being.”

   Seeing this semi-theological assertion through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, we can see that this concept of the ‘Perennial Philosophy’ reflects the principle which powers the coming-to-be of the universe (the ‘world of things’) and that it is reflected in some way in the core of the human person.

Effectively, this ‘metaphysic’ points the way to the underlying activity by which we have come to be and the guidelines by which we successfully navigate our growth.  The Perennial Philosophy recognizes that there are basic dynamics of human existence which, understood and managed properly, will lead to increased completeness.  The religious and societal norms which have evolved, therefore, reflect our attempt to articulate these dynamics and the activities of understanding and management of them.  By definition, as we evolve as persons and as societies we hope to evolve them in a direction which activates our potential.

Or, as Karen Armstrong puts it in her insights on the many streams of thinking which developed during the ‘Axial Age’:

“The fact that they all (the sages of the Axial Age) came up with such profoundly similar solutions by so many different routes suggests that they had indeed discovered something important about the way human beings worked”.

   The theologian, Cynthia Bourgeault, puts it a little differently:

”I think it’s fair to say that all of the great spiritual paths lead toward the same center—the larger, nondual mind as the seat of personal consciousness—but they get there by different routes.” 

What’s the Alternative?

Successfully negotiating the continuation of our evolution goes beyond fulfilling our potential.  It is obvious today that human activity also has the potential of contributing to our extinction.  Finding and understanding the ‘laws of the noosphere’ also requires us to adapt to our ever-increasing population and the effects it has on the planet.  One example of the potential of such adaptation is acknowledged by John McHale in his book, “The Future of the Future”:

“At this point, then, where men’s affairs reach the scale of potential disruption of the global ecosystem, he invents precisely those conceptual and physical technologies that may enable him to deal with the magnitude of a complex planetary society.”

   It’s not just that we are in danger of destroying our planet, but that even more danger lurks in our ever-increasing proximity to each other.  As we increasingly compress, we are more and more at the mercy of our instincts to defend our space, to keep ‘the other’ at bay, to defend our territory and make sure we get our fair share.  Inventing McHale’s ‘conceptual technologies’ means to develop evolutional strategies that overcome this strong resistance to closeness.  Johan Norberg documents nine distinct examples of such strategy in his book, “Progress”.

In this area it’s essential to our continued evolution for us to develop tactics which “use our neo-cortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of our reptilian and limbic brains.”

These ‘basic dynamics’ and ‘conceptual technologies’, therefore, are what is sought by humans in their attempts to ‘articulate the noosphere’.   Culling them from the enormous and often contradictory cluster of statements of beliefs that have arisen over the long evolution of religion is the main goal of a ‘reinterpretation’ process.

Teilhard offers a concise description of the validity of a person’s belief:

“By definition, his religion, if true, can have no other effect than to perfect the humanity in him.”

The Next Post

So, if we believe that that all expressions of religious beliefs include some elements of the ‘Perennial Philosophy’, what remains is to address them in the light of the perspectives we have developed thus far, then reinterpret them to find such kernels.  Next week we will begin to address the process of ‘reinterpreting religion’.

  How do science and religion need to mature to be able to abate the risks of evolution?

 Today’s Post

This week we will begin to explore how Teilhard’s lens of evolution and science’s way of making sense of things can offer religion a door to an understanding in which it can recover its relevancy.

With such ‘reinterpretation’, religion can emerge as a new, more relevant, and more immediate referent for personal growth, while science’s field of regard can expand to encompass the energies of personal life.

We will begin by seeing how their two traditional ‘cosmic stories’ can not only move toward increased resonance, but also toward higher synergy as they become more relevant to human life.  In doing so, they can become more comprehensive, and collaborate as agencies which foster continued human development.

Retelling The ‘Cosmic Story’

We have seen how an integrated understanding of the cosmos can affect both our lives and our participation in the larger society.  We have also noted the many dualisms that face us as we attempt to integrate traditional principles of wholeness into our lives.  Science and religion obviously represent rich sources of concepts which we can use, but at the same time, both within themselves and between themselves, can be found many contradictions as well as concepts neither helpful nor relevant to human life.

John Haught, Research Professor at Georgetown University, offers a way to look at this situation from the center of what we have been referring to as ‘the terrain of synergy’.  In his perspective, outlined in his book, “The New Cosmic Story”, science and religion represent our two traditional ways of doing this.

In this book, he critiques the ‘stories’ traditionally told by science and religion and argues for a third story which offers an integrated perspective on what is clearly a single, integrated cosmos.

He stands well back from the traditional stories, addressing them as two categories of lore which address the same thing: the cosmos.

• The first category he labels as “archaeonomy” which is the traditional, empirically based, left-brained story told by science.
• The second category is the story told by traditional, intuition-based, right-brained religion, which he labels, “analogy”

He also envisions a third story, slowly emerging today, as we learn more about the universe on the one hand, and become less patient with the dualisms of traditional religion on the other. He labels the third perspective, which offers a synergistic reinterpretation of both, as “anticipation”.  This story is told from the perspective of the ‘whole brain’.

These three categories of stories serve not only as a taxonomy of insights into the cosmos, but also as a guide to understanding our place within it.  He notes that any story which purports to address the universe is, by definition, incomplete if it does not address the human person.  In this he echoes Teilhard, Paul Davies, Jonathan Sacks, and Richard Rohr,, all of whom we have met previously.

The ‘Archaenomic’ Story

We have looked in some detail at the story which mainstream science tells, particularly at how science, so obviously adept in building technology and increasing our creature comforts, seems to be marking time at the phenomenon of the human person.  In Haught’s telling, and in implicit agreement with Davies and Teilhard,

“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 archaeonomic 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.”

   And, recognizing this ‘corridor’ as Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’, he goes on to say

“Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ (eg consciousness aware of itself) 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.”  (Parentheses mine)

   He goes on to comment how such an ‘archaeonomic’ story fails to address the very human characteristics that have emerged in evolution:

“…how little illumination materialistic readings of nature have shed not only on religion but also on life, mind, morality and other emergent phenomena.”

   And, I would add, how little illumination on human happiness.

Not only, as he notes, does the archaeonomic perspective fall short of addressing these very human manifestations of life, but adds a dystopian outlook as well:

“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.”

   He sees this pessimistic perspective as one which ignores the very basis of science: that of evolution:

“(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 ‘Analogic’ Story

He is neither sparing of the traditional religious story.

“Analogy has appealed to religious people for centuries, but it remains intellectually plausible only so long as the universe is taken to be immobile.”

   He proposes Teilhard’s method of making sense of religion by putting it into the context of evolution:

“Once we realize that nature is a gradually unfolding narrative, we cannot help noticing that more is indeed coming into the story out of less over the course of time, and that it does so without miraculous interruptions and without disturbing invariant physical and chemical principles.  It is intellectually plausible only as long as the universe is taken to be immobile.  The wrongness in religion is a signal that the universe is still far from being fully actualized.”

Next Week

This week we took another look at the human enterprises of science and religion, this time from the insights of John Haught.  In doing so we saw that even though both have played a critical part in the evolution of human society, and in understanding our individual lives, neither perspective is without need of further evolution if the whole of universal existence, and our part in it, is to be better understood.

   Next week we will see how Haught sees a path to synergy of both systems that can facilitate such a journey.  In addition to these two ‘stories’, he also sees a third story as slowly emerging today as we learn more about the universe and become increasingly dissatisfied with traditional religion.  He titles this third ‘story’, “anticipation”.

These three categories of stories serve not only as a taxonomy of insights into the cosmos, but also as a guide to understanding our place within it.  In this endeavor Haught echoes Teilhard, Paul Davies, Jonathan Sacks and Richard Rohr.

   In the potential collaboration between science and religion to lead us forward, what part can science play?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Jonathan Sacks, former British Chief Rabbi, understood the potential role that religion could play with science in the further evolution of humans on this planet.

This week, we will look at the ‘other side of the coin’ to see his thoughts on the potential role of science.

Religion’s Need for Science

Just as the left- brained perspectives of science are in need of the right-brained balance of religion, as implicitly recognized by Norberg, so the perspectives of religion are in need of the left-brained balance of science.

The claims of all forms of religion are based on metaphorical beliefs, many of which cannot be held by those who are powering the ‘progress’ curve outlined by Norberg.  As we saw in the case of Thomas Jefferson, he systematically stripped the gospels of such ‘miraculous’ teachings to reveal what he considered to be the bedrock of “The Teachings of Jesus”.  He then applied them to his underlying (and asserted as ‘self-evident’) assertions of the value, equality, and dignity of the individual human person.

Many educated persons believe that scientific insight will eventually replace religion as the basis of human action.  It is certainly true that in the past two hundred or so years, many religious teachings have become unacceptable due to the rise of empiricism, such as the formal blaming of the Jewish race for the death of Jesus, the seven literal days of creation, and so on.  The continuing value of religion in many parts of the world is due more to its ability to push back on state corruption and savagery than its teachings on reincarnation and virgin births.  But with the increasing evolution of state structures more benign to the human person, such as that found in democracies, the underlying importance that religion places on the individual human person plays a larger role.

For religion to continue to play a role in this evolution, it must be seen as relevant.  As Sacks sees it:

“Religion needs science because we cannot apply God’s will to the world if we do not understand the world.  If we try to, the result will be magic or misplaced supernaturalism.” 

The Road to Synthesis

So, how do we get to the point where right- and left- brain process are balanced?  Sacks addresses what happens when we don’t:

“Bad things happen when religion ceases to hold itself answerable to empirical reality, when it creates devastation and cruelty on earth for the sake of salvation in heaven.  And bad things happen when science declares itself the last word on the human condition and engages in social or bioengineering, treating humans as objects rather than as subjects, and substitution of cause and effect for reflection, will and choice.”

   He recognizes that science and religion have their own way of asking questions and searching for answers, but doesn’t see it as a basis for compartmentalization, in which they are seen ascompletely separate worlds.  Like Teilhard, he sees the potential for synergy

 “..because they are about the same world within which we live, breathe and have our being”.

   He sees the starting point for such synergy as “conversation”, in hopes that it will lead to “integration”.  From Sacks’ perspective:

“Science needs religion, or at the very least some philosophical understanding of the human condition and our place within the universe, for each fresh item of knowledge and each new accession of power raises the question of how it should be used, and for that we need another way of thinking.”

   Even though Sacks doesn’t place his beliefs in an explicitly evolutionary context, he does envision a more whole human person which emerges as a result of a more complete balance between the influence of the ‘right’ and ‘left’ brains (modes of engaging reality).  In this sense, he echoes Teilhard’s belief of ‘fuller being’ resulting from ‘closer union’.

The Next Post

This week we have seen how Jonathan Sacks echoes Teilhard’s call for a fresh approach to the potential synergy between religion and science.  Like Teilhard, he concludes that the success of the West requires a balanced synergy between science and religion if it is to continue.

Next week, we will apply Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ to ‘rethinking’ both religion and science, by seeing how both must continue to evolve if they are to hold up their end of the relationship.

   In the potential collaboration between science and religion to lead us forward, what part can religion play?

Today’s Post

Last week we looked at the last four of Teilhard’s eight ways of seeing the natural confluence between religion and science.  As we saw, Teilhard understands them to be natural facets of a synthesized understanding of the noosphere, and therefore potentially of benefit to an increased insight into human life.

This week we will see how another thinker sees this potential for a closer and more beneficial relationship.  Jonathan Sacks, former British Chief Rabbi, comes at this subject from a slightly different perspective.  While Teilhard situates traditional dualities into an evolutive context to resolve them, Sacks understands them in the context of the two primary modes of human understanding intuition and empiricism.

Sacks On the Evolution of Religion

Teilhard of course placed religion (as he does all things) into an evolutionary context as one strand of ‘universal becoming’.  His understanding of the mutual benefit of a synthesis between science and religion is focused on their paired value to the continuation human evolution.

Sacks, in his book, “The Great Partnership”, stays closer to home, focusing on religion’s potential to help us to become what we are capable of becoming.  From this perspective, religion, properly understood and applied, is a mechanism for our personal growth in the context of our collective growth.  Sacks sees the evolution of human thinking in the unfolding of religion and the evolution of language, and thus as a slow movement towards a balance between the ‘left’ and ‘right’ hemispheres of the human brain.  In this way, the cooperation between religion and science can be seen as simply a more balanced and harmonious way of thinking in which the traditional ‘dualities’ (as seen by both Teilhard and Sacks) can be resolved.

Science’s Need for Religion

Sacks’ perspective is strongly resonant with Johan Norberg’s insight as he sees the freedom of the human person as the cornerstone of improving human welfare.  Like Jefferson, he also recognizes the role that religion has played in the evolution of society:

“Outside religion there is no secure alternative base for the unconditional source of worth that in the West has come from the idea that we are each in God’s image.  Though many have tried to create a secular substitute, none has ultimately succeeded.”

   The ‘none’ to which he refers can of course be seen in those countries which tried to create a “social order based on materialistic lines”.  These examples can be seen in Stalinist Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the Kim family’s North Korea.

As he sees it, the problem arises when an alternative to religion’s value of the human person is sought.  Sacks locates the failure of such searches in science’s inability to address human freedom.  As he sees it:

“To the extent that there is a science of human behavior, to that extent there is an implicitly denial of the freedom of human behavior.”

   He sees this duality at work in Spinoza, Marx and Freud, who argued that human freedom is an illusion, but notes that “If freedom is an illusion, so is human dignity”.  Hence when human dignity is denied, the state is no longer viable.

Sacks agrees with the success of science in overcoming the superstitions that so often accompany religion, but notes that it does not replace the path to ‘meaning’ offered by religion.  He summarizes these two facets of human understanding:

 “Science takes things apart to understand how they work.  Religion puts things together to show what they mean.”

   For science to be effective, its statements must be objectively ‘proved’, and the means of doing so are accepted across the breadth of humanity.  Both the need for such rigor and the success of its application can be seen in the many aspects of increased human welfare (effectively advances in human evolution) as seen by Johan Norberg.   Clearly the ‘scientific method’ is a significant root of human evolution.

However, Norberg recognizes the cornerstones of human evolution as human freedom, innovation and relationship.  These three facets of the human person are not ‘provable’, and which existence, as we saw above, is even denied by many ‘empiricists’.  Since these facets are active in the sap of evolution, they also must be in the root.

At the level of the human person, Sacks observes that

“Almost none of the things for which people live can be proved.”

   He offers the example of ‘trust’.

“A person who manages the virtue of trust will experience a different life than one to whom every human relationship is a potential threat.”

      Therefore, any group in which all the members can trust one another is at a massive advantage to others.  As evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has argued, this is what religion does more powerfully than any other system.

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at the insights into Jonathan Sacks on the value of religion to human evolution, and of how these values, while critical to this evolution, are not to be found in our other great system of thought: science.

Next week, we will look at the other side of the coin to see how science offers its own critical value.  These two perspectives, when seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’, can lead to an insight in which they can collaborate in insuring our path to the future.

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

Today’s Post

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

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

Religion’s Role As An ‘Evolutionary Tool’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

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

Today’s Post

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

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

Evolution Everywhere

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

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

Today’s Post

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

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

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

Rethinking Morality 

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

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

This week we will address the first two.

 The Evolutionary Basis for Morality

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

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

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

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

The Evolution of Morality

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

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

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

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

The Next Post                              

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

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