Tag Archives: X Reinterpretation of Religion

November 14 Interpreting Religion

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Today’s Post

   Continuing our look at the role of religion in human evolution, last week we saw six examples of the parts that religion plays. In keeping with the perspective of secularity that we have taken in this blog, while they are not based on the traditional teachings of any religion, they are agencies common to all.

This week we go one step further into such a secular perspective, and that is the idea of God. Is it possible to approach the many and diverse ideas of the ‘ground of being’ for some level of commonality? Further, is there any way that a concept such as ’the ground of being’ can be compatible with the deliberations of science?

This subject is discussed in the five posts from May 25, (Reinterpretation) to July 7 2016 (Reinterpretation Principles).

Reinterpretation

Maurice Blondel was one of the first theologians to suggest that in order to survive in an age which saw the increasing influence of science, religion must become more meaningful, immediate and relevant. He saw it as necessary for religion to emerge from the hierarchical, supernatural and autocratic form that it had taken by the late eighteen hundreds. He suggested that to make this happen, religion must be ‘reinterpreted’.

While Blondel may have opened the door to rethinking the traditional understanding of God and the universe, others, such as Teilhard de Chardin expanded this concept by reinterpreting the tenets of science as well. Today, thinkers such as Jonathan Sacks, Karen Armstrong, John Haight and Richard Rohr continue this expansion.

As Michael Dowd observes, such ‘reinterpretation’ isn’t new to Western thinking::

“Just as Augustine reinterpreted Christianity in light of Plato in the 4th century, and Aquinas integrated Aristotle in the 13th, today there are dozens of theologians across the spectrum re-envisioning the Christian faith. Whose ideas are they integrating now? Darwin, Einstein, Hubble, Wilson and all those who have corrected, and continually contribute to, an evidence-based understanding of biological, cosmic, and cultural evolution.”

Principles of Reinterpretation

To many, however, the precepts of religion are too deeply rooted in the idea of God as completely supernatural to allow for such interpretation. God is understood as above nature but so powerful as to break through to the level of nature. To others, the traditional view of God, with its elements of magic and superstition, simply are not worthy of consideration.

Somewhere closer to the center of these two poles is the observation from Richard Dawkins, prominent atheist, in his book, “The God Delusion”:

“There must have been a first cause of everything, and we might as well give it the name God, but 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 basis for a process which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence.”

   The opening of atheism to concepts such as a ‘first cause’ which ‘raises the world’ in a process of ‘increasing complexity’ is simply another way of understanding God as ‘secular’.

And, coming at it from the opposite pole, we can see how the thinkers listed above, Blondel, Teilhard, Sacks, Armstrong, Haight and Rohr offer discrete principles for mining the ore of traditional religious lore for the gold that lies within.

Blondel, writing late in the nineteenth century, suggested several ‘principles’ which could offer clarity in understanding the ‘ground of being’ from a secular perspectives. His principles are outlined in Gregory Baum’s book, “Man Becoming”.

  • ‘There is no human standpoint from which God is simply man’s ‘over-against’ “.  It is impossible to think of ourselves 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.
  • “Every sentence about God can be translated into a declaration about human life”. An example of this principle: To say that “God Exists” means that “We are alive by a principle that transcends us, over which we have no power, which summons us to surpass ourselves and frees us to be creative”.
  • “That God is person means that man’s relationship to the deepest dimension of his life is personal”, not that God is a person (which based on the definition above would limit God).
  • “That God is Father means that human life is oriented towards a future freely given”. God is ‘on our side’.

Teilhard and others expanded upon Blondel’s early insights into the recognition of religion (properly reinterpreted) as a valid hermeneutic for understanding the human person embedded in the universal process of evolution. From these expansions, seven ‘principles’ can be seen:

–          Evolution occurs because of a fundamental characteristic of matter and energy which over time organizes the ‘stuff of the universe’ from very simple entities into ever more complex forms.  This principle continues to be active in the appearance and continued evolution of the human person.

The Principle: We grow as persons because of our potential for growth, which comes to us as a particular instantiation of the general potential of the universe to evolve in the direction of greater complexity

–          All things evolve, and the fundamental thread of evolution is that of increasing complexity

The Principle: The increasing complexity of the universe is reflected in our individual increase in complexity, which in the human manifests itself as personal growth

–          The basic process of physics by which evolution occurs consists of elements of matter pulled into ever more complex arrangements through elemental forces.  When recognized as part of the elements and forces described in the Standard Model of Physics, the phenomenon of increasing complexity completes the Standard Model by adding the characteristic which makes evolution possible. This process continues to manifest itself today in the evolutionary products of human persons and the unitive forces of love which connect us in such a way in which we become more human.

The Principle:  Just as atoms unite to become molecules, and cells to become neural systems, so do our personal connections enhance our personal growth which enhances our societies and assures our evolution.

Adding the effect of increasing complexity to the basic theories of Physics also unites the three eras of evolution (pre-life, life, conscious life) as it provides a thread leading from the elemental mechanics of matter through the development of neural systems in Natural Selection to the ‘awareness of awareness’ as seen in humans.

The Principle: This ‘thread’ therefore continues to be active in every human person in the potential of our personal ‘increase in complexity’, which of course is our personal growth.

–          This addition points the way to understanding how evolution continues to proceed through the human person and his society.  The neurological advancement in living things evolves the central neural system (the brain) in three stages: the reptilian brain, with its instinctive fight/flight reactions; the limbic brain, which incorporates emotional care of the young; and the neo-cortex brain, which is capable dealing with these instinctual stimuli.

The Principle: Human evolution can be understood as the increasing skill of employing the ‘higher’ neocortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of the ‘lower’ brains.

–          This ‘skill’ is the subject of nearly every religious and philosophical thought system in human history.  Understanding the nature of the reality which surrounds us is a critical step, which must be followed by decisions of how to react to it if we are to fulfill our true human potential.

The Principle:  Finding the core of a religious teaching involves understanding how the teaching can lead to increasing the skill of using the neo cortex brain to modulate the instinctive stimuli of the ‘lower’ brains’.

–          “We must first understand, and then we must act.” (Teilhard).  If our understanding is correct, then an action appropriate to the understanding can be chosen.  If we act in accordance with what is real, our actions will contribute to both our personal evolution (our process of becoming more whole, more mature) as well as the evolution of our society.  As Richard Rohr puts it, “Our lives must be grounded in awareness of the patterns of the universe.”

The Principle:  Authentic religion helps us to be aware of and cooperate with the creative energies which effect the universal phenomenon of evolution.

The Next Post

This week we continued an overview of the eleven posts on the evolution of religion, looking at specific principles that help to see the underlying value of religious teachings among the many teachings that Richard Dawkins sees as ‘baggage’.

Having seen this, next week we will move on applying these principles to the core concept of all religions: that of the ‘Ground of Being’, better known as “God”. What does understanding God from the secular viewpoint do to the idea of relating to ‘Him”?

October 31 Understanding Religion In the Context of Evolution

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Today’s Post

After seeing last week how religion can be seen as an evolving phenomenon, this week we will begin an overview of the eleven posts that look at this evolving phenomenon in the light of Teilhard’s insights into how evolution continues its rise of complexity through the human species. If we are evolving, what role can religion be seen to play in the process?

Our treatment of this subject can be seen in the posts from 10 December2015 (The Continuation of Evolution in the Human) to 14 April, 2016 (Religion and Stability).

The Continuation of Evolution in the Human Species

Before looking at religion’s role in human evolution, it is necessary to see this evolution holistically. Teilhard’s insights into such a comprehensive view place evolution at the heart of the ‘coming-to-be’ of the universe from the ‘big bang’, some fourteen billion years ago, to the present day. As we saw previously, the phenomenon which unites the three major phases of the universe’s evolution, matter, life and reflective life, is that of increasing complexity. In every step of each of these three major stages, and in the transition of each stage to the next, more complex products emerge from the unification of ancestral products in such a way as to increase their complexity.

The key to understanding how evolution continues through the human, he asserts, is simply to recognize how the rise of complexity can be seen to take place in human history.

The problem, of course, is that any observations that we make about ourselves is, by definition, relative to ourselves, and hence subjective in nature, and this subjectivity makes it difficult to stand back and observe with any amount of objectivity. This hesitation can be clearly seen in science’s insistence that not only is evolution absent in the scientific theories of changes of matter leading up to the cell, but that evolution after the cell is the result of ‘Natural Selection’, which itself is driven by ‘chance’ and ‘necessity’. Further, this narrow view of evolution in which the agency of ‘complexification’ is ignored, reduces science’s treatment of the human person to either an ‘epiphenomenon’ or perhaps predicated on a ‘non-existent’ consciousness which is merely the result of random neuron firings.

As Ian Barbour puts it in his book, “Religion and Science’:

“Something radically different takes place when culture rather than the genes becomes the principal means by which the past is transmitted to the future and when conscious choice alters that future.”

   Thus, something new comes into play with the human: the capability of being aware of consciousness, and this results in the ability to choose, and this ability manifests itself in the two emerging styles of human thinking, science and religion.

Teilhard and many others (such as Jonathan Sacks, whom we saw last week) also point out that these two evolutionary branches of thinking at first seem to be just other ‘branches’ on the tree of life, similar to those occurring for millions of years. Teilhard and Sacks both note that at their bifurcation points, the two branches are indeed different, but that they emerge as a result of evolving skills of thinking. Sacks notes how they are related to the more recent evolution of left brain activity, and both point to the potential of ‘reconnection’, or as Teilhard puts it, “confluence after fluorescence”.

Thus, as Teilhard sees it, science’s understanding of atomic and molecular structure, and biology’s understanding of Natural Selection aren’t incorrect, simply incomplete. While these clearly play a part in cosmic evolution, once the phenomenon of ‘complexification’ is factored in, they can now be seen as ‘harmonics’ of a ‘fundamental’: second order effectors riding on top of the first order of increasing complexity.

With The Rise of the Left Brain, is Religion Still Relevant?

With Teilhard’s perspective of human evolution as a subset of cosmic evolution, and Sacks’ insight into the bicameral brain’s evolution, what sense can be made of religion?

Detractors of religion offer much to defend their stance. Richard Dawkins in his book, “The God Delusion” offers a sobering but undeniable picture of the ills to be found in the history of organized religion. The most prevalent attitude of these detractors seem to favor a future shorn of all religious belief: one of complete dominance of the ‘left’ brain, with disdain for any thought rising from intuition experienced by the ‘right’ brain. Such right- brained modes of thinking, such as those found in art and music, are sort of ‘patched in’ to these beliefs, but are strictly prohibited from affecting legal or scientific thought. Governments in which this ideal has been prominent, such as the communist regimes of Russia and China offer proponents of religion much to argue against.

Supporters of traditional religious modes of thinking, those who would eschew ‘left’ brain modes and rely exclusively on the intuitional modes of the ‘right’, with their fundamentalism, supernaturalism and ‘anti-intellectual’ approach to thinking, give the materialists much ground for opposition.

Add to this the frequently publicized polls that show a distinct decline of religious belief in the West, and it would seem that religion as an evolutionary phenomenon has passed its prime’. How can it be seen as relevant today?

Understanding Religion From the Perspective of Evolution

Teilhard understood religion’s role in evolution when he stated:

“To explain the workings of the universe we must understand the forces and process by which it comes to be, and this understanding must include the human person.”

   With that simple statement, the relationship between the two modes of thinking is established: a complete understanding of the universe requires an understanding of how the human person fits into it. This perspective isn’t limited to Teilhard; many thinkers have intuited that since there is only one reality, all modes of thought must be brought into confluence if they are to address it.

In the beginning, as we saw last week, humans have always attempted to understand their part in life so they would know how to negotiate it. The earliest insights manifested themselves in beliefs, rituals and laws which not only helped each person to better understand themselves, but insured the connection to a society which would in turn support their existence. This wasn’t as much a ‘left vs right’ brained activity, as it was one to support the development of thinking which could be protected from instinctual impulses from the ‘lower’, reptilian and limbic, impulses that had served our nonhuman ancestors so well. As Richard Rohr puts it

“It was necessary for us to move beyond our early motivations of personal security, reproduction and survival (the fear-based preoccupations of the ‘reptilian brain’) … to proceed beyond the lower stages of human development.”

This “proceeding from the lower stages’ is indeed the action of continuation of universal evolution in the human species.

Religion, for all its imperfections, can certainly be seen to be a belief system which supports just that. But, given these many and obvious imperfections, as well documented by detractors of religion, how can religion be seen as specifically contributing to the process of our evolution?

The Next Post

This week we began an overview of the eleven posts on the evolution of religion in which Jonathan Sacks’ understanding of how the evolution of human thinking can be seen in the evolution of religion from its earliest beginnings to the emergence of Christianity.

Having begun this look into religion’s role in human evolution, next week we will articulate this role in a little more detail.

October 24 The Evolution of Religion

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Today’s Post

This week we continue the recap of the blog, “The Secular Side of God” with an overview of the posts which address the evolution of religion.

We left off last week with an overview of evolution itself, seeing through Teilhard’s eyes how the unfolding of the universe can be seen in the increase of complexity over time. Therefore this universal context, since it includes both the infinitesimally small at one end and the consciously personal at the other end, it seamlessly encompasses humans as well as atoms.

Our treatment of this subject can be seen in the posts from 6 August 2015 (Isn’t This Just Deism?) to 26 November 2015 (Part 7- The Rise of Christianity)

Looking at Religion From the Vantage Point of Evolution

This blog assumes Teilhard’s basic hermeneutic that most things can be better understood when put in the context of religion, and his context included the entire universe over the entire span of time to the present. Therefore it is appropriate to approach the complex and multifaceted subject of religion as one of the products of evolution if we are to make better sense of it.

We took a look at such evolution from three perspectives:

  • From the vantage point of history
  • As the evolution of thinking
  • As influenced by human neurology

As history

From the perspective of history, we noted how Matthew Kneale, An Atheist’s History of Belief, saw it: we have evidence of religious belief in the very first stirrings of human thought, addressing healing, controlling the environment, enhancing relationships and coordinating group activities. These four values, articulated in the many diverse and manifold beliefs, were understood as contributing to the quality of early human life.

He traces the evolution of these intuitions at the tribal level to the formation of regulations seen as necessary for the social order of the emerging civilizations. The earliest of such formal guidelines seems to have appeared as early as the 24th century BCE. The first ‘laws’ to address a relation between humans and deities appears later, and includes prescriptions for rituals, behavior and worship (Judaism).

As The evolution of thinking

It was not until the fourth century BCE that laws begin to appear which addressed relations among different societal groupings that took the place of distinct tribes. The first comprehensive example of which can be found in the Roman laws, which begin to appear as early versions of what we know today as ‘constitutions’.

During this same period, however, a new way of thinking emerged in the East which addressed both human nature and relationships separately from regulating society. The ‘Axial Age’, summarized eloquently by Karen Armstrong in her book by the same name, introduced such concepts as ‘person’, ‘love’, and ‘human potential’. Such intellectual stirring can be seen in Chinese Confucianism, Indian Buddhism, Israeli Monotheism and Greek Rationalism, all of which addressed the basic nature of the human person and explored ‘his’ potential for a fuller life.

All the great concepts of contemporary religion were born during this period, such as the importance of charity, the danger of egoism, the existence of the transcendent and the importance of the human person in the scheme of things.   With such new ideas, humans were becoming ‘self conscious’, aware of their consciousness, and therefore planting seeds in the garden of collective consciousness that would flower a few centuries later in societies which treated all members as ‘equal’.

Other seeds were planted at this time, such as the Greek break from Eastern modes of thinking, as seen in the rise of objectivity and rationality, and the Jewish understanding of the ‘ground of being’ as not only ‘one’ but ‘personal’.

As Influenced by human neurology

Jonathan Sacks, in his book, “The Great Partnership” goes beyond seeing such evolution simply as the development of ideas. He notes that the human brain is made up of two hemispheres, referred to as the ‘right’ and ‘left’ brains. While a neurological fact, it is common to impute human thinking to one or the other, resulting is a general association of ‘emotion’ to the left brain, and ‘reason’ to the right. While he correctly identifies the necessity of the whole brain working cohesively to achieve ‘rationality’, he does acknowledge each hemisphere’s contribution as distinct.

With this approach to human thinking in mind, he sees the historical record prior to the ‘Axial Age’ as more influenced by the ‘right’ brain, and hence more ‘intuitional’. This can be seen in the preponderance of the religious beliefs, which themselves were the basis for what was understood to be the norms of society.

With the Greeks, he theorizes, a movement to thinking with the ‘left’ brain can be seen. As an example of this, he proposes that the shift in writing of the Greek alphabet from ‘left-to-right’ to ‘right- t- left’ was caused by this shift in brain hemisphere thinking.

He further takes note that as a result of this shift, by the third century BCE, Greek and Hebrew (still ‘left-to-right) were not just different languages with different alphabets, they represented orthogonal civilizations, very unlike in their most basic understanding of reality. Departing from the prevalent mode of ‘right brained’ thinking to one more influenced by the ‘left brain’, he sees

“Athens evolved to a ‘literate’ from an ‘oral’ culture”, and in doing so “it became the birthplace of science and philosophy, supremely left-brain, conceptual and analytical ways of thinking”.

The Rise of Christianity

Having established a pathway of the evolution of human thought from the ancient ‘right-brained’ mode to the branching of the ‘left-brain’ mode about six thousand years ago, Sacks goes on to look at how these two great branches continue to evolve. In particular, he notes how, in five steps, these two branches demonstrate their potential for eventually becoming a single branch.

First he notes how in the passages from ‘the stories of Jesus’ seen in the first three gospels (the synoptic gospels), the teachings of Jesus are expressed in typical Jewish lexicon: Jesus makes points by telling stories, as had the many ‘authors’ of the Old Testament.

Then we find Paul restating them into Greek formats: lists, analysis, and most importantly, philosophy. He summarizes Jesus’ teachings into such things as ‘Theological Virtues’ (faith, hope love) and the eight aspects of the ‘Fruit of the Spirit’. He goes on to develop the nascent gospel concept of ‘Jesus as the Son of God’ into his concept of ‘The Universal Christ’. Then, we find that under the Hellenistic influences of Paul, the first ‘New Testament’ emerges in Greek, not Hebrew. Finally, the continued development of Christian theology occurs at the hands of the ‘Fathers’ and the ‘Doctors’ of the Church, all classically trained in Greek philosophy.

Thus, Sacks notes,

“Christianity combined left-hand brain rationality with right-brain spirituality in a single, glorious overarching structure.”

   However, he goes on to see several problems with this attempt to remerge the two branches. He finds that as Christianity develops, while it might carry the evolving insight of human personal and societal potential for continued evolution, its burdensome hierarchy, insistence on its exclusive understanding of truth and creation of many dualities weakens it. He sees these as

“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. “

As a result, he sees modern Christianity as having effected an increased loss of relevancy as well as an increase in the perceived distance between the human person and the ‘ground of being’. These problems also contribute to the well-known contention between science and religion today.

We will explore this division and the potential for overcoming it later in the blog, but at this stage, how can we take one step back to establish a clearer picture of how these two major currents of thinking are active in human life? How can they be better understood in Teilhard’s hermeneutic of using the context of universal evolution to make sense of things?.

The Next Post

This week we overviewed the six posts on the evolution of religion in which Jonathan Sacks’ understanding of how the evolution of human thinking can be seen in the evolution of religion from its earliest beginnings to the emergence of Christianity.

Having established this look into religion’s evolution, next week we will apply Teilhard’s unique perspective on universal evolution to Sacks’ insights.

October 3 Summing Up Human Happiness

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Today’s Post

For the past nine weeks we have been exploring the phenomenon of ‘human happiness’ from reaction to the ‘pain of convergence’ caused by the facets of our evolution to outlining the eight facets of happiness that occur when we manage to open our lives to it.

This week I’d like to sum up these nine posts.

Why Pain?

We concluded exploration of the preceding subject, the ‘Terrain of Synergy’ by identifying the recognition of such terrain as a step to ‘reconnecting our individual parts to the whole’. Richard Rohr frequently mentions this as a very basic goal of religion, ‘re-ligio’.

The problem arises, however, when such a connection becomes difficult, seemingly impossible, and we are caught up in what is often referred to as ‘existential angst’, pain which is unfocussed and leaves us feeling alienated and lonely. In such a state, ‘better’ is always the enemy of ‘good enough’, “yesterday was the best day of the rest of our life”, and the ability to feel satisfied is denied us.

In addition, we are caught up in the inevitable side effect of human evolution: convergence. With the crowding that we see increasing every day, on our streets, in our schools, in our neighborhoods our personal space increasingly dwindles.   The need for re-connection is countered with the need for isolation.

As Yuri Harari points out, these articulations of our existential angst can be traced to our breaking of the ‘evolutionary covenant’ that ancestors enjoyed in their millions of years on this planet: the evolution of their species proceeded at the same pace as the evolution of their environment. Yuval notes that, distinct from our pre-human ancestors, we have evolved much faster than our skills of accommodation with the environment could develop.

With humans, in contrast to ancestors, our evolution proceeded much faster than that of our environment. To make matters worse, we exacerbated this disconnect by degrading the environment itself.
According to Harari, this has robbed us of the evolutionary balance that our ancestors enjoyed with their environment, and thus opening us up to a future of continued disconnect with not only our environment but to ourselves as well. This ‘evolutionary singularity’, as he sees it, prevents us from experiencing true happiness.

Toward Happiness

We went on to consider this dystopian conclusion in the light of three perspectives on happiness that show a different outcome to our evolution:

  • Happiness from the material perspective

There is much in contemporary society, news, religious lore and scientific theory which address the human experience of ‘happiness’, but as we noted on August 8, very little of it is consistent, and much contradictory. Other than that it is highly subjective, and subject to physiological stimulation, one does not come away with a comprehensive understanding of what it is and how to come by it.

We noted that if Teilhard’s perspective on evolution is applied, and the ‘rise of complexity’ from the big bang to the present is still active, then some optimism in the future can be merited. Therefore, such an insight into the process of evolution is a facet of ‘being happy’. Just ‘belief in the future’ alone contributes to our happiness.  As Patricia Albere, author of “Evolutionary Relationship”, puts it, this long history of rising complexity suggests that we have only to allow ourselves to be “lifted by the evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”. To do this, “we only have to begin to pay attention”.

We noted that Teilhard’s use of this term differs considerably from that of traditional religion, and spent more time on this particular perspective than the other two. Key to this perspective is the ‘terrain of synergy’ in which the insights of science and religion overlap. As we have seen many times in this blog, science and religion have much to offer each other, and the subject of happiness is no exception.

We also noted the insights from John Haught which clearly delineates this terrain from that of traditional religion and science. Such delineation also opens the subject of happiness to understanding it from the perspective of Western religion. This insight provides further articulation to how Albere’s suggestion of ‘paying attention’ can take place.

We ended this segment by proceeding with the process of ‘reinterpretation’ of traditional Christian tenets, first addressed back in May, 2016. Once again, we saw how Teilhard’s ‘principle of evolutionary context’ makes it possible to understand anew how our religious lore can become more relevant to our lives, and hence our continued evolution.

We first looked at how Teilhard’s three ‘vectors’ of universal evolution: ‘forward’, ‘inward’ and ‘upward’, manifested in every step of evolution from the big bang to human persons, can be seen as active in human persons in reinterpreting Paul’s essential actions of ‘faith’, ‘hope’ and ‘love’.

Finally, we continued reinterpreting Paul with his ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ into articulations of eight facets of human life which underlie the dimension of human happiness. While the subject of human happiness might well be a ‘slippery subject’, the nine facets of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control certainly offer a scaffolding for a relationship to life that brings us ‘happiness.

In this search for Harari’s ‘accommodation to evolution’, we have generally taken two approaches to Patricia Albere’s suggestion to ‘pay attention’ so that we can learn to trust evolution, one from Maurice Blondel and the other from John Haught.

From Blondel,

“In the light of evolution, religious tenets can be reinterpreted in terms of human life.”

Then Haught,

“…every aspect of religion gains new meaning and importance once we link it to the new scientific story of an unfinished universe.”

Therefore we have seen, using Teilhard’s evolutionary hermeneutic, how happiness is not only possible in our species, to a large extent it is both necessary for our continued evolution and the payoff for the finding of our place in it. .

The Next Post

This week we wrapped up our look at the experience of human happiness, tracing it from “The Terrain of Synergy’ to a practical way to relook at our religious lore and reinterpret it in the light of Teilhard’s hermeneutic of cosmic becoming.

Next week we will do another ‘wrapup’, this time of the overall blog, “The Secular Side of God’ over its five year run.

September 26, 2019 – The Dimensions of Happiness

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Today’s Post

Last week we began a final look at happiness by recognizing that in spite of the confusing, often negative and frequently irrelevant nature of our Western religious lore, much can still be found that provides insight into both our personal development and our social welfare.

Over the past several weeks we have looked at the concept and experience of personal happiness from three viewpoints: material, evolutionary and ‘spiritual’. As we have seen, this term, ‘spiritual’, loses its religious connotation when put in the secular evolutionary context of Teilhard de Chardin and seen in the daily posts of Richard Rohr. In this context, spirituality is simply the agency of continued complexity, the sap of the tree of cosmic evolution, as it manifests itself in the branches of our own human and societal evolution.

Last week we looked a little deeper at how Paul’s ‘repacking’ of Jesus’ teaching, while couched in the religious vernacular of the time, can be reinterpreted into secular terms which reflect the presence of the ‘agency of continued complexity’ in our lives. We saw how Teilhard’s essential mapping of the three fundamental ‘vectors’ of cosmic evolution (forward, upward, inward) are succinctly captured in Paul’s ‘Theological Virtues’ of Faith, Hope and Love.

This week we will look into another example of such exploration.

The “Fruit of the Spirit”

As we discussed above, the term ‘spirit’ is used here to refer to that current which rises through cosmic evolution in which all things increase in complexity as they evolve Restating Teilhard’s understanding of ‘spirituality’,

“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.”

   Thus ‘spirituality’ can be seen, as Paul Davies puts it, as the ‘software’ by which the ‘hardware’ of matter increases in complexity over time.

This is the ‘hermeneutic’ which we have used throughout this blog to ‘reinterpret’ the tenets of Western religion as we approach the ‘filtering’ of it in search of how this ‘software’ is at work in our lives.

That said, the ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ is Paul’s term that sums up nine attributes of a person or community living ‘in accord with the Holy Spirit’, which of course in our lexicon is reinterpreted as ‘in accordance with the evolutionary agency of complexification’.  As Paul lists the facets of this ‘fruit’: “..the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”  Among the many attempts to objectively quantify the attributes of a ‘full’ or complete human life, one in which some degree of happiness could be expected, these seem high on the list. From our approach to the concept of human happiness, such completeness is an essential factor.

Love –  We have addressed the attribute of love several times in this blog, contrasting the traditional understanding of it as the emotion by which we are attracted to each other and Teilhard’s insight that it is a manifestation of the universal evolutive energy by which things become more complex, and hence more united over time in such a way to recursively become more complete.  By participating in love we become more complete, more whole, and as we do we increase our capacity for love. Love is the evolutionary ‘glue’ that unites us in such a way that we ascend the spiral of evolution.

Peace –  It is hard to imagine anything more conducive to happiness than peace, which comes from the recognition that our efforts to grow more complete are underwritten by a universal energy which rises unbidden and unearned within us.  From this standpoint, God, as Blondel understood ‘Him’, is on our side. Life, as it is offered to us as a gift, is guaranteed to be open to our strivings, and welcoming to our labors.  As the Ground of Being is uncovered as active in our own personal ground of existence, it is understood more as father than as fate.

Patience – Patience becomes more than long-suffering, teeth gritting endurance necessary for ‘salvation’, but the natural acceptance of what cannot be changed in light of Teilhard’s “.. current to the open sea” on which we are carried when we “…set our sails to the winds of life.” As we have seen, John Haught sets great store on patience as a stance or attitude that we begin to master as anticipation replaces dread as our sense of the future. Recognition of the Cosmic Spark within us, the ‘gifted’ nature of it, and confidence in where it is taking us, can instill in us a patience with the vagaries of life that would have been previously considered to be naive.

Kindness – As an essential building block of both society and personal relationships, kindness is prescribed by nearly every religion as the basis of the ‘Golden Rule’.  Beyond this prescription is the natural emergence of kindness as a recognition that not only are we underpinned by the Cosmic Spark, but others are as well.  Treating others as we would be treated requires us to be aware of how our own Cosmic Spark is the essence of being by which we all participate in Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’.

Goodness –  Goodness, of course, is that tricky concept which underlays all the ‘fruits’ of Paul.  In Paul, as echoed by Teilhard, that which is ‘good’ is simply that which moves us ahead, both as individuals and members of our societies.  If we are to have ‘abundance’ of life, whatever contributes to such abundance is ‘good’.

Faithfulness – As we saw in our look at the Theological Virtues, faith is much more than intellectual and emotional adherence to doctrines or dogmas as criteria for entry into ‘the next life’.  Faith has an ontological character by which we understand ourselves to be caught up in a ‘process’ which lifts us from the past and prepares us for a future that while unknown is nevertheless fully manageable and completely trustworthy.

Gentleness – As a mirror to ‘goodness’, gentleness, once we have become aware of the Cosmic Spark not only in ourselves but in all others, becomes the only authentic way of relating to others.

Self-Control – Self-control acknowledges that while we might be caught up in a process by which we become what it is possible to become, its continuation is dependent upon our ability and willingness to choose.  Being carried by Teilhard’s ‘current’ (‘Patience’, above) still requires us to develop the skills of ‘sail setting’ and ‘wind reading’.  The instinctual stimuli of the reptilian and limbic brains do not dissipate as we grow, but the skill of our neocortex brains to modulate them must be judiciously developed. As we develop the skill of ‘thinking with the whole brain’ (6 July) our responses to the many stimuli of life become more appropriate to a universe which evolves as ‘the elaboration of more eyes in a world in which there is always more to see”.

Thus Paul’s ‘fruits’ aren’t independent. They represent the kaleidoscope of facets of being that emerge when we are ‘in synch’ with the ‘axis of evolution’. As Yuval Harari would have it, they result from our finding a ‘better fit’ into the milieu of human evolution, and overcoming the ‘existential angst’ resulting from our speedy departure from pre-human evolution. (August 1).

The Next Post

This week we took a second look at how traditional Western religious insights in to human life can be extracted from their traditional religious vernacular and understood in a secular context. This week, just as we saw last week, those insights proposed by Paul are easily placed in a secular evolutionary context when seen from the perspective of Teilhard’s evolutionary world view.

This, of course, is another example of Blondel’s approach to religion: in the light of evolution, religious tenets can be reinterpreted in terms of human life. Or, as John Haught puts it

“…every aspect of religion gains new meaning and importance once we link it to the new scientific story of an unfinished universe.”

   This permits us to move, as John Haught suggests, from the “nonnatural mode of causation” fostered by traditional religion to one which not only is “linked..to the scientific story” but retains traditional religion’s emphasis on the human person (as understood by Thomas Jefferson). This emphasis can, in turn, sharpen the focus with which the human person is treated by traditional science.

Next week we will sum up our exploration of the human attribute of ‘happiness’.

September 12, 2019 – How Does the Terrain of Synergy Provide a Ground of Happiness?

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Teilhard’s model of the ‘spiral of evolution’ offers insight into how the wellsprings of cosmic evolution not only rise through the strata of existence, but can be seen as active in both our lives and in society.

This week we will take a look at how our two traditional ‘cosmic stories’ can become more comprehensive, and act as an agency for human happiness, by seeing them in the context of ‘The Terrain of Synergy’.

Telling The Cosmic Story

We have seen in many segments of this blog how our collective understanding of the cosmos, what we understand of it and how our understanding of it affects both the living of our lives and our participation in the larger society. We have also noted the many dualisms that face us as we attempt to integrate principles of wholeness into our lives. Science and religion obviously represent a rich source of concepts which we can use, but at the same time, both within themselves and between themselves, can be found many contradictions and concepts neither helpful nor relevant to our 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 offer our two traditional ways of telling the ‘Cosmic Story’.

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 an integrated cosmos.

He stands well back from the traditional stories, and understands 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 story told by science.
  • The second category is the story told by traditional, intuition-based religion, which he labels, “analogy”
  • The third story is the one slowly emerging today as we learn more about the universe, which he labels, “anticipation”

These three categories of stories serve not only as a taxonomy of stories of the cosmos, but also as a guide to understanding our place within it. In this he echoes Teilhard, Paul Davies, Jonathan Sacks and Richard Rohr, all of whom we have met in previous posts.

The Archaenomic Story

We have looked with some detail at the story which mainstream science tells, particularly at how science seems to be marking time at the phenomenon of the human person. In Haught’s telling, and in implicit agreement with Davies,

“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 notes “…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.

The Analogic Story

He is neither sparing of the traditional religious telling of the ‘Cosmic 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. 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 Inadequacy of the Two Stories

He notes how neither of the two legacy ‘Cosmic Stories’ are satisfactory today.

“If the analogical reading is unbelievable- since it has to bring in supernatural causes to explain how more-being gets into the natural world- the archaeonomic reading is even less believable since it cannot show how the mere passage of time accounts for the fuller-being that gradually emerges.

   If analogy cannot make the emergence of life and mind intelligible without bringing in a non-natural mode of causation that lifts the whole mass up from above, archaeonomy is even less intellectually helpful in assuming that all true causes are ultimately mindless physical events, hence that life and mind are not really anything more than their inanimate constituents.”

But closer to the focus of our search for a story which is more relevant to our lives

“Both archaeonomic cosmic pessimism and analogical otherworldly optimism, by comparison, are expressions of impatience.”

   Impatience- indignant dissatisfaction with our state and that of the environment which surrounds us- is one element of our ‘existential anxiety’. Haught’s insight into this condition explains why neither the comfort provided by religion in the past or the intellectual satisfaction promised by technology for the future are working to ease such a condition. 

The Anticipation Story

In the third category of ‘Cosmic Story’, Haught is suggesting a confluence between science and religion that builds on their strengths and ‘filters’ out their shortcomings.

“Anticipation offers a coherent alternative to both analogy and archaeonomy. It reads nature, life, mind and religion as ways in which a whole universe is awakening to the coming of more-being on the horizon. It accepts both the new scientific narrative of gradual emergence and the sense that something ontologically richer and fuller is coming into the universe in the process.”

   He proposes that such an approach to the nature of the cosmos also can bring about a profound sense of ‘belonging’ once we begin to trust the upwelling of wholeness warranted by fourteen or so billion years of ‘complexification’.

“An anticipatory reading of the cosmic story therefore requires a patient forbearance akin to the disposition we must have when reading any intriguing story. Reading the cosmic story calls for a similar kind of waiting, a policy of vigilance inseparable from what some religious traditions call faith. Indeed, there is a sense in which faith, as I use the term…, is patience”.

   Thus the anticipatory approach to the cosmic story requires a certain patience with the process of complexification, certain in the belief that the future is better than the past. Placing the universe in the context of becoming requires us to understand that

“Not-yet, however, is not the same as non-being. It exists as a reservoir of possibilities that have yet to be actualized. It is a realm of being that has future as its very essence.”

Patricia Allerbee, whom we have met previously, echoes this perspective

“..the long history of rising universal complexity suggests that we have only to allow ourselves to be “lifted by the evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”. To do this, “we only have to begin to pay attention”.

   And, as John Haught advises, “to anticipate with patience”.

The Next Post

This week we have returned to the idea of a ‘Terrain of Synergy’ in our search for the ground of happiness, this time from the perspective of John Haught, who contrasts the legacy religious and scientific ‘Cosmic Stories’, but suggests areas of overlap. In his perspective, what is warranted as we participate in the flow of human evolution, is a spirit of ‘anticipation’: less a hand-wringing, indignant demand for faster progress than a realization of the progress that is being made and a recognition that Allerbee’s ‘optimization’ is in fact underway in our lives as well as our societies.

Next week we will look into the traditional Western religious lore, referred to by Haught as ‘analogy’ to sift its ore for the jewels of insight that it offers this exploration.

September 5, 2019 – Articulating the ‘Spiritual’ Basis of the Ground of Happiness

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Today’s Post

Last week we traced the ‘spiritual ground of happiness’ to the ‘terrain of synergy’ between science and religion. At the center of this terrain, the concept that opens the door to an overlap between science and religion points the way to a truly integrated mode of human existence, is ‘Increasing complexity’.

We saw Yuval Noah Harari’s insight that our human capacities can alienate us from our evolutionary legacy connection with our environment   But we also recognized that, contrary to his dystopian forecast, as we become more integrated and more whole in our individual lives and in our collective societies, we can come to recognize our true connection to the wellsprings of the cosmos. Or, as Teilhard puts it:

“..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 made human in him.”

   This week we will look further into Teilhard’s understanding of the structure of the cosmos in such a way as to justify such strong confidence.

Teilhard’s Simple Picture of Cosmic Evolution

As we saw in our look at the structure of cosmic evolution (November, 2018), Teilhard envisions evolution proceeding throughout the cosmos from the ‘big bang’ in the form of a ‘convergent spiral’. As the products of evolution replicate themselves through joining and producing ‘offspring’ (eg atoms from electrons), they also experience a ‘rise’ in their complexity. Thus as they proceed ‘forward’ along the spiral, they experience an ‘upward’ effect as their complexity and ability to unite increases. This increase in complexity can be seen as a response to a universal force seen in a third agent whose direction is ‘inward’, hence the decreasing diameter of the spiral: its ‘convergence’.

With these three forces, forward, upward and inward, applying to every product of evolution in every age of the universe, Teilhard identifies the structure of cosmic evolution as it moves forward in the direction of increased complexity.

Teilhard also notes that not only does the diameter of the spiral decrease with time, it decreases ‘exponentially’: the rate of convergence increases over time.

This isn’t, of course, religion in any form. It is simply a way of looking at scientifically accumulated and empirical data in a different way. The data by which the history of evolution is categorized becomes much more straightforward when the ‘characteristic of complexity’ is recognized, and as we have seen, ultimately opens the door to science’s addressing of the human person.

Once the phenomenon of ‘increasing complexity’ is recognized in its universal context, all things in the cosmos become both inextricably linked and thus increasingly intelligible. Humans therefore become a valid subject of science once their place in the universal ‘hierarchy of being’ is recognized.

That said, however, the problem still obtains that once the threshold of ‘consciousness aware of itself’ is crossed, it becomes difficult to study human evolution outside of the conventional Darwinist paradigm of ‘Natural Selection”, which reduces humans to simple molecular activities under the influence of such things as ‘chance’ and ‘survival’.

Teilhard’s unique model of the ‘convergent spiral’ overcomes this barrier. His three ‘vectors’ of ‘forward’, ‘upward’ and ‘inward’ apply equally to every stage of universal evolution and to every new state of energy and matter that results from it.

Science has little difficulty understanding the transition from pure energy (at the ‘big bang)’ through the evolution of complex molecules, as the ‘Standard Theory’ of Physics outlines. The transition to the cell, and the latter (and quicker) transition to consciousness are more difficult, and by the time we get to ‘consciousness aware of itself’, all bets are off. This is the main reason why the last stage is so poorly addressed by science. Humans are either ‘epi-phenomenon’ or simply the result of pure chance; either way they are off limits as such.

If science avoids addressing the human phenomenon, how can we apply Teilhard’s tri-vector conception of evolution to its rise through the human?

The Spiral Of Evolution in the Human

If we believe that the universe is evolving along the three ‘vectors’ of Teilhard’s spiral model, then we should be able to find examples of how they are playing out in human history. As we have seen, science so far has been of little help.

Early last May we took an extensive look at how this spiral can be seen at work in the human person. Our personal (and cultural) evolution can hence be seen as a continuation of universal evolution as we (in Teilhard’s terms)

“…continually find new ways of arranging (our) elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space” by “a rise in interiority and liberty within a whole made up of reflective particles that are now more harmoniously interrelated.”

High minded words indeed. Can we find examples? Consider Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress”, which, in implicit agreement with Teilhard, does indeed offer both insight as well as articulation.

We first looked at Norberg’s ‘articulations of the noosphere’ which clearly and objectively show an exponential increase in human welfare (and hence human evolution) since 1850, and in which he cites instances of the activity outlined by Teilhard in the above quote.   In all nine of the areas of such ‘arrangements’, he cites the increased Western value of human freedom as the underlying causality.

This finding illustrates the action of Teilhard’s three ‘vectors’ of the spiral:

–          Fruitful Unity: Each step of the exponential increase described by Norberg is precipitated by an action of human collective insight, a sharp and clear example of human relationships as the locus of the energy of evolution manifesting itself in the human. Unity is the first vector- that which connects the products of evolution to move them ‘forward’.

–          Resulting complexity: As a result of each step, the complexity of society can be seen to increase in terms of more efficient organization, the reduction of human ills such as wars, famine and disease, and increased human lifespan. Increasing complexity is the second vector, the ‘upward’ component.

  • Increasing response to the agency of universal complexification: Through the increases in education and communication since 1850, each new step of evolution provides a stage for the next as individual persons become better educated at the same time that collective society is raised to the next level. In such results can be seen the action of the ‘inward’ component.

The Next Post

This week we continued our exploration of the ‘spiritual’ ground of happiness, noting that this ‘ground’ is located within the ‘terrain of synergy’. Once we begin to sense that the ‘ground of being’ is ‘on our side’, it becomes possible to build a level of confidence in the process of cosmic evolution as it rises through ourselves.

Having seen a clearer picture of this ‘terrain of synergy’ and its potential for a satisfaction with life that is grounded in a clear-headed, secular perspective, we can take our exploration of it yet a little further. Next week we will outline the dimensions of the ‘terrain of synergy’, and how it can be seen as the center-ground for the two traditional ways of ‘telling the cosmic story’.

August 15, 2019 – The Evolutionary Ground of Happiness

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a broad overview of the subject of ‘happiness’ and its vagueness, as we began to place it into Teilhard’s context of universal evolution.   We began with the ‘material’ view of happiness, and looked at several aspects from the viewpoints of psychology (such as surveys of this highly subjective subject) and biology (especially genetics), and saw that while all these searches for the ‘seat of happiness’ provide insights, the ‘bottom line’ is still evasive.

This week we will look at human happiness from the viewpoint of cosmic evolution. If, as we have maintained throughout this blog,

  • Teilhard’s insight that the underlying manifestation of universal evolution, from the ‘big bang’ to the present can be seen in the increase of complexity,
  • and this increase can be measured by the increase of consciousness,
  • then the fourteen or so billions of years of universal evolution of which we are products can’t be ignored.

Whatever it is that has effected the rise of complexity in the ‘stuff of the universe’ must be active in each of its products. As one of these products, it must be active in us. If it is, it can be trusted to continue in us, and our ‘happiness’ is in some way related to it.

Can humans, An Evolved Species, Ever be happy?

If we are to understand our evolution as persons and as of society from the context of universal evolution, our happiness, or at least our potential for happiness, must be understood in this way as well. How can our capacity for happiness be understood in such an evolutionary context?

Paraphrasing Patricia Allerbee, author of “Evolutionary Relationship”, this long history of rising complexity suggests that we have only to allow ourselves to be “lifted by the evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”. To do this, “we only have to begin to pay attention”.

Last week we saw how Yuval Noah Harari, in his book, “Sapiens”, believes that humans have not only evolved much faster than their environment but are ruining the environment from which we are becoming increasingly estranged. He notes that our predecessor species enjoyed long periods of flouresence, on the order of several million years, because their pace of evolution matched the pace of the evolution of their environment. This insured, he thinks, a continuing and long lasting ‘accommodation’ between species and their environments; an accommodation that humans have lost. The result, he goes on to opine, is the existential unease that makes is almost impossible for us to be ‘happy’ and hence will result in untimely extinction.

While I disagree with his conclusion, the idea that we have broken the implicit bonds with our environment has some merit. This week we will take a look at this aspect of the potential for happiness.

It’s not so much that humans have become unable to be happy, but more that our instinctive reactions to our surroundings, kept in play by our reptilian and limbic brains, no longer work as well for us as fhey did for our ancestors. This is true for our potential for happiness as well.

So, What’s The Alternative?

   As we have cited several times, Teilhard charts the many ‘changes of state’ that the ‘stuff of the universe’ undergoes in its journey towards increased complexity, such as energy to matter, simple building blocks evolving into more complex atoms, then molecules, than cells, then neurons, then brains, then consciousness. With each new change of state, new capacities appear, ones that were not in play in the precedent products, but ones neither completely free of the characteristics of the precedents. Teilhard notes the example of the cell evolving from the molecule: “the cell emerges ‘dripping in molecularity’”. It takes some time before the new capacities fully emerge, and the next rung of complexity can be mounted.

It is in this transitory state that we find ourselves today, humans can be seen as still, to some degree, ‘dripping in animality’. Humans may have a new capacity in the neocortex brain, but the skill of using it to advance our evolution and actualize our new potential in this new ‘change of state’ is still in development.

An example of such a new ‘skill’ was addressed earlier in this blog. The skill of ‘thinking with the whole brain’ was addressed last June, but can be seen in the intellectual process of overcoming the dualisms that infect our lives by simply using the neocortex to ‘ride herd’ on the stimuli of the ‘lower’ (reptilian and limbic) brains. It’s not a matter of ignoring these stimuli; they have evolved to enrich mammalian existence and enhance the capacity for ‘survival’. It’s more a matter of becoming aware of them, understanding them to be able to manage them to enrich human existence and enhance our own unique dimensions of survival. This is a ‘skill’ which we are still learning.

Thus the key to understanding ‘happiness’ from an evolutionary perspective is to understand what is indeed unique about human nature and how it works (or should work) in the context of an evolved universe.

Put another way, human life is most enriched when it fits harmoniously into the ‘forces of evolution’. Both humans and their environment have evolved over billions of years in which products have increased their complexity, and most recently when this increase in complexity has been quickened by a ‘natural’ selection in which products and their environments are able to ‘fit together’.

The excellent and insightful activities of science have certainly been able to quantify such things as universal time spans, the structures and configurations of evolutionary products which reflect this ‘complexification’, and details of the history of living things as well as our ontological and sociological part in it.

However, as we have seen, and as Teilhard, Sacks and Davies have pointed out, science is ‘marking time’ (Teilhard’s phrase) before it addresses what is unique about human existence: the person. As Teilhard points out (and Davies and Sacks restate)

“Up to now, Man in his essential characteristics has been omitted from all scientific theories of nature. For some, his “spiritual value” is too high to allow of his being included, without some sort of sacrilege, in a general scheme of history. For others his power of choosing and abstracting is too far removed from material determinism for it to be possible, or even useful, to associate him with the elements composing the physical sciences. In both cases, either through excessive admiration or lack of esteem, man is left floating above, or left on the edge of, the universe.”

   This, however, does not mean that humans cannot reflect upon themselves and their unique place in cosmic evolution, and begin to discern ways to use their unique capacities to better ‘fit’ into life and hence to enhance their enjoyment of it.   In addition to the ‘material’ and ‘evolutionary’ grounds of happiness, there is also a ‘spiritual’ ground.

The Next Post

This week we took a second look at the slippery subject of happiness, this time from the perspective of universal evolution. We saw how Yuval Noah Harari ‘s pessimism suggested that humans could never be truly happy due to the wide chasm that they have created with their environment. While disagreeing with his dystopic conclusion, we saw the merit in acknowledging that our species has nonetheless broken the bond enjoyed by our evolutionary predecessors and that this breach is indeed a source of the ‘pain of our evolutionary convergence’, but is not unexpected in the ‘rise of complexity’ embedded in the roots of evolution.

Next week we will take a look at evolution from a third perspective as we continue our exploration of ‘happiness’.

August 8, 2019 – The Material Ground of Happiness

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Today’s Post

Last week we continued our exploration of the ‘middle ground’ of the ‘terrain of synergy’ in which the efforts of science and religion overlap as they continue to address human life. We saw how the aspect of ‘happiness’ in the human person, while much to be desired, is both difficult to quantify, and if common belief would have it, difficult to attain.

This week we will take a closer look at this slippery subject, to see if Teilhard’s hermeneutic of placing a subject in the context of universal evolution will help us to see it more clearly.

What Is Happiness

The long string of human thinking in our literature, philosophy and religions presents us with a wide spectrum of stances that we can take in response to Shakespeare’s “slings and outrages” as inflicted by life. At one end of this wide spectrum lies simple acceptance of endless rounds of ‘fate’ and ‘fortune’, as the Easterners would have it.   At the far other end the ‘joyous embrace’ of cycles, which may well recur, but also rise over time, as envisioned in the West . Not surprisingly, most of us (and our literature, philosophy and religion) occupy the terrain closer to the center. Most approaches to happiness contain both some level of acceptance of those things over which we have no power mixed with some level of confidence that whatever our lot, it is capable of some improvement.

Happiness, to some extent, is the name we apply to the degree of acceptance with which we respond to these cycles.

Thus, happiness is difficult to pin down. Circumstances which might depress one person might be shrugged off by another. Personal welfare that might cause satisfaction in one might not be enough to satisfy others. Our news is filled daily with stories of people unconsoled by their good fortune, as well as those that manage some degree of life satisfaction without significant material welfare.

Where do we get the information that underpins these stories? The answer is that states of happiness are reported by those who experience them. Their subjective stories are reported, with no small measure of bias on the part of the reporter, and interpreted according to the mindset of the receiver.

In other words, not only is the concept of happiness slippery, its basis in reality is highly subjective.

Still, the search for its dimensions continue. Psychologists conduct surveys, biologists explore chemicals, and religionists look to faith. Does this level of contradictory activities mean that there’s nothing that can be said? Let’s look at a few aspects:

  • Surveys: For decades, psychologists have been searching for a process of conducting surveys free of cultural, economic, religious and racial bias. Not only do the continuing waves of surveys show a wider range of reported states of happiness than statistics suggest, but many of them are contradictory.
  • Biology: Many biologists suggest that happiness results directly from our chemistry. They state that chemicals such as dopamine and serotonin are direct causes of the sensation of happiness, and minimize those things that lead to their secretion in the brain. Thus, in the ‘nature vs nurture’ spectrum, in their view, nurture doesn’t have a chance.
  • Genetics: All of us know persons who are generally cheerful, even under difficult circumstances. We also know those whose glass is always ‘half empty’. From this view, we are all predisposed towards some level of happiness or unhappiness.
  • Religion: The religions of the world all aim at some level of accommodation with reality, from (as above) acceptance to embrace. Their hermeneutics and practices are clearly myriad, and often very contradictory.

For all this, science doesn’t have a good handle on happiness, contentment, or any of the ‘states’ of well-being.

A more subtle approach to happiness falls into the realm of relative measures. For example, if a very poor person comes into a large sum of money, the impact on their happiness is directly related to the improvement in their situation. They can be safely said to have increased the level of their happiness by a large amount.

For a rich person, even a large amount of money will not have anywhere near the impact as did the poor person. In the case of the person less well off, the impact will likely be longer lasting, as the money can also be put to use in caring for family and assuring a comfortable future. In the other case, the money will most likely not affect the person’s well-being, much less that of his family.

A curious take on this subject involves generally happy people who are nonetheless report that they are unhappy, a phenomenon which is relatively new in human evolution. This ‘dualism’ occurs when individuals are relatively well-off and well-educated, known as ‘the middle class’. As referred to in a recent article (July 11) of the Economist, this ‘satisfaction paradox’ can be seen when seemingly contented people vote for angry political parties.

This paradox can be seen in the dissociation between longtime political partners: personal well-being and incumbent political parties. As the Economist relates, the common election of an incumbent party has historically been the result of a general feeling of ‘well off’ among the population.   Today, we are seeing a surge in angry ‘Populist’ and ‘Nationalist’ parties elected by populations who consider themselves as ‘well off’.

The Economist traces one possible cause of this phenomena, prevalent in the ‘developed’ world, as the result of aging populations. Certainly, this demographic feels uncomfortable being caught up in rapid changes. As an example, many of us ‘old folks’ were taught, as we taught our children, how to use a dial phone. This same group, in many cases, are being taught how to use ‘smartphones’ by their grandchildren.

The reliance on ‘habit’, those learned since birth to enable us to smoothly function, is becoming a liability, as the necessity for a rapid learning curve seems to be more prevalent. The ‘fruits of our labor’, pensions, investments and assets built up over a lifetime of cultivating productive ‘habits’, may well have provided us with much quality of life, but do not necessarily constitute a comfortable intellectual nest for today’s turbuolence.

This certainly leads to an increase of indignation, a level of personal life satisfaction which is nonetheless deeply critical of others. We have seen how indignation can induce pleasant feelings, but this phenomenon also brings us back to the insights of Yuval concerning the ‘fit’ between the human person and his environment.

Consciousness aware of itself speeds up evolution in an environment highly subject to our influence. This ‘upset,’ not unlike weather (static air mass becomes unstable, leading to the emergence of patterns: a complexification/change to a new organization with new attributes).   Can the tension between a changing environment caused by humans who themselves are rapidly changing have such a future? Is it possible that the process of harmony-disharmony-change of state that we see today result in a new harmony?

And, on top of this, what is the forecast for a level of accommodation, even happiness, for the human person caught up in such a dynamic mileu?

If Teilhard understood it correctly, and the energy by which human persons unite is no more (but no less, as he would say) than the current manifestation of the fourteen billion year upwelling of the cosmos, then how can we not recognize the potential for fulfillment, both at the personal and the level of society?

More specific to the topic of happiness, how can Teilhard’s perspective be applied to each of us?

The Next Post

This week saw a broad overview of the subject of ‘happiness’, its vagueness, and began to place it in Teilhard’s context of universal evolution. If the energy of increasing complexity and emerging consciousness can be seen in human relationships (love, in its most universal appearance) and consciousness aware of itself, how can we better understand how we fit into it?

Next week we will begin to explore such ‘universal accommodation’ and attempt to locate the appropriate niche for the human person is this grand process of universal evolution.

 

August 1, 2019 – Human Life: Dealing With the Pain of Convergence

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Today’s Post

Over the past few weeks we have been exploring the ‘terrain of synergy’, the area of fruitful coherence between science and religion. In the past two weeks we have seen how Jonathan Sacks looks at this terrain from the middle ground, the terrain in which we live our daily lives.

As Sacks, Davies and Teilhard all avow, both our personal and collective evolution requires us to both better understand this phenomenon in which we are enmeshed, and our need for this understanding to guide us in cooperating with it.

This week we will take another step into looking at this phenomenon as we address it from its influence on our inner, personal life. It’s time to address the slippery phenomenon of ‘happiness’.

If We’re So Evolved, Why Ain’t We Happy?

It’s not difficult to find references to ‘existential anxiety’ in the current press. In spite of the recent increase in global human welfare reported by Johan Norberg, the persistence of pessimism and even depression among our contemporaries seems to be increasing. The causes underlying this phenomenon are certainly not clear, but the effect seems universal.

In his bestselling book, “Sapiens”. Yuval Noah Harari takes a unique position on this. He sees the cause of our ‘existential anxiety’ rooted in the speed of human evolution. In his view, the speed of our human unique evolution has a considerable impact on how we feel.

Yuval notes that, distinct from our pre-human ancestors, we have evolved much faster than our skills of accommodation with the environment could develop.

From his perspective, in the (relatively) glacial speed of pre-human evolution, species could ‘grow up’ with their environment, changing no faster than their environment changes. As a result, ‘Natural Selection’ in turn could ‘select for accommodation’, insuring that each species evolved in concert with its environment. In keeping with his Darwinist perspective, such an ‘evolutionary coherent pace’ insures not only better coherence between these ancestors and their environment but insures their ‘survival’. He cites science’s study of the past as showing ‘life cycles’ of our immediate ‘homo’ genus ancestors (egaster, rudalfensis, and others) to be in millions of years, and believes that these lengthy spans are the result of the more harmonious relationship between them and their environments. It’s not that their environments didn’t change, but rather that when they did change, such as in global warming and cooling cycles, the groups simply migrated, like the other animals, to different areas.

Yuval believes that with our subspecies, sapiens, our rapid population growth changed this dynamic, forcing the need for agriculture, with its corollaries such as towns, governments and laws, and interrupting the migratory instincts developed by Natural Selection. Thus the speedup of sapiens drove a wedge between us and our environment from which we have never recovered. We are, in effect, ‘longing for the good old days’.

In addition, he notes that humans have had a larger impact on the environment than our ancestors, and impose this impact much quicker as well. This is causing an additional disconnect as both our evolution and these environmental impacts change faster than we, as a species, can become comfortable with it.

Harari goes to great length in his book to call out the significant disconnect between humans and their environment, identifying the point in our history which occurred with the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, in which humans ceased to be nomadic and became sedentary, as a pivot point in human evolution. Prior to this point, while the human evolutionary ‘rate’ was slower, its impact on the environment was much less, and as he theorizes, our ancestors were ‘happier’.
After this point, he notes the rapid rise of human population (in which humans had a more reliable food source), which had the downside of introducing a reduction in the human’s sense of ‘belonging’ to the environment. He cites many ills of post-agrarian society, such as the need for intensive, benumbing labor (to tend the fields), the crowding and ugly by-products of overpopulation in cities resulting in diseases and other ills. He sees this turning point as a ‘decision’ and a huge ‘evolutionary mistake’ resulting in what he sees as the root of widespread unease in human civilization today. In his telling, with the Agricultural Revolution, humans, enabled populations to explode, negatively affect their environment and ‘ruining’ a satisfactory accommodation between humans and their environment which persists to this day.

He sees in this an underlying paradox in human evolution. Our ability to impact our environment impedes our accommodation of it. We are more ready, he asserts, to change it rather than (as our ancestors) live with its perceived problems. Each change that we make produces yet another problem that we believe we have to fix, and so on to the present day. Each of these changes creates yet another degree of alienation from nature, and contributes to an additional degree of anxiety. He extrapolates this tendency to a future in which our negative impact on our environment, our increasing discomfort with it and the incessant necessity for new technology to ‘fix’ it, leads inevitably to a future in which we quickly become totally dependent on automation, resulting in our untimely extinction. Unlike the reign of our Homo ancestors, in the millions of years, he gives us only a few thousand or so.

This dystopian view of human evolution (not the first, as Malthus showed us) provides one answer to the question of ‘if we’re so evolved why ain’t we happy?’

So, Why Ain’t We?

Setting aside the fact that not all of us are unhappy, the issue of happiness shows a long trail of evolution in itself, and can be seen in the immense spectrum of attitudes that represents total fatalism at one end and joyful acceptance at the other.

Teilhard also saw the rise of anxiety as resulting from the rapid rise of human evolution:

“Surely the basic cause of our distress must be sought precisely in the change of curve which is suddenly obliging us to move from a universe in which the divergence, and hence the spacing out, of the containing lines still seemed the most important feature, into another type of universe which, in pace with time, is rapidly folding-in upon itself.”

   So, we are brought to the point of considering the ‘terrain of synergy’ from the perspective of human happiness as well as that of the continuation of our species. Are we, as Harari predicts, doomed to a future in which we, unlike the millions of species which preceded us, doomed to carry our increased evolution as a burden in which our survival must be paid for by our unhappiness. Is there a perspective, grounded in both material and spiritual tangibility, in which we can see our future otherwise?

In this blog we have consistently followed the thoughts of Teilhard de Chardin , supplemented by those of other writers whose vision of the future suggest the answer to this question is an unqualified ‘yes’. Admitting, however, that the general issue of human happiness is very slippery, I’d like to take a perspective on the ‘terrain of synergy’ that continues, as Jonathan Sacks has opened the door, to the ‘middle ground’ of it. Harari is certainly insightful in his look backwards in history, but does this retrospective necessarily lead to the dismal future he predicts? Turning Teilhard’s succinct perspective of evolution, “Everything which rises must converge”, might it be true that “Everything which converges must rise?”

The Next Post

This week we followed up on Jonathan Sacks insights on the middle ground of the ‘terrain of synergy’ in which the different but complementary methods and insights of science and religion might overlap.   In spite of the optimistic tone of Sacks, as well as that of Teilhard and Paul Davies, we saw how Yuval Noah Harari offers a highly negative prognostication.

Next week we will continue our exploration of this ‘middle ground’ from the slippery perspective of human happiness. Not only is it difficult to quantify, but even more difficult to establish causes and effects. We will see if our long journey towards seeing the ‘Secular Side of God’ can offer any insights into seeing this phenomenon more clearly.