Tag Archives: X Reinterpretation of Religion

April 30, 2020 – Understanding the Structure of Human Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw that one way to deal with the ‘noospheric’ risks (those associated with the risks brought on by the milieu of our collective humanity) was to better understand the noosphere itself and what part we play in it. In doing so, we are taking Teilhard’s approach which he explains:

“Evolution is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses which all systems must submit and satisfy from now on in order to be conceivable and true.”

   If we’re going to manage the risks, we must better understand the milieu that we are creating as we evolve. Teilhard’s approach to any subject is to place it into the context of universal evolution if we are to better understand it, and the noosphere is no exception.

This week we will continue down this path of looking at the noosphere in an evolutionary context to help situate ourselves in this process of understanding ‘complexification’ as it takes place in human evolution.

The Convergent Spiral of Evolution

Teilhard used the ‘sphere’ as a metaphor for understanding how the expansion of humanity compresses us as it reaches the equator of our metaphorical sphere. As a result, instead of continuing to spread, we begin to press in on ourselves, requiring replacement of those tools that served us so well in the ‘expansion’ phase with ones which will support our ‘compression’.

In the same way, he uses the metaphor of the spiral (Jan 9) to illustrate how ‘the stuff of the universe’ evolves as its components unite to increase their complexity at the same time that they are drawn ‘upwards to more complexity’ and ‘inwards towards closer union’. The spiral that Teilhard envisions isn’t just a simple coil, like a bedspring, it’s a spiral which converges as it rises over time.

Teilhard sees the cosmic energy which powers evolution, active in each element of the universe, acting in three ways:

  • First, he notes a ‘tangential’ component of this energy by which the granules of the ‘stuff of the universe’ have the potential of uniting with each other.
  • Secondly, he notes a ‘vertical’ component of this energy by which such union increases complexity
  • Thirdly he notes a ‘radial’ component of this energy by which the components become not only more complex, but more capable of increasing their unification and therefore becoming more complex .

Hence the convergence of the spiral pulls these components not only closer to each other but also closer to the ‘axis’ of the spiral (Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’). In doing so they become closer to the source of the universal energy by which all things become united in such a way as to differentiate themselves at the same time that they are enriched.

Thus, in this simple graphic metaphor, Teilhard shows the universe evolving as union brings complexity which in turn increases the potential for further union.

A very simple example of this tri-vectored evolutionary force can be seen in the Standard Model of Physics. Electrons can unite to become atoms, which by definition are more complex. The few types of ‘the stuff of the universe’ represented by electrons become the many types represented by atoms. The atoms in turn contain more potential for unification than did the electrons, and therefore become a larger set of granules which are not only more complex but whose potential is increased in such a way that they can unite to become highly complex molecules.

In such successive ‘trips around the spiral’ do we see the incredible simple electron evolving into the highly complex amino acid which is one of the building blocks of the cell.

Applying Teilhard’s spiral metaphor to humanity, we can understand ourselves as the most recent manifestation of such ‘stuff of the universe’, produced as the result of these three components of energy which interact to increase the complexity of the universe. We engage with ‘tangential’ energy when we relate to others; while enhancing and enriching our ‘persons’; we engage with ‘radial’ energy as we become more conscious of, and learn to cooperate with the ‘tangential’ energy which differentiates and enhances us, and in this cooperation both our persons and our ‘psychisms’ become more complete and enriched.

So, to the question of where are we in this universal journey from pure energy to some future state of increased complexity, Teilhard offers a suggestion: We are early in the process of learning both how relationships and cooperation are essential to our progress.

That said, can we quantify how such process can be seen?

Th Empirical Spiral

We are surely very early in the process of building an integrated understanding of all the facets of energy acting on us, much less an understanding of how to cooperate with them. Even so, empirical science can offer some insight.

While the light which science can show on the past may not yet be complete, Physics highlights the many ‘discontinuities’ which appear in the past evolution of ‘the stuff of the universe’, such as:

  • Matter appearing from pure energy
  • Atoms emerging from combinations of the first, simple grains of matter
  • Molecules emerging from an infinitude of combinations of atoms
  • Such molecules evolving to the relatively astonishing organization of cells
  • Cells continuing this unprecedented explosion into the more complex groupings found in neurons
  • Neurons find ways to compact themselves into centralized neurosystems, then to brains
  • Neocortices emerge from limbic brains, themselves from reptilian brains
  • Conscious brains become aware of their functionality.

Each of these transitions can be considered a ‘discontinuity’ because the conditions which preceded each of them, taken out of context, do not suggest the significant change in complexity which ensues. While science can describe the physical processes which are involved in the transitions, it cannot explain the increasing complexity that ensues. There is no current scientific explanation of how the ‘stuff of the universe’ manages its slow but very sure rise in complexity as it moves from the undifferentiated level of the big bang to the highly differentiated human which is uniquely capable of an awareness which is aware of itself.

While all these stages and their transitions can be described and to some extent understood by science, their increase in complexity following each discontinuity into human evolution requires a look into how the element of ‘consciousness’ can also be seen to evolve.

Next Week

This week we took a first step toward ‘understanding the noosphere’ by following Teilhard as he situates the noosphere in an evolutive context.   To begin this phase we saw how Teilhard used the metaphor of the ‘spiral’ to map out the manifestations of energy which power our evolution, and how their manifestations can be seen in the ‘discontinuities’ which have occurred in the history of the universe.

Next week we will look further into the metaphor of the ‘spiral’ as we carry it forward into the realm of consciousness.

April 23, 2020 – Managing The Risks of Evolution

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Today’s Post

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

This week we’ll continue exploring what’s involved in managing ‘Noospheric risks’ by placing them (as Teilhard has) into an ‘evolutionary’ context.

Seeing Human History in an ‘Evolutionary’ Context

As Teilhard suggests, one way to understand who and where we are is to place ourselves into the context of universal evolution. This includes understanding how our two great human enterprises, religion and science, occur in in the flow of human history.

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

As we saw in posts on The History of Religion , a record of the rise of human ‘left brain’ thinking can be seen in the Greek development of philosophic thought.

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

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

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

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

As Sacks puts it,

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

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

From the Religious Side

One way to understand Teilhard (or any such ‘synthetic’ thinker, such as Blondel or Rohr) is to apply their concepts to such traditional ‘dualisms’. We saw in last week’s post how Teilhard’s thoughts on spirituality show one such application, and how in just a few words, the traditional dualism of spirit and matter is overcome. We have seen many other examples over the last many posts

Thus, we can see that putting traditional science and religion concepts into a truly ‘universal’ context, such as Teilhard proposes, can move us unto a mode of thinking which sees things much more clearly and less self-contradictory than we could in the past. Teilhard saw such an enterprise as

“A clearer disclosure of God in the world.”

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

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

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

From the Empirical Side

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

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

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

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

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

Two hundred years is an evolutionary ‘blink’, to be sure, but by ordinary human standards, represents many lifetimes, and an incessant search for how this ideal of human freedom and relationships should be played out (or in some cases, stomped out) in human society.

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

The Next Post

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

Next week we will take a look at where we are today in this process.

January 23, 2020 – Moving Evolution Forward

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Today’s Post

Last week we added the concept of ‘spirituality ’to our look at the secular side of such concepts as God, Jesus and the Trinity. We saw this concept through Teilhard’s eyes as “ neither a meta- nor an epi- phenomenon’ but instead as ‘the phenomenon” which underlies the steady progression of ‘complexification’ as it rises from inter-atomic forces to those forces by which we ourselves continue the process of universal evolution.

Given these insights into the scaffolding of evolution, this week we go to the other end (at least so far) of evolution as it manifests itself in our personal complexification and in the progression of our species toward yet further complexity. What are the ‘nuts and bolts’ that hold this scaffolding together so that it can continue to progress through the human species?

This week’s post summarizes several posts that address what Teilhard referred to ‘Articulating the noosphere’ as the development of guidelines for forging our evolution.

‘Articulating the Noosphere’

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

  • The ‘lithosphere’, the grouping of matter which form the base of our planet
  • The ‘atmosphere,’ which consists of the gasses which emerge to surround it
  • The ‘hydrosphere, which forms as the atmosphere produces water
  • The ‘biosphere,’ the layers of living things which cover it
  • And finally, the ‘noosphere’, indicative of the layer of human activity which pervades it

Today’s controversies over such subjects as ecology, global economy and global warming are evidence of the emerging awareness of just how significantly the noosphere has become in the evolution of our planet and how important it is to understand it..

Teilhard notes that all religions attempt to identify ‘how we should be if we would be what we can be’. With religion’s strong infusion of myths, superstitions, dualities, and entanglements with the state that are inevitable over such long periods of development (arising in the prescientific world of thousands of years ago), its accumulated guidelines for continuing our evolution are problematic. Thus we are left today with inconsistent and even contradictory guidelines for our continued development.

Science does not offer much help in this area. Its exclusion of the ‘spiritual’ (see last post) nature of the person offer little support for the faith and insight needed to deal with the daily burden of human life.

Putting this into perspective, Teilhard notes that we are moving as a species from passive experience of evolution to actively affecting it. It is becoming more necessary to use our neocortex brain to modulate the instinctive impulses of our lower brains, impulses which were successful in raising the complexity of our pre-human ancestors, but which now must be channeled to insure our evolutionary continuation.

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

“And, conventional and impermanent as they may seem on the surface, what are the intricacies of our social forms, if not an effort to isolate little by little what are one day to become the structural laws of the noosphere.

In their essence, and provided they keep their vital connection with the current that wells up from the depths of the past, are not the artificial, the moral and the juridical simply the hominized versions of the natural, the physical and the organic?”

Teilhard refers to identifying these skills, those necessary for evolution to continue through us, as ‘articulating the noosphere’. These skills are reflected in examples of behavior that are passed from generation to generation via the cultural ‘DNA’ of religion.

Religion is not the only place that such ‘noospheric articulations’ can be found. As we saw in the post of September 14 on the ‘secular basis of spirituality’, a secular example of spirituality can be found in a fundamental axiom of our government. It is at the basis of the idea of a ‘representative government’, and often described as the ‘will of the people’ so essential to democratic institutions. Thomas Jefferson was very clear in his concept of the validity of ‘the power of the people ‘and ‘consensus in government’ as ‘articulations of the noosphere’:

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

This exercise of ‘trust of the people to govern themselves” is a secular example of an ‘articulation of the noosphere’. When we engage in such activity as the process of voting, we are implicitly connecting with one of the threads of evolution as it runs through human evolution. This activity is effectively a ‘secular sacrament’.

Some Specific Articulations

As we saw last week, ‘spirituality’ is the underpinning of ‘matter’. In order to better understand ourselves and our role in evolution we must understand how this dyadic energy works. Following Teilhard’s insight that

“..the artificial, the moral and the juridical (are) simply the hominized versions of the natural, the physical and the organic”

any ‘articulation’ of the structure of the noosphere that we undertake must first identify the places in our lives in which such ‘spirituality’ (or as Davies would have it, ‘software’) manifests itself so that we can better cooperate with it and thus strengthen our own journey toward fuller being.

Almost all religions attempt to articulate the noosphere by traditional rituals which help address

such things as funerals, pilgrimages, social work and meditation. The Western ‘sacraments’ are but one example.

The Western church made an early effort to identify this ‘articulation’ in its concept of ‘grace’. Using the term, grace to indicate the manifestation of spirituality in human life, this early effort identifies those human activities where it is believed to be most active. These activities are known as ‘sacraments’.

Thanks to the-all-too human Catholic attempts to control (and profit from) these activities and to Luther for recognizing the evil in doing so, the ‘sacraments’ have little attraction today outside the Catholic church. Their reinterpretation in secular terms might seem forced, but in terms of Teilhard’s context of evolution, they can be seen as highlighting where the agency of spirituality, Davies’ ‘software’, is most active in critical human life events. They identify the human activity that is most likely to move us forward in our quest for both personal and cultural complexity.

Such reinterpretation sees the seven sacraments of baptism, confirmation, eucharist, matrimony, penance, ‘holy orders’ and the ‘last rites’ taking on new relevancy as the recognition of the ‘sanctity’ (proximity to the ‘tree of evolution’) of the human person, human maturity, human society, human relationships, human reconciliation, human focus on spirituality and the end of human life. New, more secular, sacraments are still appearing in the West, such as the well-being of nature (ecology).

Sacraments simply point the way to the critical points necessary to continuation of the evolution of our species. They are not divine intrusion into nature, but signposts to those activities most important to our continued evolution. Such signposts aid the navigation our lives by the compass of, and in cooperation with, the energy of evolution as it flows through our lives.

The Next Post

Having seen how spirituality is a phenomenon essential to the process of evolution as it lifts the universe to ‘its current level of complexity’., this week we looked at how such spirituality can be found in human life.

Next week we will continue our summary of the blog, “The Secular Side of God” taking another look at religion from Teilhard’s vantage point of seeing religion not as ‘anti science’ but as, at its core, valuable not only of sharpening our sense of evolutionary direction, but providing science with a new hermeneutic which opens its study of the human person to wider and more relevant vistas.

January 16, 2020 – TheSecular Side of Spirituality

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Today’s Post

For the last few weeks we have been summarizing the part of the blog, “The Secular Side of God, in which we have seen how from Teilhard’s perspective, the traditional concepts of God and the Trinity can be reinterpreted into facets of universal evolution. Last week we saw how they play together in Teilhard’s convergent spiral, manifested in the ‘hominized’ vectors of Faith, Hope and Love, the human version of the universal agencies of unity, convergence and complexification, and thus continue the rise of complexity through the human person.

Throughout this journey, we have touched on the idea of ‘spirituality’, assuming that at every rung of evolution some sort of underlying agency moves the universe, and ourselves, from less to more complexity.

This week we will look at this commonly used term in more depth as we address the ‘secular side of spirituality’. The posts of September 14 through 26 October, 2017 are summarized this week.

The Evolution of ‘Spirituality’

In opposition to the traditional Western concept of spirituality as a quality of ‘supernature’, in which reality is dualistically divided into ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’. Teilhard sees only one reality, not two, and things traditionally relegated to the ‘supernatural’ are simply things that we have not yet recognized as ‘natural’

Teilhard takes the key underlying metric of ‘complexification of the universe’ as his starting point. As many have objected, how can we make this assumption? Teilhard’s answer is that if the universe did not evolve in the direction of increasing complexity, it would have been ‘dead on arrival’, and we would not be here to debate it. In his words, “complexification is not a phenomenon of the universe, it is the phenomenon”

Hence if we follow this thread of increasing complexity, we can better understand ‘how things come to be what they are’ and in doing so, better understand how we fit in.

In Teilhard’s day, this concept had yet to take root in traditional Physics. Science restricted evolution to the biological era, via the Darwinistic principle of ‘Natural Selection’. Teilhard was one of the few thinkers to question what happened in the preceding ten billion or so years that prepared the inanimate ‘stuff of the universe’ for integrating in such a way as to produce living cells.
Teilhard’s insight was that each particle of the universe somehow had the innate capability of joining with other ‘like’ particles to effect an increase in complexity in the resulting new particle. It wasn’t until the late 1960’s before empirical scientists, such as Ilya Prigogine, began to address the mystifying capability of natural things to ‘self-organize’, such as weather patterns (tornadoes), crystals, in their intricate patterns, and many other phenomena.

In the next few decades, scientists began to build an approach to physics which saw inanimate particles as inclusive of ‘information’. An example of this ‘information’ is how the complex DNA molecule provides ‘instructions’ for the conversion of nucleic acids into proteins, which would ultimately provide energy to the cell.

Paul Davies, who elaborates on this implicit factor in his book, “The 5th Miracle”, asks the question,

“How can mindless molecules, capable only of pushing and pulling their intermediate neighbors, cooperate and sustain something as ingenious as a living organism?”

   He answers his question:

“If I am right that the key to biogenesis lies, not with chemistry but with the formation of a particular logical and informational architecture, then the crucial step involved the creation of an information processing, system, employing software control.”

   Thus empirical science is being led to consider that there is something in material particles which contains what Davies analogically refers to as ‘software’. This ‘software’ is precisely what Teilhard understood as the underlying principle which guides things to unite in such a way as to increase their complexity.
Davies is quick to point out that science does not yet have an empirical understanding of exactly how this ‘software’ is embedded in the ‘hardware’ of matter, but like Richard Dawkins, he believes that it will one day be discovered.

The Spiritual Basis of Evolution

We have seen in our secular perspective of God how the principle metric of evolution is the increasing of complexity over time, and how this increasing complexity has yet to be quantified by science but yet is critical to science’s understanding of how the universe unfolds. We have also seen how this increase in complexity underpins the principle by which entities of a given order of complexity can unite in such a way that the ensuing entities are of a higher order.

Teilhard sees an energy at work by which this happens at every rung of evolution. At the rung of fundamental particles, it can be seen in the effecting of electrons from quarks, then atoms from electrons, protons and neutrons, then molecules from atoms. At the rung of the human person, it is the energy which unites us in such a way that we become more complete. At the human level this energy manifests itself as ‘love’.

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

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

“Spirituality is not a recent accident, arbitrarily or fortuitously imposed on the edifice of the world around us; it is a deeply rooted phenomenon, the traces of which we can follow with certainty backwards as far as the eye can reach, in the wake of the movement that is drawing us forward. ..it is neither super-imposed nor accessory to the cosmos, but that it quite simply represents the higher state assumed in and around us by the primal and indefinable thing that we call, for want of a better name, the ‘stuff of the universe’. Nothing more; and also nothing less. Spirit is neither a meta- nor an epi- phenomenon, it is the phenomenon.”

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

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

   Teilhard is making an essential point about spirit and matter here. He sees matter evolving to higher levels of complexity (‘synthesizing’) under the influence of the energy of complexification (‘spirit’), and the increased complexity which results from such synthesis is therefore capable of more complex interaction, which itself is capable of closer union (See last week’s post on the convergent spiral of evolution). This increased material level of complexity is a manifestation of an increased level of spirit. To Teilhard, spirit is “Nothing more; and also nothing less” than the energy of evolution, or in Davie’s analogy, “The ‘software’ which drives the ‘hardware’ to more complexity”.

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

The Next Post

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

Next week we will continue our summary of the blog, “The Secular Side of God” by addressing the specific aspects of evolution as it is appears in human life. We have seen how evolution can be understood both by science and a reinterpreted religion as an increase in complexity leading up to the era of biologic life, but what happens when we introduce the concept of “Natural Selection”? Does Natural Selection replace ‘complexification’ as the key agency in evolution once the cell arrives? How do these two phenomena play out in human life? How can we become aware of evolution as it occurs in our lives?

January 9, 2020 – The Trinity and the Convergent Spiral of Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week we completed a look at how the concept of the ‘Trinity’ addresses three facets of the ‘ground of being’ that underlays the entire universe and has, as Richard Dawkins suggests, “raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence”.

This week we will look a little deeper into this agency, seeing it through a model proposed by Teilhard which illustrates how these three facets work together to effect this ‘raising’ over time.

This post is a summary of those posted from September 2 May to 16 May 2019.

The Universal Spiral of Evolution

Teilhard’s insight into evolution moves the subject from a biological process on a single planet which moves life toward manifestations that survive over time (Natural Selection) to one which increases the complexity of its products beginning at the ‘big bang’ and continues to this day, not only on this planet but at every place in the universe. As we have seen, he sees three factors are at work at each step of the the elements of ‘the stuff of the universe’ to effect this increase. He proposes this model as a way of viewing this process

In this simple figure, each element of evolution is acted on by three ‘vectors’ of evolutionary energy.

In the first vector, a, the element engages in union with other elements of the same rank, This unifying force produces a new product whose measure of complexity is slightly increased from the ‘parent’ elements, such as the atom which is a product of the union among electrons, protons, and neutrons. Teilhard refers to this vector as ‘tangential’.

The second vector, b, is an indication of the force which increases the potential for further union and complexity of the new product. Teilhard’ term for this is ‘radial’.

The resulting magnitude of complexity of the new product is indicated in the third vector, c,

By which the elements move forward and upward on the spiral as they increase their complexity.

Teilhard sees this convergent spiral as illustrating the process of evolution at every stage of every component of evolution in the entire cosmos. All components are acted upon by these three forces.

He notes, however, that every stage of evolution, while these three forces apply they appear in different ways to effect the outcomes of closer union, increased capacity for union and as a result, increased complexity. The forces of evolution by which atoms result from unifications of electrons, protons and neutrons, for example, while conforming in general to his model, are manifested quite differently from those which effect the evolution from atoms to molecules, and radically different from the appearance of the cell, the neuron, consciousness, and finally consciousness aware of itself: the human person. As the level of complexity increases, articulating and understanding how the three vectors play out becomes increasingly difficult.

This model, while explanatory of the underlying process of complexification as it rises throughout the entire universe, is not universally accepted by science. The complaint is that it can be seen as ‘teleological’, and hence a ‘back door’ intrusion of religion into the field of science.

There are, however, scientists who empirically inquire into such tangible complexification, such as Paul Davies, who, in his book, “The Cosmic Blueprint”, says

“I have been at great pains to argue that the steady unfolding of organized complexity in the universe is a fundamental property of nature”. (underline mine.)

   And, as we have seen, even the more clear-headed atheists, while dismissing religion as a valid school of thought, can refer to a process which

“…eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence. “

The Spiral of Evolution in the Human Person

If, as Teilhard asserts, the basic three vectors of the fundamental forces of evolution apply as well to humans as to atoms, how can they be seen as active in our lives?

If the three facets or ‘vectors’ identified above are still active in the human species, how do they manifest themselves in our lives?

We saw in the last post how the concept of a ‘triune God’ can be understood as the basic forces of evolution working in three interconnected ways, identified by Teilhard as ‘tangential’, ‘radial’ and resulting ‘vertical’, the increase of complexity.   Teilhard refers these three ‘facets’, or ‘vectors’ as that seen in one of Paul’s great summaries of the teaching of Jesus: the ‘theological virtues’.

The first of Paul’s three human components of this converging spiral is ‘Love’, the component of unity.   Love is the ‘hominized’ (Teilhard’s term) characteristic of the vector labelled ‘a’ in the diagram. In doing so, Teilhard frees the concept of ‘love’ from its popular understanding as a strong emotion and allows it to flower as the energy of the power of evolution to unite its products in ways that increase their complexity. To Teilhard, Love is less an act of emotion or instinct that encourages our relationships and more one of uniting us in such a way that we become more what it is possible for us to become. From this perspective, love is ‘ontological’: to love is to become. It is the energy which unites in such a way as to move us forward on the spiral.

Paul’s second component is that of ‘Faith’, the hominized appearance of ‘b’ in the figure above.   Faith is the pull of our lives toward the axis of evolution and hence the human response to the universal evolutional principle of complexification.

As we become more adept at ‘articulating the noosphere’, we begin to better understand the structure and the workings of the reality in which we are enmeshed. Such articulations of the universe will be undermined, however, if they are not preceded by a ‘faith’ that they exist at all. While this sounds like religious terminology, imagine if Newton had not first believed that there was some objective, measurable and most of all ‘comprehensible’ force by which objects moved from ‘static’ to ‘dynamic states. Faith is the first step toward increasing our grasp of reality and enhancing our response to the energy of evolution.

The third of these three components is ‘Hope’, ‘c’ in the figure. Hope is the result of engaging in Love and Faith which results in the opening our eyes to a future now seen as pregnant with possibility. It encourages us on our journey toward our potential for increased complexity as we move forward (and therefore upward) on the spiral.

One of the gifts of evolution in the human is the ability to look into the future, as murky and risky as that might be. If our look into the future is pessimistic and without hope, such negativity inhibits our movement up the spiral, toward a future in which the results of our growth are bleak, the fruit of our love is rejection, and we see ourselves as hopelessly inadequate to build a full life. Without hope, the evolutionary power of love, itself guaranteed over the fourteen or so billion years of universal becoming, is diminished.   Hope is that component of evolution by which we ‘rise’ as we move forward on the spiral.

The Next Post

For the past several weeks we have been tracing the traditional approach to God, Jesus and the Trinity. Fundamentals of Western religion, through the eyes of Teilhard to their secular sides. This week we looked at the whole picture in terms of Teilhard’s ‘spiral of evolution, showing how these concepts emerge as manifestations of the forces of universal evolution, and further how they can be seen to work in our individual lives.

Throughout this journey, we have touched on the idea of ‘spirituality’, assuming some sort of underlying agency which moves the universe, and ourselves, from less to more complexity.

Next week we will look at this commonly used term in more depth as we address the ‘secular side of spirituality’.

 

December 26, 2019 – The Secular Side of The Trinity

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw Jesus from our secular perspective, and noted how quickly the highly integrated understanding found in John became a victim of the endless human trend toward ‘dualism’. From our secular perspective, we saw how John’s vision strengthened the immediacy (immanence) of ‘the ground of being’ in human life and how Jesus was the ‘signpost’ for this spark of universal becoming which could be found in all the products of evolution, but only capable of being recognized as such by the human person.

This week we’ll take a look at the third stage of this unique evolution of the concept of God: the Trinity.

Today’s post is a summary of the posts from August 3 to August 17, 2017.

The History of the Trinity

As Bart Ehrman notes in his book, “How Jesus Became God”, unlike God and Jesus the Trinity isn’t addressed as such in any of the books of the Old or New Testament.   As we have seen, the understanding of God and Jesus in these books has evolved over time, but the concept of a ‘third person’ wasn’t developed until late in the first three hundred years of the new Christian church.

It wasn’t until this point in the evolution of the early church’s theology that this agent began to be considered divine in somehow the same way that Jesus was being considered.

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

And, in the same way that the controversy over the nature of Jesus was debated before the Nicene council, that of the Trinity continued to be debated. After the Arian controversy was resolved by the Nicean council, the debate moved from the deity of Jesus to the equality of the ‘Spirit’ with the ‘Father’ and ‘Son’. Was this new person, the ‘Spirit’, equal or inferior to the other two? How could it be integrated when it was absent from scripture?

This controversy was brought to a head at the Council of Constantinople (381) which affirmed that the Spirit was indeed of the same ‘substance and nature’ of God, but like Jesus, a separate ‘person’. While perhaps theologically acceptable, Karen Armstrong concludes in her book, “A History of God”,

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

Richard Rohr agrees with Armstrong that of all the Christian statements of belief, that of the Trinity seems furthest removed from human life.

So, what secular sense can we make of this? Can the ‘secular’ sense make ‘common’ sense?

The Secular Side of the Trinity

From our secular viewpoint, when put into Teilhard’s context of universal evolution, the concept of the Trinity becomes not only much simpler but more relevant to human life. Looking through Teilhard’s (and before him, Blondel’s) eyes, we have seen how God can be reinterpreted from a supernatural being which is the ‘over and against of man’ who creates, rewards and punishes, to the ‘ground of being’, the basis for the universe’s potential for evolution via increase in complexity. And applying this perspective to Jesus, we saw last week how he can be reinterpreted from a sacrifice necessary to satisfy such a distant God, to the personification of this increase in complexity as it rises through cosmic evolution to eventually manifest itself as the human person: the ‘signpost to God’.

In the same way we can see a third facet of this ‘axis of evolution’, the ‘Spirit’, as the energy which unites the products of evolution in such a way as to effect their increase in complexity. From this perspective, the ‘Spirit’ is simply the “the agent of complexification in evolution.”

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

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

  • ‘Father’ as the underlying principle of the unfolding of the universe in general, but as the principle of this becoming as it emerges after long periods of time as the ‘person’.
  • ‘Son’ as the manifestation of the product of evolution that has become ‘person’
  • ‘Spirit’ as the energy by which this ‘becoming’ takes the form of increasing complexity which leads to the ‘person’

Or, more succinctly

  • The ‘Father’ acts to move the universe along its evolutionary path.
  • Jesus is the blueprint for this action.
  • Spirit is the agency by which such action results in increased complexity

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

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

   There’s something very revolutionary about this assertion. Before the advent of the human, universal ‘complexification’ rose through the outcome of such unification: increased complexity only occurred in the antecedent to the union, the precedents are left unchanged.

This can be seen in the early stages of universal evolution where more complex atoms result from the unification of less complex electrons and more complex molecules from less complex atoms. In the human person, the act of love increases the level of complexity in the uniters themselves. It is in this latest manifestation of the energies of the universe that we ourselves grow when we participate in love. So much more than the emotion which we experience when we unite, this unification effects our personal coming to be of what we are capable of. The point that Teilhard makes many times in his writing is that love is more ontological than it is emotional.

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

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

Thus, Teilhard locates the ’Spirit’ squarely in the axis of evolution, as the manifestation of the energy which powers evolution through its rising levels of complexity. We can see in Science’s “Standard Model’ how this energy is manifest in forces such as the atomic forces, electricity and magnetism, gravity and chemistry as they all collaborate in raising the universe from the level of pure energy to that of matter sufficiently complex to provide the building blocks of life. We can also see how this energy continues to manifest itself in raising the complexity of living matter through the process of Natural Selection. Understanding the ‘Spirit’ is simply recognizing how evolutionary products aware of their consciousness (human persons) can cooperate with this energy to be united in such a way as to advance their individual complexity (their personal growth) and therefore continue to advance the complexity of their species.

Last week we noted that Richard Rohr decried how the increasing structure and dogmatism of the Christian church increased the distance between man and God by decreasing the relevance of its message. With our secular perspective, we can see how it is possible to understand the Trinity in terms which are relevant to life.

The Next Post

This week we saw that how adding the ‘Spirit’ to the ‘Father’ and the ‘Son’ completes an understanding of the ‘the ground of being’, the basis of the universe’s ‘coming to be’ in general. More importantly, we saw how we can begin to understand how this agent of evolution which has “raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence” (Richard Dawkins) works in our individual lives, as our personal dimension of the ‘axis of evolution’.

There is still another aspect of the concept of ‘The Trinity’ to explore. Understanding that the universe ‘is raised..to complexity” by the three-vectored actions of the ‘ground of being’, Teilhard proposes a ‘model’ how they act in concert to effect such raise in complexity. Next week we will look into this model as we address the “Convergent Spiral of Evolution.

December 12 – Psychology as Secular Meditation

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Today’s Post

Last week we expanded Teilhard’s approach to meditation into discrete steps by which we can make contact with our ‘core of being’, and through this with the ‘ground of being’ which underlays universal evolution, as moving toward a general search for the “Secular Side of God”.

We noted that such an approach might sound ‘overly religious’, and perhaps out of place in a ‘secular’ approach to this ‘ground of being’. Even though, as we noted, it requires no religious mindset, it is also true that such religious perspective, warts and all, has seeped into Western secular culture with its increasing focus on the importance of the ‘person’ as well as the idea of ‘connection’ to both ourselves and our ‘mileu’.

In this general approach of looking at this search from the secular point of view, this week we will take a look at how a form of “secular meditation” can be seen in the secular empirical practice of ‘psychology’. We’ll look at psychology from the two major approaches of Freud and the ‘Existentialists’, and compare these approaches in light of Teilhard’s context of evolution.

This segment of the summary of the blog, “The Secular Side of God” can be found in the posts from November 10, 2016 to January 5, 2017

The Emergence of Psychology

Beginning with the rising tide of humanity’s awareness of itself as ‘personal’, summarized in Karen Armstrong’s book, “The Great Transformation”, humans began to apply empirical tactics to their understanding of the world about them. This new approach to reality inevitably led to the human person itself as a subject of this enquiry.

Even the most casual study of human history, however, reveals a ‘dark side’ to humanity. All of the great books of ancient religions recognize it and warn against it.   It’s not surprising that the first approaches to making secular sense of human behavior would have focused on this ‘dark side’

One of the first thinkers to attempt a systematic empirical approach to the human ‘psyche’ was Sigmund Freud, applying the new, empirical and objective methods of science to the making and testing of hypotheses of human growth and relationships. His hermeneutic, however, was more in line with an understanding derived more from the negative interpretations of Lucretius and Hobbes than the positive approaches of Plato, Plotinus and Augustine. While Freud wove a phenomenal cloth of hypotheses about the makeup of human nature, his assumption of the danger of the core of humanity colored his entire approach. In his view, the human person was, at its core, very dangerous indeed.

Freud was the first to systematically apply the emerging practices of science to study of the human person, and assembled a magnificent edifice of concepts, terminology and theory which was applicable to diagnosis and treatment of human emotional problems. Unfortunately, his premise of the dangerous nature of the basic human, combined with his disdain of organized religion, colored this remarkable undertaking with a deep-seated pessimism that was to permeate his ‘school’ of psychology.

Freud’s view of human ontology was surely influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, in which the human evolved from a non-human (animal) ancestor. He held that this evolution explained the source of our ‘dark’ side, and hence had to be overcome if we were to rid ourselves of our ‘psychoses’. In his words:

“Eros and destructiveness are intertwined within all erotic relationships. Love is not at the basis of everything unless you add hate to it”.

   While Teilhard could say of the voice that flows from our most inner core

“It is I, be not afraid”

   Freud would say

“It is Ego, be very afraid”

   Freud’s negative assumption of human nature can be seen in that bastion of European Christianity, Martin Luther. Luther himself, echoing Calvin’s assessment o “total depravity”, expressed his opinion of the basic nature of the human person when he said

“Men are like piles of manure covered by Christ”.

This approach permeated many expressions of Western Christianity, and no doubt highly influenced Freud.

So Freud, while pioneering the application of the objective secularism of science to the study of the human person, nonetheless arrives at a position at odds with Teilhard’s proposition that the kernel at the core of the person is a trustworthy manifestation of the same agent of rising complexity afoot in the evolution of the universe. However, we can find agreement between Freud and Teilhard on several things, such as the existence of a personal core of energy which underlies human growth and relationships, and understanding love as manifested in the reciprocal exchange of this energy between individual persons.

Teilhard and Freud sharply disagree on the nature and source of this energy, and the role that this reciprocal exchange could have in positive growth, maturity, and even the creation of the person involved in its exchange.  The difference between these two schools of thought, one positive and one negative, sharpens further when they are applied to human relationships at te social level.

The ‘Positive’ Schools of Thought

Even though Freud correctly recognized the ‘Dark Side’, his assumption that the kernel of the person is dangerous does not take into account that it is through engagement with this kernel that the human evolves from emotional immaturity toward personal wholeness. It’s not that the child’s essence is negative, but that his growth towards maturity is incomplete.

After the Second World War, a second, decidedly non-Freudian approach to psychology began to emerge. While agreeing with Freud that it is possible to have a ‘science of the human’, it is not necessary to ‘fragmentize’ him as was done by Freud. This ‘Existential’ approach, as it came to be known, focused less on understanding behavior by reference to a predetermined Freudian structure and more on understanding how persons themselves subjectively experience reality. Psychology began to move from analysis and diagnosis to guided inner search.

Thinkers such as Rollo May, Abraham Maslow and Ashley Mongatu were among the first to focus on the development of human potential and placing humans in an evolutionary context, believing that the negative and antisocial aspects of behavior discovered by Freud were more evidence of immaturity than as proof of an unredeemable core.

A more recent example of this approach can be seen in Carl Rogers, who summarized his approach to psychology:

“How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?”

   instead of,

“How can I analyze, diagnose, treat, cure, or change this person?”

   The goal of both approaches is betterment of the individual, but the methods are clearly different.

Rogers takes a view of our personal evolution that is quite different from Freud. He assumes that each human person comes into the world with a quantum of potency, and that instead of being broken, he is incomplete and capable of personal evolution –growth– towards increased being (or as Karen Armstrong would put it, “more completely possession of one’s self”).

It should be noted that Rogers’ articulation of the emerging characteristics of a maturing person are purely secular. His methods are those of science: observe, theorize, and test. They require no adherence to religious belief (and are often considered antithetical to some), but rather a basic, fundamental belief in the trustworthy nature of the basic self, and a willingness to cooperate with it.

In Rogers’ therapeutic relationship between therapist and patient, concepts such as belief, faith and love, commonly associated with religion, take on a new, secular, and much more relevant meaning.

Rogers’ approach offers a structure for a true, secular, employment of secular meditation as a means to self-discovery. 

Freud, Rogers and Teilhard in a Nutshell

Freud applies science to atheism, “It is Id, be very afraid”

Rogers applies experience to science, “It is me, I am trustworthy”

Tielhard applies science to religion. “It is I, be not afraid”

As Teilhard affirms, finding ourselves is finding the universal thread of evolution that rises in us. As Rogers discovers, the legacy that we receive as human persons can be trusted to power our growth towards more complete being. From this insight, God can not only be found but, the ‘ground of being’ can be embraced.

Teilhard and Rogers offer an approach for such a process:

After identifying God as the agent of evolution,

by which things increase in complexity over time,

through which the process of evolution is possible,

from the big bang to the human,

as products of evolution, even in our lives,

to which we can come in contact

by searching for the kernel of ourselves

using the emerging insights of science

The Twelve-Step program of Alcoholics Anonymous is another example of ‘secular meditation’. In creating this program in 1935, Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, with typical American pragmatism, designed a truly practical and deliberately secular program based on the Existentialist’s premise that humans, at their core, were redeemable. Several decades of practice of this approach has established significant objective evidence that the assumptions of ‘The Twelve Steps’ program are indeed valid.

The Next Post

This week we took a look at how the basic Western understanding of the value of the human person has developed into a hermeneutic for a secular approach to a ‘science of the person’. Granted that many scientists take a reductive approach to such science, seeing the human person as the organized activity of aggregated molecules, nonetheless those seeking to apply the methods of science to the improvement of human lives have adopted many of the core values of Christianity without being shackled by its belief in the ‘supernatural’.

Next week we will begin to apply our ‘principles of reinterpretation’ to some of the subjects of religion In our search for “The Secular Side of God’. The first such subject will be the “person of Jesus’.

December 5 Secular Meditation: Finding Ourselves, Finding God, Without Religion

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This Week

Last week we made a first cut at seeing how meditation can be understood as a secular approach to finding ‘the ground of being’ in its manifestation as ‘the ground of us’. Following Blondel’s assertion that “Every statement about God is effectively a statement about man”, we can see that every step toward God is therefore a step towards ourselves

This week we will move on to summarizing the blog, “The Secular Side of God” in looking more closely at Teilhard’s secular approach to ‘meditation’.

The Secular Side of Meditation

We noted last week that the very idea of ‘meditation’ conjures much negative association with the more empirical among us- seen as a decidedly right-brained excess of emotion requiring disdain for ‘life as lived’, disconnection from social life and ultimately self-centered. Teilhard’s example from last week, however, shows how the act of meditation can be understood as a clearer look at ourselves, or as he puts it, a “clearer disclosure of God in the world”.

Teilhard’s example can be expanded into a straightforward, secular roadmap for this process:

Step 1: Recognizing the facets of our person

“I took the lamp and, leaving the zones of everyday occupations and relationships, where my identity, my perception of myself is so dependent on my profession, my roles- where everything seems clear, I went down into my inmost self, to the deep abyss whence I feel dimly that my power of action emanates.”

Here Teilhard explores the ‘scaffolding’ of his person: those influences which affect the development of personality: beliefs, faiths and fears. How much of who we are and what we believe have we consciously accepted, as opposed to those facades which we have constructed as a protective skin to ward off the dangers of life?

Step 2: Accepting where we are

”At each step of the descent, with the removal of layers of my identity defined from without, a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me.”

What happens when we begin to recognize these facades and scaffoldings, recognizing which ones move us forward, and which hold us back, and try to imagine the consequence of divesting ourselves of them? How can we ultimately trust that which lies beneath is indeed ‘trustworthy’? Upon what can we place our faith in our capacity for the ‘dangerous actions’ that we must undertake each day?

Step 3: Acknowledging our powerlessness

“And when I had to stop my descent because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet, and from it flowed, arising I know not from where, the current which I dare to call my life”.

This is a difficult step for most of us. Whatever skills we have learned, tactics that we have developed and beliefs that we have forged, we have no control over the basic person we are or the energy of cosmic becoming that incessantly flows into us.

Step 4: Accepting powerlessness

“My self is given to me far more than it is formed by me.” “In the last resort, the profound life, the fontal life, the new-born life, escapes our life entirely.”

 This step is even more difficult. Beneath the trepidation of the many actions required of us in our daily lives is the fear of their consequences. Will we be able to successfully deal with the consequences of our decisions without the armors of ego, self-centeredness and emotional distance? Are we even able to predict the consequences of our actions, much less survive dealing with them? Ultimately, in spite of our professions, families and friends are we not alone?

Step 5: Trusting the ground of being

“At that moment, I felt the distress characteristic to a particle adrift in the universe, the distress which makes human wills founder daily under the crushing number of living things and of stars. And if something saved me, it was hearing the voice of the Gospel, guaranteed by divine success, speaking to me from the depth of the night:

                                                     “It is I, be not afraid.”

How do we dare believe that whatever is at the source of our being, it is nonetheless on our side? How is it possible to see this ‘fontal’ life which pours into us at each moment as an individual instantiation of the general forces which have brought (and are still bringing) the universe into being? How do we dare trust that these forces, welling up over billions of years, will continue to well up in ourselves? How can we begin to recognize and more importantly cooperate with this inner source of energy so that we can be carried onto a more complete possession of ourselves?

Secular Meditation

There is nothing religious about the first four steps. The assumptions about the nature of the universe that science and biology assert, once the phenomenon of increasing complexity is added, are all that is necessary to state them. The essential Teilhard insight is that the addition of this phenomenon, while not a specific scientific theory, is not only necessary for inclusion of the human person in the scope of scientific enquiry, it is also necessary for the process of evolution itself. A universe without increasing complexity would not evolve.

Thus this line of thought, that a search for the ground of being of the universe entails an understanding of the ground of our being, while finding a stronger (if somewhat unfocussed) voice in religion, is not mute in the empirical processes of science.

An example of this voice can be seen in the similarity between these five steps and the very successful but deliberately secular “Ten Steps” of Alcoholics Anonymous. The foundational step of exploring and learning to trust one’s self is at the basis of much of Western secular thinking. Psychology itself, as we will address next week, can therefore be seen as ‘secular meditation’.

The Next Post

This week we expanded Teilhard’s approach to meditation into discrete steps by which we can make contact with our ‘core of being’, and through this with the ‘ground of being’, as moving toward a general search for the “Secular Side of God”.

In this general approach of looking at this search from the secular point of view, next week we will take a look at how psychology can be seen as a form of “secular meditation”.

November 28 Relating to God

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Today’s Post

Last week, in moving on with summarizing the blog, “The Secular Side of God” we made a first cut at applying our ‘principles of reinterpretation’ to the basic idea of ‘God’ as the ‘Ground of Being’, which belief underpins all religions.   But we noted that by taking Teilhard’s approach to understanding God in the context of universal evolution, we see the objection raised by Carl Sagan, reinforced by Richard Dawkins:

“If by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying…it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”

While setting aside, for a moment, that all of the ‘laws’ which ‘govern the universe’ would in fact include the human person, the question is nonetheless valid. This week we will summarize the segments of the Blog from 15 September2016 to 2 February 2017, which address relating to the ‘Ground of Being’.

Why Should It Be Difficult?

If, as Teilhard asserts, the human is simply the latest branch of the ‘axis of Evolution’, itself alive and well throughout the whole of the universe for some fourteen billion years so far, then becoming aware of the existence and the agency of this upwelling of complexity in each of us, and establishing enough of a relationship with it to assure our further evolution would not seem difficult. Powered by the accumulation of evolved instincts, our pre-human ancestors were able to reliably get us to the most recent four or so hundred thousand years .

But, alas, as our human history shows too clearly, it’s not that easy. History is filled with examples of, for example, the conflict among the reptilian brain’s stimuli of ‘fight or flight’, the limbic brain’s need for relationship and our neo cortex brain’s desire to ‘sort things out’ before acting.
Christianity is frequently cited as a ‘leveling’ agent which addresses this age-old tension, and indeed many examples of this agency can be seen (such as Jefferson’s adoption of Jesus’ belief in human equality into successful Western governments), but even it is rife with ‘dualisms’ that pull us in one way or another. Its idea of God, on the surface a unifying concept, becomes rife with such dualisms.

Jonathan Sacks notes that much more so than Judaism, Christianity divides: body/soul, physical/spiritual, heaven/earth, this life/next life, evil/good, with the emphasis on the second of each. He sees the entire set of contrasts as massively Greek, with much debt to Plato. He sees in these either/or dichotomies a departure from the typically Jewish perspective of either/and.

This increasing dualism is contrasted with what Blondel insisted as fundamental to an understanding of the intimacy of God. Rephrased:

“It is impossible to think of ourselves as ‘over here’, and then of God, as ‘over against us’. This is impossible because we have come to be who we are through a process in which God is involved.”

   This is, of course, a logical conclusion from the essential message of John:

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

   Blondel, Teilhard, Sacks and the contemporary theologian Richard Rohr all decry how this message of John, itself a logical conclusion from the teachings of Jesus, is frequently minimized in the subsequent evolution of the Greek-influenced Church. Thus, it’s not difficult to understand the difficulty of returning to the sense of belonging that our ‘pre anxiety’ animal ancestors enjoyed. While Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’ might have a single trunk, we, lost among the branches, have to work to find it.

Finding the Way

A first step to such a search is to recognize that there is indeed a way. Teilhard’s postulation that the basic element of universal evolution, in which all things, including ourselves, are enmeshed, requires belief that the energy of this evolution having existed in all things for the fourteen or so billion years of universal ‘becoming’, is still active in its most recent product.

This is not a religious assertion. As we saw last week, even an atheist of such renown as Richard Dawkins can acknowledge it. While he fails to recognize its importance to human life, once understood the logical consequences of it lead unerringly to a positive and ‘future affirming’ grasp of human life.

Thus a starting place for ‘relating’ to a ‘ground of being’ (or, in Dawkins-speak, ‘the fundamental principle of existence’) is to begin to recognize how this universal agency of complexification manifests itself in the human person. Again, taking a cue from Teilhard,

“It is through that which is most incommunicably personal in us that we make contact with the universal“,

we can see that our search for God, therefore, begins with a search for ourselves.

This is, of course, an idea that first rises during the Axial Age (900-200 BCE). As Karen Armstrong, in her book on this period sees it:

”Enlightened persons would discover within themselves the means of rising above the world; they would experience transcendence by plumbing the mysteries of their own nature, not simply by taking part in magical rituals.”

   Given the tangle of practices that emerge from this simple recognition, however, points to its difficulty.   One of these, however, resonates across nearly expression of religion.

Meditation

This term can evoke many negative reactions, especially in the minds of nonbelievers or those who highly value empirical thought over intuitional insight. While its basis is simply concentrating on finding and experiencing this ‘cosmic spark’, this ‘sap of the tree of evolution’ which lies in every human, the practices most commonly associated with it evoke pictures of self-abasement, withdrawal from relationships, other-worldliness and a general distancing from and disdaining of life as lived.   Teilhard himself, comfortable in both empirical and intuitional worlds, summarized an approach for this search for the ‘cosmic spark’ in a completely secular way. From his book, ‘The Divine Milieu’, he writes:

“And so, for the first time in my life, perhaps, I took the lamp and, leaving the zones of everyday occupations and relationships, where my identity, my perception of myself is so dependent on my profession, my roles- where everything seems clear, I went down into my inmost self, to the deep abyss whence I feel dimly that my power of action emanates.

   But as I descended further and further from that level of conventional certainties by which social life is so superficially illuminated, I became aware that I was losing contact with myself. At each step of the descent, with the removal of layers of my identity defined from without, a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me.

   And when I had to stop my descent because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet, and from it flowed, arising I know not from where, the current which I dare to call my life.

   What science will ever be able to reveal to man the origin, nature and character of that conscious power to will and to love which constitutes his life? It is certainly not our effort, nor the effort of anyone around us, which set that current in motion. And it is certainly not our anxious care, nor that of any friend of ours, which prevents its ebb or controls its turbulence.

We can, of course, trace back through generations some of the antecedents of the torrent which bears us along; and we can, by means of certain moral and physical disciplines and stimulations, regularize or enlarge the aperture through which the torrent is released into us.

   But neither that geography nor those artifices help us in theory or in practice to harness the sources of life.

   My self is given to me far more than it is formed by me.

   Man, scripture says, cannot add a cubit to his nature. Still less can he add a unit to the potential of his love, or accelerate by another unit the fundamental rhythm which regulates the ripening of his mind and heart. In the last resort, the profound life, the fontal life, the new-born life, escapes our life entirely.

   Stirred by my discovery, I then wanted to return to the light of day and forget the disturbing enigma in the comfortable surroundings of familiar things, to begin living again at the surface without imprudently plumbing the depths of the abyss. But then, beneath this very spectacle of the turmoil of life, there re-appeared before my newly-opened eyes, the unknown that I wanted to escape.

This time it was not hiding at the bottom of an abyss; it disguised itself, its presence, in the innumerable strands which form the web of chance, the very stuff of which the universe and my own small individuality are woven. Yet it was the same mystery without a doubt: I recognized it.

   Our mind is disturbed when we try to plumb the depth of the world beneath us. But it reels still more when we try to number the favorable chances which must coincide at every moment if the least of living things is to survive and succeed in its enterprises.

   After the consciousness of being something other and something greater than myself- a second thing made me dizzy: Namely the supreme improbability, the tremendous unlikelyhood of finding myself existing in the heart of a world that has survived and succeeded in being a world.

At that moment, I felt the distress characteristic to a particle adrift in the universe, the distress which makes human wills founder daily under the crushing number of living things and of stars. And if something saved me, it was hearing the voice of the Gospel, guaranteed by divine success, speaking to me from the depth of the night:

                                                     “It is I, be not afraid.”

The Next Post

This week we moved from applying our ‘principles of reinterpretation’ to the basic idea of ‘God’ to addressing a path to relationship with ‘the ground of being’. Agreeing with Blondel that “Every statement about God is effectively a statement about man”, we can see that every step toward God is a step towards ourselves.

Having seen this, the next question that can be asked is, what’s involved in ‘finding ourselves’?

Next week we will move on to looking at this activity through secular lens. What is there at our core, and how do we move towards it?

November 21 Reinterpreting God

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Today’s Post

Last week we looked at ‘principles’ which can be applied to a process of ‘reinterpretation’ of traditional religious teachings in our goal of finding the nuggets of relevancy in these teachings.

This week we will move on to applying these principles to the fundamental concept around which all religions revolve, the concept of ‘God’.

Today’s post summarizes the four posts from 21 July 2016 to 1 September 2016 on this subject.

A Starting Place

The concept of God as found in the many often contradicting expressions of Western religion can be very confusing. Given the duality which occurs in both the Old and New Testament (such as punishment-forgiveness), layered with the many further dualities introduced by Greek influences in the early Christian church (such as body-soul), and topped by many contemporary messages that distort the original texts (such as the “Prosperity Gospel”) this is not surprising. Finding a thread which meets our principles of interpretation without violating the basic findings of science but staying consistent with the basic Western teachings can be difficult. Many believe it to be impossible.

A perhaps surprising starting place might come from the writings of one of the more well-known atheists, Richard Dawkins.   Professor Dawkins strongly dislikes organized religion, but in his book, “The God Delusion”, he casually remarks

“There must have been a first cause of everything, and we might as well give it the name God. Yes, I said, but it must have been simple and therefore whatever else we call it, God is not an appropriate name (unless we very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers). The first cause that we seek must have been the process which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence.”

   Here we find a succinct outline of the nature of the ‘fundamental principle of existence’ as well as an excellent place to begin a ‘reinterpretation’ of the concept of God:

  • It must be the first cause of everything
  • It must work within natural processes
  • It must be an ongoing active agent (a “process”) in all phases of evolution from the Big Bang to the appearance of humans
  • It must be an agent for increasing complexity (“the raising of the world as we know it into its present complex existence”)
  • It must be divested of “all the baggage” (such as magic and superstition) of the many traditional religions
  • Once so divested, “God” is an appropriate name for this first cause

Dawkins goes on to claim that such a God cannot possibly be reconciled with traditional religion. Paradoxically, in this simple statement he offers an excellent place to begin just such a reconciliation.

Western religion also sees the potential for ‘reconciliation’. An example is Pope John Paul II’s statement on science’s relation to religion:

“Science can purify religion from error and superstition.”

   So in this starting place we can begin to see a view of God that is antithetical to neither science nor religion, but one in which John Paul II echoes Teilhard when he sees it as one in which:

“Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”

Is God A Person?

The concept of the ‘person’ is somewhat unique to the West. It is related to the fundamental Jewish concept of time is seen as flowing from a beginning to an end, unlike the cyclical concept of time as found in the East. It also sees the person as constantly growing to ‘uniqueness’ as opposed to the Eastern concept of human destiny fulfilled in the loss of identity as merged into the ‘cosmic all’.

The idea of the human person emerging from the evolutionary phenomenon of neurological development is also unique to the West. While there is still much disagreement on the subject of how (or even whether) the person, with his unique mind, is separate from random neurological firings in the brain, the idea of the ‘person’ is well accepted.

Therefore, Western society has proceeded along the path that however the neurons work, the effect is still a ‘person’, and recognized as such in the laws which govern the societies which have emerged in the West.

This concept of the person as unique provides a strong benefit to Western civilization. While perhaps rooted in the Jewish beliefs which underpin those of Christianity, the Western concept of ‘the person’ nonetheless underpins the other unique Western development: that of Science. The uniqueness of the person (and the associated concepts of freedom) and the power of empirical thinking clearly contribute to the unique successes of the West. As Teilhard asserts:

“…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.”

Not surprisingly, the uniqueness of the person is reflected in Western religion. Further, while the many different expressions of the three major monotheistic religions might disagree on the specifics, they all agree that persons are somehow uniquely connected to God, and therefore God is in some way a ‘person’ who saves and damns, rewards and punishes, and provides guidance for life.

The approach that we have taken, however, does not explicitly reflect such an aspect of the Ground of Being.
Does this mean that from our point of view God is not a person?

The Personal Side of God

From our point of view, God is not understood as a person, but as the ground or the principle

of person-ness. Just as the forces of atomic reaction, gravity and biology in the theories of Physics and Biology address the principles of matter and life, the overarching force of ‘increasing complexity’ addresses the increase in complexity which powers evolution and thus leads to the appearance of the person.

Teilhard offers an insight on this issue

“From this point of view man is nothing but the point of emergence in nature, at which this deep cosmic evolution culminates and declares itself. From this point onwards man ceases to be a spark fallen by chance on earth and coming from another place. He is the flame of a general fermentation of the universe which breaks out suddenly on the earth.” (Italics mine)

   He goes on to underscore the profound meaning of such of such insight:

“I doubt that whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized (becomes human) in him.”

   Thus, as Teilhard sees it, evolution requires complexification, which results in personization.

But, With All That, Is God ‘A Person’?

Dawkins, while he might admit to a process by which the universe evolves, holds out on this subject, quoting Carl Sagan:

“If by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying…it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”

Dawkins and Sagan are correct about our approach to God, in that our definition so far does not point to a God suitable for a personal relationship. While recognizing Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’ which fosters increasing complexity leading to increased ‘personness’, how can it apply to our personal life?

From Teilhard’s vantage point, the starting place for a personal approach to God, a ‘relationship’, is the recognition that this ‘axis of evolution’ which has been an agent of ‘complexification’ for some 14 billion years is not only still active in the human, but is the same axis that accounts for our ‘personization’. Humans are not only products of evolution who have become ‘aware of their consciousness’, but specific products, persons, who are capable of not only recognizing but more importantly cooperating with this inner source of energy that can carry them onto a more complete possession of themselves.

From Blondel’s perspective,

“The statement that “God Exists” can therefore be reinterpreted to say that “Man is alive by a principle that transcends him, over which he has no power, which summons him to surpass himself and frees him to be creative. That God is person means that man’s relationship to the deepest dimension of his life is personal”. (Italics mine)

So, in answer to the question, Baum goes on to state:

“God is not a super-person, not even three super-persons; he is in no way a being, however supreme, of which man can aspire to have a spectator knowledge. That God is person reveals that man is related to the deepest dimension of his life in a personal and never-to-be reified way.”

   Teilhard echoes Blondel when he says:

“It is through that which is most incommunicably personal in us that we make contact with the universal. “

“Those who spread their sails in the right way to the winds of the earth will always find themselves borne by a current towards the open seas.”

The Next Post

This week we made a first cut at applying our ‘principles of reinterpretation’ to the basic idea of ‘God’ as the ‘Ground of Being’, which belief underpins all religions.

Having seen this, the next question that can be asked is , “so what”? What difference does it make if our concept of God agrees with Teilhard, Luther or the Budda?

Next week we will move on to using these principles to address the idea of ‘relating’ to God. How can we find God in our lives, in our world, and more importantly, connect to ‘him’?