Tag Archives: X Reinterpretation of Religion

July 25, 2019 – Human Life: Reconnecting Our Parts to the Whole

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Today’s Post

Last week we moved from the ‘terrain of synthesis’, the areas potentially common to science and religion as identified by Teilhard and Paul Davies, to the ‘middle ground’ addressed by Jonathan Sacks: that occupied by the human person.

This week we will go a little deeper into exploring the potential of this ground to personal human growth.

The Road to Synthesis

Sacks moves from his review of the history between science and religion to address what he sees has resulted from the “crumbling of the arch between Jerusalem and Athens” and the need for rediscovery of the ‘terrain of synergy’.

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

   Science and religion have their own logic, their own way of asking questions and searching for answers. This is not an argument for compartmentalization, seeing science and religion as did (Stephen Jay) Gould as ‘non overlapping magisteria’, two entirely separate worlds. They do indeed overlap because they are about the same world within which we live, breathe and have our being. It is instead an argument for conversation, hopefully even integration. Religion needs science because we cannot (find God) in the world if we do not understand the world. If we try to, the result will be magic or misplaced supernaturalism.”

   He goes on to echo Davies’ observation that science, as it does not address the phenomenon of rising complexity in the universe, is poorly equipped to include the human person in its deliberation.

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

   He offers an articulation of the “Terrain of Synergy” that we addressed last week.

“It is precisely the space between the world that is and the world that ought to be that is, or should be, the arena of conversation between science and religion, and each should be open to the perceptions of the other. The question is neither, “Does Darwinism refute religion?” nor, “Does religion refute Darwinism”? Rather: “How does each shed light on the other, and “What new insights does Darwinism offer religion?”, and “What insights does religion offer to Darwinism?”

   Recognizing the “Terrain of Synergy” is much more than a philosophical goal. While it is a worthy objective to better understand where we fit into the ‘scheme of things’, we are still faced with the need to unpack this understanding into a way of personal life in which

“(in general) religion and science, far from being opposed, are on the same side of the table, using their distinctive methods to help us better understand humanity, nature, and our place in the scheme of things.”

   Reflecting Thomas Jefferson’s reinterpretation of Jesus’ teaching (Part 1 of “So Who And What Was Jesus’), he goes on to say

“Outside religion there is no secure alternative base for the unconditional source of worth that in the West has come from the idea that we are each in God’s image. Though many have tried to create a secular substitute, none has ultimately succeeded. This has been demonstrated four times in the modern world when an attempt was made to create a social order on secular lines: The French Revolution, Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany and Communist China. When there is a bonfire of the sanctities, lives are lost.

   Science cannot locate freedom, because the word is one of causal relationships. A scientific law is one that links one physical phenomenon to another without the intervention of will and choice. To the extent that there is a science of human behavior, to that extent there is an implicit denial of the freedom of human behavior. That is precisely what Spinoza, Marx and Freud were arguing, that freedom is an illusion. But if freedom is an illusion, then so is human dignity.”

The Next Post

This week we took a deeper look at the ‘terrain of synergy’ in which the different but complementary methods and insights of science and religion might overlap.   Three weeks ago we looked at how Paul Davies and Teilhard offer two very clear examples of thinking about synergy between science and religion, and this week and the last we saw how Jonathan Sacks looked at it from the perspective of the ‘center’ of this terrain, which is where most of us live our daily lives.

Next week we will build upon Sack’s insights, much closer to home, to look at how this movement toward ‘synergy’ between such things as left-right brain thinking, science-religion coherence and general overcoming of daily ‘dualisms’ can lead to what Richard Rohr refers to as “whatever reconnects (re-religio) our parts to the whole”.

July 18, 2019 – Science, Religion, Synergy and Human Life

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Today’s Post

Last week we looked at, in some detail, how the perspectives and insights of Paul Davies and Teilhard offer the concept of a ‘terrain of synergy’ in which the underlying basis of universal evolution, increasing complexity, can be examined as Teilhard states, by “assailing the real from different angles and on different planes”.

This week we will address this terrain from the insights of Jonathan Sacks, Former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the United Kingdom, who views this from the middle ground.

The Human Person’s Need for Balance

Sacks locate the center point of this ‘terrain of synergy’ in the phenomenon of the human person:

“It is not incidental that Homo sapiens has been gifted with a bicameral brain that allows us to experience the world in two fundamentally different ways, as subject and object, ‘I’ and ‘Me’, capable of standing both within and outside our subjective experience.  In that fact lies our moral and intellectual freedom, our ability to mix emotion and reflection, our capacity for both love and justice, attachment and detachment, in short, our humanity.”

   He notes that the difficulty of attaining such synergy can be seen in the human difficulty to integrate these two modes of understanding, resulting in the dualisms to which we have become accustomed.

“ It is this (potential for synergy) that the reductivist – the scientist who denies the integrity of spirituality, or the religious individual who denies the findings of science- fails to understand.”

   He also notes that most of us do not live our day-to-day lives in such a divided world.  While the empirical facts that guide science must be recognized, our daily lives are lived in a mileu more ‘intuitional’ than ‘empirical’.   He uses the human characteristic of ‘trust’ as an example.  As Yuval Noah Harari explains in great detail in his book, “Sapiens”, the whole human edifice of economics, (so necessary for the welfare detailed by Johan Norberg) is predicated on ‘trust’.   This welfare, unprecedented in human history, requires not only that individuals trust one another, but that they trust the ‘imaginary’ but tangible fabric of society.  The nodes of this fabric, such as states, banks, schools and laws are both results of ‘trust’ and structures upholding welfare.

Such trust isn’t empirically measurable or provable (as the empiricists would require) but it is nonetheless a key strand of the fabric that holds society together.  Those times when it erodes (as in an economic collapse), human welfare suffers greatly.

Sacks goes on to show how trust is more than just part of the glue that holds society together, and is the basis for our own personal outlook:

“Almost none of the things for which people live can be proved.  For example, a person who manages the virtue of trust will experience a different life than one to whom every human relationship is a potential threat.”

   And this is where the ‘center’ of the ‘terrain of synergy’ is located.

How Did We Get Here?

As Sacks sees it, the road to today’s bifurcation between science and religion began in the sixteenth century:

“The rise of science can be seen to have resulted from the impact of the wars of religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that led figures like Descartes and Newton to seek certainty on the basis of a structure of knowledge that did not rest on dogmatic foundations.  One way or another, first science, then philosophy, declared their independence from theology and the great arch stretching from Jerusalem to Athens began to crumble.  First came the seventeenth century realization that the earth was not the center of the universe.  Then came the development of a mechanistic science that sought explanations in terms of prior causes, not ultimate purposes.  Then came the eighteenth century philosophical assault by Hume and Kant, on the philosophical arguments for the existence of God.  Hume pointed up the weakness of the argument from design.  Kant refuted the ontological argument.  Then came the nineteenth century and Darwin.  This was, on the face of it, the most crushing blow of all, because it seemed to show that the entire emergence of life was the result of a process that was blind.”

In his view, the Christian religion of the West arose with a few foundational cracks that would eventually weaken it.

“Christendom drew its philosophy, science and art from Greece, its religion from Israel.  But from the outset it contained a hairline fracture that would not become a structural weakness until the seventeenth century.  It consisted in this: that though Christians encountered philosophy, science and art in the original Greek, they experienced the religion of their founder in translation.  While Greek is not the language of Jesus, it was the natural language of thought of Paul, the writers of the gospels, the authors of the other books of the NT, the early church Fathers, and the first Christian theologians. This was (brilliant but with) one assumption that would eventually be challenged from the seventeenth century until today: namely that science and philosophy, on the one hand, and religion on the other, belong to the same universe of discourse.  They may, and they may not.  It could be that Greek science and philosophy and the Judiac experience of God are two different languages- that, like the left- and right-brain modes of thinking only imperfectly translate into one another.”

  Sacks not only envisions the possibility that science and religion can ‘intertranslate’, but goes a little further.  He believes that they need each other.  Better yet, he believes that humanity needs both of them to be able to flourish.

The Next Post

This week we addressed Davies’ and Teilhard’s ‘terrain of synthesis’ as the intersect between science and religion, this time from Jonathan Sacks’ ‘middle ground’: the human person.

Next week we will build on this centrist vision to address how the powerful systems of science and religion can benefit from expanding this terrain.

July 4, 2019 – Science and Religion: An Integrated View of Reality

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at how the seemingly opposing perspectives of science and religion, our two great modes of thinking on this planet, could be seen as simply two facets of a fundamentally integrated movement towards a more comprehensive understanding of ourselves and the universe of which we are a part.  Teilhard likened them to two meridians on the surface of a globe which draw near as they approach the pole:

“Like the meridians as they approach the poles, science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.  I say, “converge” advisedly, but without merging, and without ceasing, to the very end, to assail the real from different angles and on different planes”.

   Given the traditional enmity between them, many would conclude that more of one inevitably results in less of the other.  This conclusion certainly seems to be borne out by the many polls in western countries which show a decline in religious participation.  ‘Accommodation’ has been automatically translated as ‘surrender’.

This week we will look at both Teilhard’s model of “assailing the real from different angles and on different planes” and how Paul Davies’ recognition of science’s need to ‘accommodate’ the human person offers a starting place for a true ‘accommodation’ in which one is enriched by the other.

Science and Religion: Drawing Nearer to the Poles

As a first step to rethink this classic duality, Paul Davies, a professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, simply puts scientific understanding into an evolutionary perspective:

 “No scientist would claim that the existing formulation of the laws of physics is complete and final.  It is therefore legitimate to consider that extensions or modifications of these laws may be found, that embody at a fundamental level the capacity for matter and energy to organize themselves.”

   One aspect of such ‘extension or modification’ lies in the Inclusion of the phenomenon of increasing complexity into the scope of science.  He notes that not only is such inclusion necessary for a more complete understanding of the universe in which we live, but will open the door to a subject significant but so far poorly treated by science: the human person.

Teilhard de Chardin also understood that the recognition of increasing complexity was key to a comprehensive understanding of reality, and also recognized the missing piece:

“Up to the present, whether from prejudice or fear, science has been reluctant to look man in the face but has constantly circled round the human object without daring to tackle it.  Materially our bodies seem insignificant, accidental, transitory and fragile; why bother about them?  Psychologically, our souls are incredibly subtle and complex: how can one fit them into a world of laws and formulas?”

   Thus, such inclusion as proposed by Davies, requires a new empirical perspective, an extension to traditional science.  Such emphasis on emerging complexity, while perhaps new to science, echoes Teilhard’s insistence that this same emphasis brings more relevancy to religion itself.  After all, he notes, religion has always assumed that there is a facet to the human person which is connected in some way to whatever universal agency by which the universe unfolds.   Again, from Teilhard:

“To outward appearance, the modern world was born of an anti-religious movement: man becoming self-sufficient and reason supplanting belief.  Our generation and the two that preceded it have heard little but talk of the conflict between science and faith; indeed it seemed at one moment a foregone conclusion that the former was destined to take the place of the latter.

    But, as the tension is prolonged, the conflict visibly seems to be resolved in terms of an entirely different form of equilibrium- not in elimination, nor duality, but in synthesis.  After close on to two centuries of passionate struggles, neither science nor faith has succeeded in discrediting its adversary.  On the contrary, it becomes obvious that neither can develop normally without the other.  And the reason is simple: the same life animates both.  Neither in its impetus nor its achievements can science go to its limits without becoming tinged with mysticism and charged with faith.”

   The ‘mysticism’ to which Teilhard refers here is less the classical religious concept of ‘tuning into to the supernatural’ and more the recognizing of the presence of a heretofore unrecognized agency of universal evolution.  ‘Faith’ in this insight refers less to ‘adherence to dogmatic statements so that we will be saved’ and more believing in both the inherent comprehensiveness of reality and our innate capability to understand it.

The Next Post

This week we took a deeper look at the skill of using the ‘whole brain’ to assess the ‘noosphere’, focusing on the different thinking modes of science and religion, as represented by Paul Davies and Teilhard, and how they illustrate the potential to envision them as Teilhard did, as global “meridians as they approach the poles…,  bound to converge as they draw nearer to the pole”.   While Davies and Teilhard offer two very clear examples of envisioning synergy between science and religion, the question can be asked, “what areas of focus could be common to science and religion?”  Aren’t they, as claimed by Stephen Jay Gould (and echoed by Richard Dawkins), independent ‘non overlapping magisteria’

Next week we will take a look at some areas where it would be appropriate to explore the idea of synergy.

June 27, 2019 – Science, Religion and Thinking With the ‘Whole Brain’

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­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Last week I was floating down the Rhine river from Basel to Amsterdam.   Sorry for the interruption in postings.

Today’s Post

Two weeks ago we took a deeper look at the skill of using the ‘whole brain’ to assess the ‘noosphere’, the mileu in which humans operate, to further understand our place in it and better understand how we can develop the skill necessary to cooperate with the flow of evolutional energy as it rises through the human species.

This week we will extend this theme of ‘coherence’ to our two great human paradigms of understanding and the ‘hermeneutics’ which we employ in them as we further our attempts to ‘make sense of things’.

Science and Religion: Activities of Two Hemispheres? 

As we have seen several times in this blog, the two modes of thought, empiricism and intuition, commonly seen as left and right brained activities, can be used in opposition, as evident in the many dualities that we have addressed.

Ultimately, however, there is but one reality, no matter how hard we try to break it up into bite size pieces to be better able to digest it.  As Teilhard says in his Preface to the “Phenomenon of Man”

 “Like the meridians as they approach the poles, science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.  I say, “converge” advisedly, but without merging, and without ceasing, to the very end, to assail the real from different angles and on different planes”.

   Science and religion are typically seen as left and right brained functions, manifest in empiricism and intuition, and the duality expressed as ‘science vs religion’ is common in our debates.  Teilhard’s deep insights into the nature of ‘being’ certainly precipitated heated criticism from both his science-oppositional hierarchy and from the predominately anti-religionists of science.

The fact that they have been so vehemently debated in the past does not necessarily mean that they are in true opposition, but often one or the other holds sway in the reasoning process.  What is necessary for ‘whole brain thinking’ is for recognition of each hemisphere’s need for the other: intuition as the starting point for objective empiricism, and empiricism as the infrastructure to verify and clarify intuition.

Hence, thinking with the whole brain requires these two perspectives to complete and enrich the other, whether we are addressing reality from the ‘left brain’ empirical perspectives of science or those of the intuitional ‘right brain’ of religion.

From the religious perspective, Teilhard (and Blondel before him) clearly understood how the scientific concept of evolution represented the possibility of reinterpreting the teachings of traditional religion in a way which clarified the immediacy of God, diluted religion’s superstitious and supernatural aspects and ultimately opened the door for a belief by which humans could more effectively contribute to their personal as well as societal evolution.

From the scientific perspective, Paul Davies, professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, outlines the many ways that science is beginning to articulate religion’s insistence that a cosmic thread of ‘becoming’ rises through all things, and thus offers a door to inclusion of the human (heretofore omitted from scientific thought) in scientific discourse.

We don’t need to be able to empirically understand the nature of this underlying agent of increasing complexity to be able to cooperate with it.  The ancients understood enough of it to be able to craft a belief system and the resultant social organization that benefited from it.

Are Religion and Science Compatible?

As Davies moves towards articulating the underlying agent by which the universe ‘complexifies’, he is moving beyond the traditional scaffolding of science.  He acknowledges the need for an ‘extension’ to the traditional science of Newton, Einstein and Planck if we wish to empirically treat such complexification.  Religion needs a similar extension which places this same complexification in a more central focus.  Teilhard fits this bill:

“”The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world”

   I believe that Davies would reply that:

The true science is that which recognizes the existence of a creative agency in the ever-increasing complexity that underlies universal evolution.

   Davies notes that Einstein didn’t replace Newton’s ‘laws’ with relativity, nor does quantum physics replace relativity.  In both situations, the understanding of phenomenon simply expands from the realm previously described into a realm more recently recognized.  As new phenomena are so recognized, new concepts, relationships and paradigms are required to address them.

Teilhard does the same for religion.  As he goes to great pains to describe, the scientific concept of ‘evolution’ does not require the jettison of legacy religion in the human journey toward completeness.  He simply offers an approach to religion that, anticipating Richard Dawkins:

“..divests the word ‘God’ of all the baggage that it carries in the minds of most religious believers.”

   Teilhard sees the ‘secular side of God’ in fact as the ‘religious side of science’

Thus Davies’ empirical quest for the agency of universal complexity is the scientific equivalent of Teilhard’s intuitional religious quest: the object is ultimately the same, and requires healing of the basic ‘dualism’ between religion and science.  The facilitation of such cohesion would equip the human mind with a ‘wholeness’ with which it can more adeptly navigate the process of human evolution.

Newton addressed the narrow but essential niche of existence of which we are aware in our daily lives.  Einstein (relativity), then Planck (quantum physics) expanded Newton’s field of view to the mini- and macro- spheres of the universe: the mega hot and the mega cold, the mini-small and the cosmically large outer reaches of existence of which we are unaware in our day-to-day existence, but which underpin (and overarch) it nonetheless.  These three steps have led in turn to the elegant but still incomplete models of the Standard Model of Physics, Relativity and Quantum Physics as science advances in its quest to ‘make sense of things’.

What Teilhard brings to the table is that these visions of reality are all somehow woven into a single cloth of cosmic existence, and what Davies recognizes is the necessity to first acknowledge this single cloth, then go to work expanding Einstein and Planck to the next level of theory.  Not a ‘meta’- physics but an extension of Newton, Einstein and Planck to the next level in which the agency of evolution and its universal product of ‘complexity’ becomes not just better recognized but quantified in such uncertain terms that the necessity for our allegiance to the laws which they reveal is unquestionably clear.

In such a way, Teilhard’s vision of ‘coherence’ between science and religion, in which they mature their legacy gifts of understanding into a collegial effort “to assail the real from different angles and on different planes”, begins to be less a dream and more of a reality.

The Next Post

This week we took a deeper look at the skill of using the ‘whole brain’ to assess the ‘noosphere’, focusing on the different thinking modes of science and religion, and how it is possible to envision them as Teilhard did, as global “meridians as they approach the poles…, bound to converge as they draw nearer to the pole”.

Next week we will dig a little deeper into what many would consider unlikely: the possibility that science and religion, and the perspectives, viewpoints and hermeneutics which they traditionally represent, are nonetheless simply facets of a single, integrated, and coherent attempt to make sense of the universe in which we live.  Is it possible for science to accommodate the intuitions of religion, with its hopes, faith and insistence on love, and for religion to (as Dawkins insists) “..divest the word ‘God’ of all the baggage that it carries in the minds of most religious believers” and accept the scientific discovery of ‘complexification’ as the manifestation of God’s creation?

June 13, 2019 – Science, Religion and Thinking With the ‘Whole Brain’

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a deeper look at the skill of using the ‘whole brain’ to assess the ‘noosphere’: further understand our place in it and better understand how we can develop the skill necessary to cooperate with the flow of evolutional energy as it rises through the human species.

This week we will extend this theme of ‘coherence’ to our two great human paradigms of understanding and the ‘hermeneutics’ which we employ in them as we further our attempts to ‘make sense of things’.

Science and Religion: Activities of Two Hemispheres? 

As we have seen, the two modes of thought, empiricism and intuition, can be used in opposition, as seen in the many dualities that we have addressed.   It’s not that they are in true opposition, but that often one or the other holds sway in the reasoning process.  What is necessary for ‘whole brain thinking’ is for each to recognize the need for the other: intuition as the starting point for objective articulation, and empiricism as the infrastructure to verify and clarify intuition.

Ultimately, after all, there is but one reality.  As Teilhard says in his Preface to the “Phenomenon of Man”

 “Like the meridians as they approach the poles, science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.  I say, “converge” advisedly, but without merging, and without ceasing, to the very end, to assail the real from different angles and on different planes”.

   Science and religion are typically seen as left and right brained functions, and the duality of science vs religion is common in our debates.  Teilhard’s deep insights into the nature of ‘being’ certainly precipitated heated criticism from both his scientific-oppositional hierarchy and from the predominately anti religionists of science.

However, thinking with the whole brain requires these two perspectives to naturally complete and enrich the other, whether we are addressing reality from the ‘left brain’ empirical perspectives of science or those of the intuitional ‘right brain’ of religion.

From the religious perspective, Teilhard (and Blondel before him) clearly understood how the scientific concept of evolution represented a way to reinterpret traditional religion in a way which clarified the immediacy of God, diluted religion’s superstitious and supernatural aspects and ultimately opened the door for a belief by which humans could more effectively contribute to their personal as well as societal evolution.

From the scientific perspective, Paul Davies, professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, outlines the many ways that science is beginning to articulate religion’s insistence that a cosmic thread of ‘becoming’ rises through all things, and thus offers a door to inclusion of the human in scientific discourse.

We don’t need to be able to empirically understand the nature of the underlying agent of increasing complexity to be able to capitalize on it.  The ancients understood enough of it to be able to craft a belief system and the resultant social organization that benefited from it.

Are Religion and Science Compatible?

As Davies moves towards articulating the underlying agent by which the universe ‘complexifies’, he is moving beyond the traditional empiricism of science.  He acknowledges the need for an ‘extension’ to traditional science which empirically treats such complexification.  Religion needs a similar extension which places this same complexification in a more central focus.  Teilhard fits this bill:

“”The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world”

   I believe that Davies would reply that:

The true religion is that which recognizes the creative aspect of God in the ever-increasing complexity that occurs with universal evolution.

   Davies notes that Einstein didn’t replace Newton’s ‘laws’ with relativity, nor does quantum physics replace the Standard Model of Physics.  In both situations, the understanding of phenomenon simply expands from the realm previously described into a realm more recently recognized.  As new phenomena are so recognized, new relationships and paradigms are required to address them.

Teilhard does the same for religion.  As he goes to great pains to describe, the scientific concept of ‘evolution’ does not require the jettison of religion in the human journey toward completeness.  He simply offers an approach to religion that, anticipating Richard Dawkins:

“..divests the word ‘God’ of all the baggage that it carries in the minds of most religious believers.”

   He sees the ‘secular side of God’ in fact as the ‘religious side of science’

Thus Davies’ empirical quest for the agency of universal complexity is the scientific equivalent of Teilhard’s intuitional religious quest: the object is ultimately the same, and requires healing of the basic ‘dualism’ between religion and science.  The fabrication of such cohesion would equip the human mind a ‘wholeness’ with which it can more adeptly navigate the process of human evolution.

Newton addressed the narrow but essential niche of existence in which we live life.  Einstein (relativity), then Planck (quantum physics) expanded Newton’s field of view to the mini- and macro- spheres of the universe: the mega hot and the mega cold, the mini-small and the cosmic large outer reaches of existence of which we are not aware in our day-to-day existence, but which underpin (and overarch) it nonetheless.  These three steps have led in turn to the elegant but still incomplete models of the Standard Model of Physics, Relativity and Quantum Physics as science advances in its quest to ‘make sense of things’.

What Teilhard brings to the table is that these visions of reality are all somehow woven into a single cloth of cosmic existence, and what Davies recognizes is the necessity to first acknowledge this single cloth, then go to work expanding Einstein and Planck to the next level of theory.  Not a ‘meta’- physics but an extension of Newton, Einstein and Planck to the next level in which the agency of evolution and its universal product of ‘complexity’ becomes not just better recognized but quantified in such uncertain terms that the necessity for our allegiance to the laws which they reveal is unquestionably clear.

In such a way, Teilhard’s vision of ‘coherence’ between science and religion, in which they mature their legacy gifts of understanding into a collective effort “to assail the real from different angles and on different planes”, begins to be less a dream and more of a reality.

The Next Post

This week we took a deeper look at the skill of using the ‘whole brain’ to assess the ‘noosphere’, focusing on the different thinking modes of science and religion, and how it is possible to envision them as Teilhard did, as global “meridians as they approach the poles…, bound to converge as they draw nearer to the pole”.

Next week we will dig a little deeper into what many would consider unlikely: the possibility that science and religion, and the perspectives, viewpoints and hermeneutics which they traditionally represent, are nonetheless simply facets of a single, integrated, and coherent attempt to make sense of the universe in which we live.  Is it possible for science to accommodate the intuitions of religion, with its hopes, faith and insistence on love, and for religion to (as Dawkins insists) “..divest the word ‘God’ of all the baggage that it carries in the minds of most religious believers” and accept the scientific discovery of ‘complexification’ as the manifestation of God’s creation?

May 30, 2019 – The ‘Whole Brain’ Model of Human Evolution

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­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Today’s Post 

Last week we continued our decomposition of Teilhard’s ‘convergent spiral’ model of universal evolution into how the dynamic at work in this spiral is manifested in human life as we advance our evolution through the transition from ‘instinctual’ to ‘volitional’ behavior.  We took a look at how the two brain lobes, the ‘left’ and ‘right’ hemispheres, are associated with ‘intuitive’ and ‘empirical’ modes of thinking and how for a fully human approach to such thinking, they must be used in balance with each other.  In the words of Jonathan Sacks:

“Think of ‘right’ and ‘left’ not as precise neuroscientific descriptions, but merely as metaphors for different modes of engagement with the world.”

   As he notes, most human dysfunctionality can be placed at the doorstep of dualities in which existence is understood in terms of opposites (love-hate, life-death, rich-poor, we-they, etc).  Advancing our evolution, therefore, calls for us to overcome these dualities by understanding the ‘noosphere’ as the single, integrated thing that it is, and this requires us to see it in a single integrated manner.

This week we will extend our look at the human thinking system from the neo cortex to the other two brain segments which contribute to our awareness, and thus extend our view to ‘the whole brain’.

Thinking With the Whole Brain

The neo cortex brain is clearly the most recent product of evolution, and one unique to humans, but there is yet another dimension to the task of ‘thinking with the whole brain’.  We have addressed this facet several times in this blog, but to recap: the limbic and ‘reptilian’ brains contribute significant stimuli to the neo cortex brain that we discussed last week.  In the human, the two lobes of the neo cortex brain are located ‘above’ (in evolution as well as vertical position at the top of the spine) the limbic and reptilian brains.  As we have seen many times in this blog, we are never without the stimuli of these ‘lower’ brains, which wield great influence over our ability to make sense of life.  As we saw six weeks ago (April 11), not only are these stimuli powerful, they are active in our personal growth, at work very early in our life and long before our neo cortex brain brains mature.  As a result, their stimuli is in play much earlier than our reasoning process can mature.

Further, their stimuli makes its way to our neo cortex much quicker than our neo cortex can formulate a reasoned response.  Add to this the factor the fact that their stimuli are capable of producing the pleasurable effects of dopamine, and it is easy to understand why it can be difficult to ‘being reasonable’.  This necessity for the neo cortex brain to formulate an objective decision in the face of powerful and more immediate stimuli from the lower brains is an aspect of the long (in comparisons to other animals) gestation of humans.  As we mature, for a comparatively long period of time, our ‘volitional’ skills lag our ‘instinctive’ responses.

It’s not that we have to learn to ignore these two ‘lower’ sources of stimuli, as their activity is essential to human evolution, but it is necessary to develop the skill of consciously and objectively dealing with them for us to be able to effect our own evolution as human persons.  Trusting our instincts, evolved over two billion years, is necessary for a full life, but the ability to modulate them when necessary is essential to the objective thinking that underpins our continued evolution.

As Richard Rohr puts it:

“If we do not move beyond our early motivations of personal security, reproduction and survival (the fear-based preoccupations of the ‘reptilian’ brain), we will never proceed beyond the lower stages of human or spiritual development.”

   As we have noted several times in this blog, the term ‘spiritual’ is not to be understood as other-worldly or supernatural, but as Teilhard understood it as the flow of evolutional energy by which we (and everything in the universe) is lifted up the convergent spiral to a higher levels of complexity.   In his words,

“Fuller being in closer union.”

   So, ‘thinking with the whole brain’ not only involves understanding our ‘noosphere’ in an increasingly integrated manner, using both our instinctual and empirical ‘modes of engagement with the world’, but being able to modulate ‘lower brain’ stimuli (such as the ‘fear-based preoccupations of the reptilian brain’) as well.

 

The Next Post

This week we took a second look at a model of the unique human brain as a step to addressing a more comprehensive skill of using the evolutionary gift of human thought as we go about trying to live our lives in cooperation with Teilhard’s ‘winds of the Earth.”

Next week we will take a deeper look at the skill of using the ‘whole brain’ to assess the ‘noosphere’ and further understand our place in it and how we can develop the skill necessary to cooperate with the flow of evolutional energy as it rises through the human species.

May 23, 2019 – The ‘Two-Lobe Brain’ Model of Human Evolution

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­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Today’s Post

Over the past several weeks we have been decomposing Teilhard’s ‘convergent spiral of evolution’ from the cosmic, universal, level to that of ‘ordinary’ human life.  In doing so we saw how we can begin to envision how the fourteen million years of cosmic evolution continues not only in the human species, but in our individual lives as well.

We have navigated this terrain by the use of models.  Teilhard’s spiral model offers an insight into how ‘lesser’ things become things ‘greater’ in complexity over cosmic eons of evolutionary time.  As convergent it also illustrates how this increase occurs ‘exponentially’, how it becomes ‘tighter’ as it continues through the noosphere.

In doing so we have moved from the cosmic spiral model to the personal model of ‘the virtues’, in which we can begin to envision the ‘attitudes’, the three ‘stances’ that we can take as we go about trying to live our lives in cooperation with Teilhard’s ‘winds of the Earth.’  We saw how the three attitudes of Faith, Hope and Love show up in the human as manifestations of Teilhard’s three universal components of the convergent spiral: fruitful unity, resulting complexity and increasing response to the agency of universal ‘complexification’.

This presents a highly unified and coherent concept of how universal evolution ‘changes state’ as it becomes more complex, resulting in an insight into how the human person fits into cosmic evolution, not as imposed from without, or emerging from chance and chaos, but a as a ‘natural’ entity.  Or as the song goes, “No less than the trees or the stars”.

However, as we have also noted, this comes with a price: the need for human ‘volition’ if this tendril of evolution is to continue.  And as so many philosophers have noted, the growth to human maturity is marked with difficulty.

In this blog, we have addressed many of the ‘risks’ to continued human evolution which constitute the locus for this difficulty. We have also noted that many of them present themselves as ‘dualities’ in which human life is depicted as options or positions that we can take which are in significant opposition.  Such dualities are seen in such concepts as ‘this world’ vs ‘the next’, ‘good’ vs ‘evil’, ‘natural’ vs ‘supernatural’, ‘damnation’ vs ‘redemption’, and many more.

These dualities demark the occasions of our maturity that call for us to make choices.  As Teilhard has noted, making the choices which overcome such ‘ontological’ dualities is one of the necessary steps toward our increased personal and social evolution.  And further, one of the steps toward such overcoming occurs when we begin to better understand both the universal process of evolution and our part in it.  As Teilhard notes, understanding evolution in this way permits us to see these ‘dualities’ as simple ‘spectra’: less ‘this vs that’ than ‘this and that’, with both present in some cohesive way.

This week we will continue the ‘decomposition’ of Teilhard’s evolutionary spiral as it manifests itself in the human person.  We will move from the ‘virtues’ to addressing how we can use the gifts of evolution more fruitfully in moving toward a cohesive and integrated mode of being.

Thinking ‘Objectively’: Beyond Duality, Towards Complexity

We have 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 the increased Western value of human freedom as the underlying causality.  This finding illustrates the action of the three virtues discussed last week:

–          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 Love as the action of the energy of evolution manifesting itself in the human

–          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 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

Norberg also highlights an aspect of this welfare that is less ‘championed’ by Western liberals: the role of wealth in this increase.  Generally, the liberal position calls for a more ‘equitable’ distribution of wealth as a necessary facet of human welfare in opposition to the conservative valuation of capitalism as necessary for the health of society.  Norberg’s extensive and well-cited data shows a different dialectic: Increased wealth as necessary for increased welfare.  Capitalism isn’t, in his view, the opposite of poverty, but rather the underlying solution to it.  Yes, the inequity remains, but not in such a way that poverty increases as a result of the rise of wealth, as if the rich add to their wealth by taking it from the poor.  He sees the rapid (and unprecedented) decrease of world poverty as a direct result of increase of world wealth.

This is an example of the overcoming of a traditional duality: ‘rich’ vs ‘poor’, in which there may be an unequal distribution of ‘rich’, but this is occurring today with an unprecedented decrease in the number of ‘poor’.

This is another example, as well, of Sacks’ observation that to become whole, which implies that we are evolving, we must think with both sides of our brain.  The ability to objectively see both sides of an issue, for example, often requires accessing the issue both intuitively and empirically, from both the left and right brain hemispheres.  Sacks sees such integrated action as looking at a dualism ‘wholistically’.

As he understands such ‘wholism’:

“It is not incidental that Homo Sapiens has been gifted with a bicameral brain that allows us to experience the world in two fundamentally different ways, as subject and object, ‘I’ and ‘Me’, capable of standing both within and outside our subjective experience.  In that fact lies our moral and intellectual freedom, our ability to mix emotion and reflection, our capacity for both love and justice, attachment and detachment, in short, our humanity.”

   In this statement, Sacks is illustrating the overcoming of several traditional dualisms: subject/object, emotion/reason, love/justice, and attachment/detachment.

Sacks offers a highly integrated insight into human evolution as seen in the increasing skill of thinking with both sides of the brain.  He traces the modes of human thinking through the development of written language from the Semitic to the Roman languages, from right-to-left expression and from the appearance of empirical (left-brain) conceptualization as it emerges from the legacy intuitional (right-brain) legacy.   The trick, he notes, is to find the ‘right’ balance between the two human powers of understanding represented by the skills of empiricism and intuition.

While this is one of the ways that we can increase our skill of using the human resources provided to us by evolution, there is yet another aspect to consider.

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at a model of the unique human brain as a step to addressing a more comprehensive skill of using the evolutionary gift of human thought as we go about trying to live our lives in cooperation with Teilhard’s ‘winds of the Earth.”

Next week we will look at an extension of this model which addresses the rest of the human brain system as we consider ‘thinking with the whole brain’.

May 16, 2019 – How Does The Spiral Of Evolution Work in Human Life?

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Today’s Post

In the last two weeks, we have turned our focus to Teilhard’s ‘spiral evolutionary model’ of the sweep of evolution from the beginnings of the universe itself to the current manifestation of complexity on our planet today.  We saw last week in Teilhard’s model of the converging spiral how complexity, his metric of evolution, could be seen as increasing in three facets: the unification of entities, resulting in the increased complexity of their offspring which in turn renders them more responsive to the ‘complexifying energy of evolution’.  As ‘consciousness’ emerges as a measure of complexity, leading to ‘consciousness aware of itself’ (the human person), we can also see how such recognition can eventually lead us to awareness of the process by which we become persons.

The Presence of the Evolutionary Spiral in the Human Person

We noted how Teilhard’s spiral model encompasses the entire sweep of cosmic evolution.  How can this be seen as reflected in the noosphere?

Such complexification can be seen in the phenomenon of personification.  As we become more aware of the energies from which our personal evolution evolves and continues in us, we can become more aware of how cooperation with them can be enhanced.

As Teilhard points out, the energy by which entities move along the spiral unites them in such a way as to:

–           advance their complexity (eg atoms into molecules)

–           become less’ intrinisic’ (eg ‘built into’ the entities as in atoms-to-molecules)

–          become less ‘instinctual’ (eg as in mammalian nurturing)

–          and become more ‘volitional’ (eg as in humans-to-humans).

As can be seen in this brief list, the energy of evolution itself changes state from chemical principles to biological imperatives, to emergence in the human as the ‘energy of relationship’.  In this series of transitions, love emerges as the current manifestation of the cosmic energy by which the universe evolves.  As we saw in the post on love as energy, love is much more than an emotional encouragement for relationship and procreation as it effects not only an increase in complexity of human offspring, but has an ‘ontological’ influence in the evolution of the human person himself.

Hence, we can see the ‘spiral of evolution’ equally at work in the human person as it is in the universe.  Learning to cooperate with the current state of evolutionary energy not only enriches our relationships, (which increases the complexity of our society), but enriches ourselves.  Such enrichment in turn increases our ability to enrich our relationships.  In such a way, the ‘universal spiral’ can be seen to be active in each human life.

However, as we saw, a successful relationship requires us to move from affection as an instinct to one which requires conscious decision.  The practice of ‘centration’ and ‘excentration’ described in the May 10, 2018 post (referenced above) requires us to modulate our lower brain stimuli as well as the resultant egoism that we have seen in our treatment of ‘noospheric risks’.   As the result of the ‘change of state’ seen in the energy of love, love becomes more a ‘decision’ than a response to an emotional imperative.  It becomes more ‘volitional’ in the human than it was ‘instinctual’ in the mammal.

That said, knowing what we know about the universal spiral of evolution, how can we map it into human life so that we can better understand it and respond to its new manifestation of energy?  What sort of ‘model’ can we use as a guide?

The Three Virtues Model

In the series of posts in which we looked at reinterpreting the concepts of Western theology, we addressed the idea of the Theological Virtues.   Just as we addressed the unique quality of the energy of human evolution as ‘spirituality’ in the context of secular phenomenon, we saw these three familiar ‘virtues’ as three ‘stances’ that we can take as we go about trying to live our lives in cooperation with Teilhard’s ‘winds of the Earth.”  Just as Teilhard’s model of the convergent spiral can be applied to better understand universal evolution, the ‘theological’ virtues can be seen as fitting into this model as a secular guide to applying it to human life

As we have seen, the ‘spiral’ model applies equally throughout the process of universal evolution.  It works at the level of the atom just as it does at the level of the human.  The ‘virtues model’, however, only works at the level of the human, but is an example of how universal processes can be seen at work in the ‘noosphere’.  These three ‘virtues’ are the human equivalent of the three universal effects of the spiral:  unity, response to evolutional energy and rise in complexity.

The first of the three human components of this converging spiral is ‘Love’, the component of unity.  As we have addressed in many places in this Blog, Teilhard’s assertion that the idea of love must be freed from its popular understanding as a strong emotion and allowed to flower as the energy of the power of evolution to unite its products in ways that increase their complexity.  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.  To Teilhard, 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.

The second component is that of ‘Faith’.   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 religious, imagine if Newton had not first believed that there was some objective, measurable and most of all ‘comprehensible’ force by which objects moved from their static state.  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’, which encourages us on our journey toward our potential for increased complexity as we move forward 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 sees us 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

This week we took another look at the mechanism of human evolution, and how recognizing and beginning to understand it is key to the important process of replacing ‘instinct’ with ‘volition’ as we begin to consciously take the helm of our evolution at the same time that we are beginning to better understand the winds, waves and tides that constitute our ‘noosphere’.

We saw how the three components of the ‘theological virtues’ can be seen in a purely secular context as the three components of our individual personal evolution.  These three components are the personal instantiation of a cosmic process which takes us ever onward, upward and inward.

Next week we will look at yet another model, one which addresses a different but equally important skill of continuing our evolution as we get closer to understanding how we can begin to consciously respond to its agency.

May 9, 2019 – How Does the ‘Spiral Model of Evolution’ Continue in the Human Person?

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Teilhard envisioned the process of universal evolution as proceeding in the form of a ‘convergent spiral’ in which entities, products of evolution, join in such a way as to produce ‘offspring’ of higher complexity.  We also looked at how, in the human, the evolutionary spiral is slowly taking on a ‘volitional’ characteristic, built on top of the ‘instinctual’ characteristic which has powered it for the past four billion or so years of life.  While the agency of ‘natural selection’ is undoubtedly at play in biological evolution, at the level of the noosphere it is becoming superseded by the human need to consciously choose the future.  Evolution is slowly becoming less ‘something that happens to us’ and more ‘something that we must consciously choose’.

This week we will take a more detailed look at how this ‘spiral of evolution’ is at work in universal evolution as a step toward better understanding of how we can respond to it in order to insure our continued evolution.

A Closer Look At The ‘Convergent Spiral’

We ended last week with Teilhard’s succinct description of cosmic evolution, in which he summarizes the action of a ‘convergent spiral’:

“Everything that rises will converge.”

   This simple statement has many facets of meaning which we will begin to unpack this week.  Each of these facets illustrates some characteristic of Teilhard’s ‘convergent spiral’.

First, the joining of products of evolution can effect an increase in complexity in their offspring.  As Teilhard sees it, this characteristic is the basic thread of universal evolution.  Nowhere in the universe does matter move toward greater complexity without this basic step.  Evolution is complexification, and complexification is the action that moves an evolving entity along the spiral.

Second, this universal phenomena (without which we wouldn’t have a universe or be here to address it) happens under the influence of some sort of implicit energy, which Teilhard understands as radiated by the ‘axis of evolution’ (the center line of his spiral).  While it is common in the scientific community to see this statement as ‘teleogical’, and hence a back door intrusion of religion into the field of science, Paul Davies, secular physicist and astrobiologist, in his book, “The Cosmic Blueprint”, states:

“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.)

   As we saw last week, even the atheistic scientist Richard Dawkins acknowledges the existence of a ‘mainspring of complexity’.

Third, the action of such joining of entities, which results in an increase in the complexity of their offspring, can result in a new entity which, because of its increase in complexity, is more responsive to the energy emanated by the ‘axis of evolution’ and better able to produce yet another level of complexity.

Fourth, the increase in complexity can be seen to occur exponentially over time, which means that as time goes on, products of evolution manifest higher measures of complexity more quickly.  A simple sampling of internet sources will quickly show that the observed interval of time between the appearance of the first atom and that of the first molecule is much longer than the interval between the molecule and the cell.  The intervals leading up to each of evolution’s major milestones (atoms, molecules, cells, single cell animals, neurons, brains and consciousness) are each shorter than the last.  The exponential decrease of the distance from the evolving entity to the ‘axis of evolution’ is a metric of the spiral’s ‘convergence’.

Fifth, each of these transitions appears as a ‘jump’, a ‘discontinuity’, or as Teilhard puts it, “a change of state’.  The resultant new entity of such transitions is radically different from its ‘parents’, and the diversity and volume of new capabilities of the ‘child’ are radically different from those of the ‘parent’.

As an example, hundreds of atoms are capable of uniting in such a way as to join to produce millions of different types of molecules, and the types of cells which eventually emerge from the initial cells is as yet uncounted.

As Davies cites biologist Bernhard Rensch:

“For example, when carbon, hydrogen and oxygen become combined, innumerable combinations can originate with new characteristics like alcohols, sugars, fatty acids, and so on.  Most of their characteristics cannot be deduced directly from the characteristics of the three basic atoms.”

   The presence of Teilhard’s spiral of evolution is therefore clear when we look back at what we understand of the past.  As Dawkins understands it, there is clearly a process at work “which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence. “

This process, while decidedly hard to quantify, nonetheless powers complexification via the intrinsic nature of matter which, as it becomes more complex, also becomes more ‘spiritual’.  I am using the term ‘spiritual’ here not in the vernacular of religion, but in that of science (as recognized above by Davies and Dawkins).  As Teilhard puts it:

“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.   The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self-conscious.  It is a cosmic ‘change of state’.”

   What is less clear is how this spiral can be seen to continue in the human.  Since the continuation of human evolution becomes less and less ‘instinctual’, and more and more ‘volitional’, it seems clear that our understanding of this spiral is increasingly necessary if we are to insure its continuation.  If we don’t understand this, it will be difficult to organize ourselves to align with it and make the choices necessary for its continuation.  In Teilhard’s words:

“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.”

   Implied in these poetic but insightful words is that if we do not understand the ways that evolution continues its universal unfolding in the human, we will not be able to cooperate with them, and thus will ultimately fail.   Understanding Teilhard’s ‘spiral of evolution’ may well help us to understand more about how evolution works on a universal scale, but other models are needed to see how such a process can be extrapolated into human life, and to better understand how we can move from ‘instinctual’ to ‘volitional’ response to ‘the winds of the Earth.”

The Next Post

This week we took a deeper look at Teilhard’s model of a convergent spiral as a way to better understand how evolution proceeds as a process central to the history of the universe.   We then began to address how this spiral can be seen in human life.

Next week we will look a look at another set of models that can be helpful in moving from this week’s ‘universal’ model to one closer to human life as we get closer to understanding how we can begin to consciously respond to the ‘winds of the Earth’

May 2, 2019 – A Model for Universal Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week, after looking at how the ‘addiction’ that is possible as we enhance our subjectivity and anger in the acidic pool of internet ‘likes’ that dilute our brain’s ability to reason with dopamine, we saw how this can be seen as another risk (when added to all the other ‘dualisms’ that underlay pessimism) to our continued evolution, and looked a little more closely at this phenomenon of ‘human evolution’.

We saw how the first eight or so billions of years of evolution, ‘pre-life’, and the following four or so billion years of ‘biological’ evolution depended on an innate and instinctive (in the biosphere) agent by which the ‘coefficient of complexity’ slowly rose.  In contrast, in the past two hundred thousand years, as humans have evolved, we noted the slow rise of ‘volition’ as the agency which is becoming the prominent force.  We saw again how the past one hundred fifty years (a nanosecond in evolutionary history) human evolution, as measured by human welfare, has increased exponentially, and how the key agent of this new surge could be recognized as the increase of freedom of the human person.  Such an understanding represents the beginning of our (in Teilhard’s terms) ‘articulation of the noosphere’, and the process of building personal freedom into our political constructs is a beginning to construe our ability to cooperate with it.

We have also seen throughout this blog, examples of ‘risks’ to our evolution, the last of which identified an insidious rising of subjectification and ‘progress pessimism’, which offers yet another ‘risk’.

This week we will begin to move forward to look at the action of universal evolution and see how our understanding of it can help us better overcome these risks and hence develop appropriate responses to it.

A Geometrical Model for a Universal Process

Developing a truly objective and wholistic grasp of universal evolution can be difficult.  After all, we are products of this process.  Whatever and whoever we are, whatever the energy or agency by which we seek this grasp and whichever cause we attribute it to, we are still caught up in its grasp.  Developing a comprehensive but objective view of cosmic becoming and our part in it is not dissimilar to constructing a bridge while we are traversing it.

Teilhard offers a fairly straightforward geometrical model which may help to better grasp this situation.   He sees universal evolution taking place as a ‘convergent spiral’, and this model can be clearly seen in our scientific understanding of the past.  Science understands the eight billion year period preceding the cell as the production of increasingly complex products of evolution, and this elaboration always leads to richer ‘entities’ which are always more conducive to ‘offspring’ of even more complexity.  Biology understands the following four billion years in much the same way: products of evolution appear as richer, better organized and more autonomous entities with each wave of living things.

Science has had a difficult time with this viewpoint, in fear that it is a ‘back door’ for inserting subjective theology into an objective method of inquiry.  However, there are few practitioners of science today that disavow the fact that the universe has become a much more complex thing today than it was at the ‘big bang’, and that humans are products of evolution which exemplify such complexity.

Even those atheists with a scientific background do not deny this.  We have seen how one of the most famous atheists, Richard Dawkins, in his book, “The God Delusion”, states it:

“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. “

Other than to note that this does not constitute a vote for religion (he seems less ‘a-theistic’ and more ‘a-religionist’), he doesn’t develop it further or recognize the many contemporary theological concepts that do so.

Teilhard, in one such concept, completely agrees with Dawkins’ premise, but goes on to elaborate in some detail how such a ‘process’ can be articulated in terms of the model of a ‘convergent spiral’.

Such a spiral is simply like a vertical spring, except as the spiral becomes increases in height, the diameter becomes smaller until the spiral converges on a single point at the top.

How Does Teilhard’s Evolutionary Model Apply to Universal Evolution? 

Teilhard applies this model to universal evolution, seeing each stage of such ‘raising of the world’ as located at some point on the spiral.  The vertical axis of the spiral is time, with the past at the bottom and the future at the top.  Along the spiral itself, evolving entities (eg, atoms) join in such a way as to increase the complexity of their products, with the result that the new entity (eg, the molecule) is located further along the spiral.

In addition to the new attributes of the new entity, a measure of such complexity can be also understood as the proximity of the new entity to the ‘axis’ (the centerline) of the spiral.  This distance slightly decreases as each new entity emerges with its slight increase in complexity, and can be seen as the influence of the agency of evolution by which the hew entities become more complex.

The third component of the converging spiral, which distinguishes itself from a simple spiral, is that the increasing complexity of the new component manifests itself as ‘vertical’.  To move along the spiral, the evolving entity must move upwards, increasing its complexity. The entity’s new level of complexity can therefore be seen as a ‘rise’.

In simpler terms, as each new product of evolution appears, it ‘rises’ in complexity in response to some ‘agency of complexification’ which equips it to produce an increase in complexity in its offspring.

In Teilhard’s words:

“Everything that rises will converge.”

The Next Post

This week we have taken a look at Teilhard’s spiral model of evolution and how such a model can be used to conceptualize and even visualize how evolution can proceed.  It still remains to see how such a model can offer a way to see it at work in each of us as we live our lives.

Next week we will unpack Teilhard’s simple statement into terms which articulate how he sees the agency of evolution in universal becoming.