Tag Archives: X Reinterpretation of Religion

December 27 – The Confluence of Religion and Science- Part 2

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Today’s Post

   Last week we took a first look at Teilhard’s insights into how we can begin to see Christianity as less a competitor to science and more as a step toward an integrated understanding of the human person and his place in Teilhard’s ‘noosphere’.

Last week’s three insights were taken from Teilhard’s collection of papers entitled “Human Energy”.  This week we will continue looking at Teilhard’s conviction of the value of Science and Religion to each other, taking four more insights from his cornerstone book, “The Phenomenon of Man”.

Science and Religion: Getting From Here To There

In the fourth insight, Teilhard cites his belief that to live the noosphere we must understand it:

“Man is, if I have not gone astray in these pages, an object of unique value to science for two reasons.

(i) (The human person) represents, individually and socially, the most synthesized state of order which the stuff of the universe is available to us.

(ii) Collectively, he is at present the most mobile (in the process of changing) point of the stuff in course of transformation.

   For these two reasons, to decipher man is essentially to try to find out how the world was made and how it ought to go on making itself.  The science of man is the practical and theoretical science of hominisation.  It means profound study of the past and of origins.  But still more, it means constructive experimentation pursued on a continually renewed object.  The program is immense and its only aim is that of the future.”

   In the fifth insight, he recognizes, however, that the emergence of science was not without its seeming competition with religion.  As Steven Pinker outlines in his book, “Enlightenment Now”, the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, while offering great clarification of human affairs appropriate to the ‘articulation of the noosphere’, still placed most of the ills of the noosphere at the feet of religion:

“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.”

This sentiment was strongly evident in the earliest claims of the superiority of empiricism over that of intuition, such as that which appeared in the Enlightenment.  As much as I value the insights of Steven Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”, this biased viewpoint can still be found tucked into the back chapters.

Further, as Pinker undertakes the difficult subject of personal happiness in this book, he is forced to recognize the significant correlation between meaning and life satisfaction.  He does not seem to understand that science does not incorporate meaning at the personal level into its wonderful insights.  As Jonathan Sacks points out:

“Science takes things apart to see how they work.  Religion puts things together to see what they mean.  The difference between them is fundamental and irreducible.  They represent two distinct activities of the mind.  Neither is dispensable.  Both, together, constitute a full expression of our humanity.  They are as different and as necessary as the twin hemispheres of the brain.  It is in fact from the hemispherical asymmetry of the brain that the entire drama of the mutual misunderstanding and conjoint creativity of religion and science derive.”

   In his sixth insight, Teilhard, goes on to envision a future relationship between science and religion in which their viewpoints capitalize on Sack’s potential synergies, and they begin to come into a synthesis in which the manifest structures of human evolution are seen as facets of a single thing:

  “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.“

   And, so, Teihard summarizes his understanding of how the empiricism of science and the intuition of religion, the traditionally understood ‘left’ and ‘right’ brain perspectives that Sacks highlights, can now be seen as potentially two integrated and synthesized human enterprises.  Long envisioned as the opposite sides of a deep-seated duality, Teilhard sees them as destined to bring us to a more complete understanding of ourselves and the noosphere which we inhabit.

In his seventh insight, Teilhard summarizes his belief that such synthesis is necessary for the continuation of human evolution:

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

   As we have seen, Johan Norberg, in his book, “Progress”, implicitly agrees when he cites the three factors of freedom, innovation and relationships as essential for the continuation of the human progress (which we have seen is essentially quantification of human evolution).  In showing how these three factors are critical to secular progress, he is in implicit agreement with Teilhard that “neither (science nor religion) can develop normally without the other” and Sacks that “Both, together, constitute a full expression of our humanity”.

These three factors of course are seldom cited as aspects of intuitional thinking, but are addressed in some form in every expression of religious belief.

The Next Post

This week we have completed looking at Teilhard’s seven insights that underlay his assertion that the continuation of human evolution requires a synergy between science and religion if it is to continue.

While this week we cited the belief of Jonathan Sacks on the two ‘domains of thought’ of these two enterprises, next week we will look a little more deeply into his insights of how they can better team to assure this continuation.

December 20 – The Confluence of Religion and Science – Part 1

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Today’s Post

Last week we noted once again that even with the evolutionary progress that can be seen in the secular world, undriven by a singular impetus for advancing evolution per se, but nonetheless effecting a startling increase in human welfare over the past two hundred years, continuation of this trend is not inevitable. It is possible for ‘noospheric risks’ to undermine the continuation of human evolution, but as Teilhard asserts, the potential of science and religion, properly focused, conjoined and applied, are tools which will help us make our way.
This week we will look at the first three of his assertions to understand the potential for religion’s confluence with science to effect a tool for doing so.

The Evolutionary Potential of Religion

In “Human Energy”, Teilhard notes that Christianity, of all the world’s religions, in its fundamental teachings, is well placed for such a partnership with science in overcoming ‘noospheric risks’ and insuring the continuation of the rise of complexity in the human species.

In the first of these assertions, he cites the distinguishing feature which differentiates Christianity from the predominant Eastern beliefs: that of the primacy of the person:
“Like every other form of adherence to a cosmic hope, the doctrine of the personal universe has exactly those characteristics of universality and faith which are, in the broad sense of the term, distinctive of religion. But the religion it introduces has in addition two associated characteristics which seemed, to their mutual detriment, destined to be perpetual opposites in religious systems: personalism and pantheism. (This position) is already virtually realized and lived within Christianity.”
Like Teilhard, Jefferson recognized the personalistic focus of Christianity, but Jefferson saw it as necessary for the success of a democratic governmental progress, and hence as a necessary impetus to continued human evolution. Unlike Jefferson, who lived in a static universe, Teilhard recognized the value of attaching primacy to the concept of the person not only in human affairs, but as necessary for understanding the entire evolution of the universe. Teilhard first identifies complexity as the key metric of universal evolution, then observes how this complexity eventually manifests itself as person-ness in evolution’s most recent stages.

Second, he notes how this primacy of person can be seen in the Christian concept of ‘incarnation’, which can be seen through Teilhard’s insights as an impetus for the personal development that is the cornerstone to continued human evolution:
” The degree to which Christianity teaches and offers a prospect of universal transformation can never be sufficiently stressed. By the Incarnation God descended into nature to ‘super-animate’ it and lead it back to Him: this is the substance of the Christian dogma.”
Here the concept of God as the fundamental agent of the rise of complexity that powers universal evolution overlaps with the core Christian teaching of John that “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”. The Christian claim that the universal agent of life is somehow present in each of its manifestations is remarkable among all the world’s religions, and clearly shows the unique Christian belief that whatever is happening in our lives as we grow is powered by a universal agency for such growth.

Third, Teilhard also takes note of how the major elements of Christian theology are not only compatible with Science’s understanding of the ‘natural’ world, they can be enhanced by it. Teilhard, like Blondel before him, understood how the concept of evolution offered religion a more complete understanding of their ancient teachings:
“In itself, (Christian) dogma can be reconciled with many representations of the empirical world. So long, for example, as the human mind saw the universe only as a fixed arrangement of ready-made elements, the Christian had no serious difficulty in introducing the mysterious process of his sanctification into this static assemblage. But was not this, to some extent, a second best? Was a fundamental immobility of the cosmos the best imaginable framework for the spiritual metamorphosis represented by the coming of the kingdom of God? Now that the dust of early battles is dying down, we are apparently beginning to perceive that a universe of evolutionary structure- provided that the direction of its movement is truly located- might well be, after all, the most favorable setting in which to develop a noble and homogenous representation of the Incarnation.”
“Christianity would have been stifled by a materialist doctrine of evolution. But does it not find its most appropriate climate in the broad and mounting prospect of a universe drawn towards the spirit? What could serve as a better background and base for the descending illuminations of a Christogenisis than an ascending anthropogenesis?”
“Drawn towards the spirit” of course invokes Teilhard’s reinterpretation of ‘spirit’ as ‘increased complexity’, with Christogenisis as the personal aspect of this increased complexity. With this observation, Teilhard ‘closes the loop’ between a science which struggles to understand the fundamental force of evolution by which the intensity of its complexity is increased (“drawn towards the spirit’) and a religion loosed from its moorings of superstition, hierarchy and a spirituality which has become detached from the noosphere.

The Next Post

This week we have taken a first look at the possibility of bringing science and religion into a coherence which strengthens both of them and thus permits a clearer understanding of the noosphere; one which provides us with more effective tools for mitigating its risks and insuring the continuation of human evolution.
Next week we will continue this inquiry by seeing how Teilhard addressed this subject in his cornerstone book, “The Phenomenon of Man”.

December 13 – Religion and Science: Noospheric Tools?

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Today’s Post

In the last several weeks, we have been looking at religion’s concept of morality, ending in a look at how Teilhard’s five insights into morality offer a rethinking of traditional religion’s concept from proscription to prescription as we begin to recognize religion’s potential as a tool for insuring our continued evolution.  We saw how religion must recognize its role as a tool for understanding the noosphere to be able to assist us in living it in such a way that we maximize our potential for being fully and authentically human.

This week we turn our focus to the other great human enterprise, science, to begin exploring how a revitalized religion, better focused on an evolving noosphere, might better work with an obviously effective science in effecting such ‘maximization’ of potential. 

Evolution Everywhere

In this series, we have frequently noted that, as asserted and quantified by Johan Norberg (‘Progress’), it is possible for us, with properly focused eyes, to recognize threads of this evolution happening all around us.  Norberg offers, as the Economist identifies, “A tornado of facts” which quantify the many ways that human welfare proceeds by the correct application of human freedom, innovation and relationship throughout the world.  These examples of increased human welfare are without a doubt evidence of the ways the human species can be seen to continue its evolution.

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

By the same token, we have noted that these three characteristics are treated poorly by science, and its companion secular ‘disciplines’ such as economics and politics.   Norberg’s three cornerstones of progress initially only occur in the West, as a slowly building consequence of society influenced by its Christian roots in the uniqueness of the person (more on this subject next week).

Jefferson’s claim that

 “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves”

was a claim to such uniqueness, and not derived from any empirical source.  His inspiration for such an unprovable concept was none other than the ‘teachings of Jesus’:

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

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

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

As Norberg quantifies at length, this clearer understanding has given rise to the success of the West in providing a mileu which has effected a degree of stability not only unprecedented in Western history, but which has slowly permeated into the rest of the world.

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

Enter Religion

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

At the basis of these ‘risks’ is the necessity for us to choose to continue to power this tide.  We saw that it is possible for humans to simply allow fear, pessimism and disbelief to weaken their will to continue.

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

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

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

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

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

We have taken a look at a key facet of religion,  that of ‘morality,’ to understand how this concept can be reinterpreted in terms of building blocks for continued human evolution.  How can religion itself be seen in this same way?  Teilhard’s answer to this question was to see that there is a way for religion and science to overcome the traditional religion-science duality:

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

The Next Post

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

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

December 6 – Religion’s Seeds of ‘Articulating the Noosphere’ and How to Build Upon Them, Part 2

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Expanding On Teilhard’s View of Morality – Part 2

Today’s Post

Last week took a second look at Teilhard’s five insights into the religious concept of morality, focusing on the first two.  As we saw, putting the idea of morality into the context of evolution brought new depths of meaning into religion’s traditional understanding of morality as proscriptions for stabilizing society and qualifying us for ‘the next life’.

This week we will continue further on this subject, reviewing the last three of his insights for their potential to ‘construct the noosphere’ even as in turn we are ‘constructed’ by it.

Teilhard’s Last Three Insights on Morality

As we saw last week, the first two of these insights from his book, “Human Energy” addressed morality from the perspective of its role in human evolution and showed how the basis of morality is a building block for the noosphere, as well as an articulation which

“guide(s) (us) so effectively in the direction of (our) anticipated fulfillments that the ‘quantity of personality’ still diffuse in humanity may be released in fullness and security.”

   To Teilhard, the essential function of religion is as a tool for unlocking our potential as entities of evolution to continue the evolutionary ‘complexification’ of the universe as we ourselves become more complete.

His last three insights extend the first two into an understanding of how morals can help us ‘release’ our “quantity of personality…in fullness and security”.

The Morality of Balance (appropriate to a static universe) vs the Morality of Movement (appropriate to an evolving universe)

 “The morality of balance is replaced by the morality of movement.

–  (As an example) The morality of money based on exchange and fairness vs the goodness of riches only if they work for the benefit of the spirit.”

   A secular example of such a shift in perspective can be seen in the examples of human evolution in human affairs today, as enumerated by Norberg.  One of the facets that he identifies is a distinct correlation between the rise of human welfare in developing countries and their increase of GNP.  This is a concrete example of Teilhard’s insight into the potential of secular wealth to improve human welfare as a metric of human evolution.  Norberg echoes Teilhard’s belief that ‘the morality of money’ can evolve from seeing donated money as a measure of morality (charity) to understanding the application of personal freedom and improved relationships as necessary for a society to increase its wealth (GNP) and as a result, increase the welfare of its citizens.

– “Individual morality to prevent him from doing harm vs working with the forces of growth to free his autonomy and personality (person-ness) to the uttermost.”

   This is a direct corollary of the above insight, and reinforces his claim that morality must evolve from proscription to prescription if it is to fulfill its potential in fostering our personal evolution towards more completeness (autonomy and person-ness).  In Teilhard’s new insight, morality must now be recognized as a tool for increasing personal freedom and enhancing relationships, not as a hedge against evil.

Religion, Morality and Complexification

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

   Here Teilhard is delving into the most fundamental role of religion.  As technology certainly can be seen to improve human welfare, it has no expertise at improving the human unique characteristics of personal freedom and personal relationships which are necessary to insure the innovation and invention at the basis of its expertise.  He goes on to say,

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

   The most appropriate role for religion Is as a tool for management of the noosphere.  The deepest claim to authenticity for a religion is to be recognized as a tool for the evolutionary advancement of the human person, and through him the advancement of humanity.

Morality As A Basis For Dealing With The Noosphere

“So as long as our conceptions of the universe remained static, the basis of duty remained extremely obscure.  To account for this mysterious law (love) which weighs fundamentally on our liberty, man had recourse to all sorts of explanations, from that of an explicit command issued from outside to that of an irrational but categorical instinct.”

   Here Teilhard is succinctly stating one of his basic tenets of understanding human evolution:  Once put in an evolutionary context, all concepts which are pertinent to human existence begin to present themselves as aspects of the single, unified and coherent thing that they truly are.   

The Tool Set

In the same way that government must establish and safeguard the building blocks of society, such as Jefferson seeing the person as the basis for society…

In the same way that medicine must understand physiology to diagnose illness to be able to prescribe treatment…

In the same way that technology must understand metal structure to build a bridge…

Religion must recognize its role as a tool for understanding the noosphere to be able to assist us in living it in such a way that we maximize our potential for being fully and authentically human.

The Next Post

This week we took a second look at the last three of Teilhard’s insights into the concept of morality, seeing how he extended his understanding in the first two (the evolutionary context) to the last three (how it is a tool for continuing our evolution as humans).

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

November 29 – Religion’s Seeds of ‘Articulating the Noosphere’ and How to Build Upon Them Expanding On Teilhard’s View of Morality- Part 1

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a more detailed look at Teilhard’s insights into the concept of morality, how it has been taught in Western religion, and how putting it into the context of evolution can point the way to incorporating it as a tool for ‘articulating the noosphere’.

   This week I’d like to look at the five insights from last week that Teilhard offers from his book, “Human Energy” in the context of the multifaceted view that we have been building in our search for “The Secular Side of God”.  Each one of these insights is in reality just an outline, a starting point for these subjects, and offers a basis for considering the concept of morality to be a cornerstone for ‘articulating the noosphere’.

Rethinking Religion

As we have seen, one of Teilhard’s key insights was that to be able to manage our journey through the noosphere, we must first understand it. The entire history of religion shows it to be our first attempt to do so.  Born in an era which depended on intuitive insights , the early religions were simply extensions of the clans which formed the base for the societal structures that came into being.  They all reflected the need to stabilize the ever-increasing size, density and complexity of human society.  All of the early myths and stories reflected the common understanding that the world had always existed, and that it had existed in manifestations that had only superficially changed over the years.

As we have seen elsewhere in this blog, these early noospheric insights did not begin to rise from the highly subjective perspectives that had held sway for thousands of years until the “Axial Age”, some 700 years BCE.  These perspectives, while somewhat impacted by early Greek thinking, managed to remain as the prevalent mode of thinking until mid-1200’s, when more empirical and objective perspectives began to appear in the West.

When this happened, the highly metaphorical insights into the composition of the noosphere began to change, culminating in the growing understanding of first the noosphere itself and then the universe which surrounds it, from static to dynamic.

The clash between the neothink offered by the nascent scientific evidence and the prevalent static and intuitive beliefs which still reflected medieval scholasticism is well documented, and to some extent still goes on today.  They offer profoundly opposed insights into the composition of the noosphere, and reflect the significant dualism that underpins modern attempts to understand it.  So it comes as no surprise that today we find it difficult to unravel these two threads to find a way to respin them into a single strand.

  In such a single strand, the concept of morality moves beyond the dualistic secular basis for a secure society and a roadmap to successful entry into the next life, and into a set of guidelines which ‘articulate the noosphere’ in such a way that we insure our continued evolution into states of greater complexity.

Rethinking Morality

   It was in this vein that Teilhard, along with other thinkers such as Maurice Blondel, began to look at the tenets and structure of religion, particularly Western religion, in these new terms offered by science.  The five insights that we saw last week offer a summary of his understanding of how this new thinking not only could bring a new, secular and empirical meaning to the ancient teachings, but that Christianity, as one of the first attempts to see religion and reason as sides of a single coin, was well suited to do so.

Teilhard’s five insights into morality all offer opportunities to not only increase the relevancy of religious teaching, but in doing so increase its value to science.  Not only can religious teaching be better grounded in empirical facts, but in doing so can provide a much needed ‘ground of humanity’ to science.

Looking a little deeper into the first two of Teilhard’s five insights into morality:

The Evolutionary Basis for Morality

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

   Here Teilhard asks us to recognize that what religion has been trying to accomplish, with its topsy-turvy, noosphericly-risky, ultimately very human approach is to ‘articulate the noosphere’, using the slowly accumulated understanding of the noosphere provided by intuition, metaphors and dreams, and impeded by egos, fears, and ambitions. 

   He attaches no particular stigma to the fact that we’re already some two hundred thousands of years into human evolution, and in many ways ‘we’re not there yet’.  Considering that evolution is ‘a work in progress’, the ultimate use of the tool of morality is to ‘construct the world’.  Conversely this calls for us to ‘construct morality’ even as we ‘articulate the noosphere’.

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

The Evolution of Morality

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

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

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

   As we better understand morals, we better understand the noosphere, and become more skilled at cooperating with its forces to increase our personal complexification.

The Next Post                  

This week we took a second look at morality as a facet of religion which can be seen as a tool for helping us understand the structure of the noosphere as a step to managing its risks.  We did this by expanding on the first two of Teilhard’s synopses of the history and the place of ‘morality’ in the unfolding of the noosphere.

Next week we’ll continue this theme, taking a deeper look at the remaining three of Teilhard’s insights from his book “Human Energy” to see how the concept of morality can be enriched and more highly focused to enhance both the relevance of religion and offer a tool more finely honed for dealing with the noosphere’s inevitable risks.

November 15 – Religion as a Tool for Understanding the Noosphere

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a second look at Teilhard’s first step of managing the Noospheric Risks by better understanding it.  We saw how a deeper understanding of the structure of the Noosphere involves recognition of and cooperation with the universal agent that for fourteen billion years has invested itself in the continuation of complexity that has eventually given rise to humans.

As we have seen over the past several weeks, this rise is no longer based on instinctual, biological and physical processes: it must be consciously grasped and capitalized upon if it is to continue in the human species.  The ‘noospheric risks’ which we have identified must be consciously overcome if evolution is to continue through our species.

A major step in understanding the noosphere so that those risks can be managed, as Teilhard suggests, is to ‘articulate’ it, to understand how it works to effect our continued evolution, both in ourselves as well in our societies.

One such tool is, properly understood, religion.  This week we will take a first look at religion to understand how it can be seen as a tool to achieve such a goal.

Why Religion?

One of the foundational concepts that the great Western awakening known as “The Enlightenment” introduced was the diminishment of religion’s role in society and government.  One of the results of this diminishment was the rise of atheism, which placed many of the world’s ills (eg ‘Noospheric risks’) at the doorstep of organized religion.  Both the leading Enlightment thinkers, and the atheists which ensued, valued objective, empirical thinking over the subjective and intuitive intellectual processes that had informed medieval Western thinkers.  As we have discussed many times, the rise in ‘left brain’ thinking began to surpass that of the ‘right brain’ as a method of ‘articulating the noosphere’.

Given the many ills of religion that can be seen today in the Mideast governments infused with radical and fundamentalist expressions of Islam, as well as Western religions weighted down by fundamentalism, excessive hierarchical structures and pedophilia, It would seem that these post-Enlightenment perspectives are indeed superior to legacy religion in helping us make sense of what’s happening in the noosphere, and how to navigate our way through it.

Can there be a way that religion can be seen as a tool for helping us ‘articulate the noospere’ or is it destined to end up on the dust pile of history: a perspective that has ‘seen its day’ but is no longer relevant in this new and technical mileu?

One way to look at this question is to see it as evidence of yet another, very fundamental ‘duality’.  We have looked at the concept of ‘dualities’ through the eyes of Jonathan Sacks previously in this blog.  He, like Teilhard, saw such dualities as a way of seeing things as opposites, such as ‘this world’ vs ‘the next’, or ‘human’ vs ‘divine’.  In Teilhard’s insight, most dualities simply reflect an inadequate understanding of a situation, and can be overcome with the proper perspective.

From the traditional perspective, science and religion are often seen in terms of a duality.  This viewpoint reflects a mode of seeing in which ‘right brained’ and ‘left brain’ perspectives are understood as ‘opposites’.  To see them thusly is to forget that there is only a single brain, although it may have many modes of operation.

Teilhard’s method of resolving ‘dualities’ is simply to put them into a single context, as he does with ‘evolution’.  In such a context, the ‘opposites’ now appear as ‘points in a single spectrum’.  By this method, the continuation and coherence between the ‘opposites’ can now be understood.

So, the question above now gives way to a second question: “How can the legitimate ‘right brained’ perspective offered by religion be seen to help us, like the ‘left brained’ perspectives of the Enlightment have done, “make sense of what’s happening in the noosphere, and how to navigate our way through it.”

As we saw in our series on Norberg’s ‘Progress’, the human actions of innovation and invention, obviously the fruit of ‘left brain’ activity, nonetheless turned on the pivot points of personal freedom and human relationships, which are much more the domain of the ‘right brain’.  So, on the surface, it would seem essential for these two modes of human thought to operate less like the commonly understood ‘opposites’ than as the two facets of a single thing that biology shows us that they are.

Earlier in this blog, I have suggested that one measure of increasing human evolution is the skill of using the neocortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of the lower (reptilian and limbic) brains.  Just as important is the corollary of using the whole neocortex, both left and right hemispheres, intuition and empiricism, in making sense of things.

As the above example from Norberg shows, articulating the ‘right brained’ concepts of personal freedom and relationships, while essential to our continued evolution, is not something we can request from science.  Requesting it from religion, as religion is commonly understood, is neither up to the task.  Traditional Western religion has only slightly evolved from its medieval perspectives, and as such would seem to offer little to a partnership with science in the enterprise of ‘articulating the noosphere’.  Extending Teilhard’s approach of understanding difficult questions by putting the subject into an evolutionary context, for religion to be germane in the answering of questions, it must evolve.

The Evolutionary Roots of Western Religion

Re-reading the Christian New Testament with Teilhard’s evolutionary context in mind offers a starting place for such evolution.  There are many concepts that appear with no precedent in the NT, that have been poorly carried forward as Christian theology developed, such as:

–          Understanding the presence of God in all created things (Pau) ,and particularly in the human person  (John), which is contrary to a God eventually taught as ‘external’ to creation

–          Understanding that we are bound together via a force which fosters our personal growth (Paul)

–          Recognizing that this growth enhances our uniqueness while it deepens our relationships

–          Recognizing that this uniqueness gives rise to the characteristic of human equality (Paul)), as opposed to the imposition of hierarchy

So a first step toward maturing religion would be to return to its evolutionary roots, many of which have sprouted anew in secular organizations, as so brilliantly seen in Thomas Jefferson’s reinterpretation of these evolutionary roots in purely secular terms.

       

The next Post                   

This week we took a first look at religion as a tool for helping us understand the structure of the noosphere as a step to managing its risks.  Next week we’ll continue this theme, taking a look at how religion has traditionally ‘articulated the noosphere’, and how the seeds for a more evolved articulation can be found among them.

October 18 – Managing the Noospheric Risks, Part 2

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at managing the ‘noospheric risks’ that we can see as evolution rises through the human species.  We boiled down the essential approaches to ‘building the noosphere’ (from the Post of October 4)

“…that human persons must be free to capitalize on their ‘interiority’ and be given the ‘liberty’ to continuously rearrange both their personal perspectives to identify enterprises which can be either used as stepping stones to new arrangements or corrected if they do not effect an improvement, and to engage with other persons to freely form ‘psychisms’ to perform these tasks.”

   But we noted that these approaches themselves need to be continually improved if they are to reflect true ‘articulations of the noosphere’.

This week we will continue this look, by exploring  a little deeper into science and religion, our two great systems of thought, as they attempt to help us ‘make sense of things’.

Spirit and Matter: Spirituality and Progress

We have noted, as both Teilhard and Norberg show, that no human movement forward (towards continued improvement in human welfare, toward increased complexity) occurs without some unplanned and unwanted consequence.  Skeptics of ‘secular progress’ decry the fact that such progress is meaningless if unwanted consequences ensue, and therefore decrease true spirituality in favor of 9simply) materialistic improvements .  Such critiques highlight what is seen as the futility of humans to overcome their ‘sinful nature’ and grow spiritually.  This criticism is well countered by Teilhard in his understanding of spirituality as simply a facet of ‘the stuff of the universe’.

“…spirit 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.”

And

“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. “

   In this unique perspective, Teilhard  offers a totally new perspective on the traditional spirit/matter duality  which sees them as opposites, requiring divine intervention into ‘lower’ matter in order to ‘save’ it, much as Luther envisioned humans as “piles of manure covered by Christ”.

Recognizing this, as Teilhard does so succinctly, bridges the gap between the ‘spitituality’ so prized by religionists and the ‘progress’ equally  prized by secularists.  In his view, they are not opposites, but simply two facets of a single integrated reality.  Both Teilhard and Norberg would agree that, properly understood, spirituality is embodied in any progress by which human welfare is advanced.  More succinctly, spirituality is the agency by which matter becomes more complex, therefore more evolved.

Thus the religionists are correct: the world needs more spirituality if it is to succeed.  However, with Teilhard’s more universal  understanding of ‘spirituality’ we can now see that spirituality is that which underlies the evolution of the ‘stuff of the universe’ (eg: matter, eg: us).  With this understanding, the idea of spirituality rises from the ‘otherworldly’ nature which requires us to look down on matter to one in which matter and its evolutionary rise in complexity are equally important to the spirituality which underpins it.

With this new approach, human welfare is not only just as important as ‘spiritual’ growth, it is actually a facet of it.  And seen in this light, Norberg’s metrics of ‘progress’ also provide evidence of the continued rise of spirituality in human evolution.

This perspective doesn’t mean that the human species will be ‘saved’ by all forms of religion or science; the ills of both of them are commonly enough reported in the free press, but the successes of both are embodied, as Teilhard, Norberg and Rohr point out, in the freedom of the individual, the recognition of the importance of relationships, and in the trust that these two facets of existence will

lead to a better future.  Compromising any of these three will compromise the continuation of human evolution.

As Richard Rohr succinctly puts it:

“The first step toward healing is truthfully acknowledging evil, while trusting the inherent goodness of reality.”

The Next Post

      This week we took a second look at managing the risks of continued human evolution, but relooking at how Teilhard offers a perspective in which spirituality and human progress aren’t just not in opposition to each other, they represent two facets of a single thing, increasing complexity.    Seen thusly, Teilhard’s extension of spirituality from human ‘holiness’ to a universal agency of ‘becoming’, and Norberg’s list of how such ‘becoming’ plays out in human affairs permits us a fuller appreciation of how evolution is occurring in our everyday lives.

Next week we will take a third look at this new perspective so we can better understand how it can make a difference in where we go from here.

October 4 – Where Have We Got to?

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a final look at the risks that Teilhard saw in the continuation of human evolution. This post concluded the part of the Blog which has seen how Teilhard understands human evolution, and how it can be objectively assessed.

Beginning last summer we summed up Teilhard’s perspective on Articulating the Noosphere and Living the Theological Virtues.  We went on to explore his metaphor of evolution as the advance of humanity over an imaginary sphere, and how as we come to the equator, everything begins to change as the increase in human population no longer finds empty space to pour into, and consequently begins to fold in on itself.

We then began to address how this new phenomena effects a change in human evolution by starting with the question,  Is Human Evolution Proceeding and how Would We Know?, and proceeded to answer the question with evidence from Johan Norberg which quantifies such metrics.  We also saw how his quantification (beginning with July 26- Fuel as a Measure of Human Evolution) illustrates how Teilhard’s insights are being borne out today, but as we saw, not without risks.

This week we’ll begin to address how all this fits into our focus of “The Secular Side of God”.

A Relook at ‘Articulating the Noosphere’

Teilhard believed that understanding how evolution proceeds both in our lives and in our societies depends on developing an understanding of the structure, the warp and woof, of the ‘noophere’:  the ‘mileu’ which appears in cosmic evolution with the appearance of the human.  Without denying science’s understanding of evolution as seen in the stages of pre-life and biological life, he offers a perspective on not only how such evolution can continue on in the human species, but how the ‘articulations’ of the spheres of ‘pre-life’ and ‘life’ as described by science can be seen to continue in the ‘noosphere’.   His straightforward observation that ‘evolution effects complexity’ is just as valid in the noosphere as it was realms of Physics and Biology.  This observation, then, is the key to beginning to understand the structure of the ‘noosphere’.  To understand how evolution works in the human is to understand how such ‘complexification’ can be understood as acting in both our personal lives and in the unfolding of society.

As we saw last week, Teilhard summarizes the unfolding of such complexity in the human species as we

“…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.”

   And as we have seen in the past few weeks, Johan Norberg offers “A tornado of evidence” on how Teilhard’s projections of how “a rise in interiority and liberty” constantly effect “new ways of arranging ourselves” but requires “harmonious interrelations”.  Effectively, in Norberg’s evidence we see how Teilhard’s approach to understanding how the classical duality, “The one vs the many” plays out as we get better at ‘articulating the noosphere’.

And, as the subject of the blog has taken shape, the ‘reinterpretation of religion’, we can see more clearly now why such an undertaking is important for our continued evolution.  Classical Western religion, entwined as it has become with superstition, mythology and weighted down by medieval philosophy, nonetheless contains within it nuggets of true understanding of those ‘articulations’ which Teilhard asserts we must uncover and follow if we are going to continue to move forward.  Western religion is rife with teachings which address Teilhard’s  three essential elements of human evolution:

–          New ways of arranging ourselves (our cultural/social structures and how they expand across the globe through ‘globalization’)

–          A rise in interiority (our person) and liberty (our autonomy)

–          Harmonious interrelations (relationships which are capable of forming ‘psychisms’ capable of employing increases in our person and our liberties to effect new arrangements)

but as we have seen, require reinterpretation to uncover their relevance and focus to the job at hand.  Such reinterpretation of religion is necessary for it to provide signposts to the future.

Continuing the March to the Future

So, Teilhard asserts, to continue the rise of complexity in the human species, which is the same as continuing its evolution, we must increase our knowledge of the noosphere so that we can learn to cooperate with its ‘laws’.  As Teilhard forecasts and Norberg cites, in the past two hundred years we have seen distinctive examples of both.  Since the mid-1800s, as Norberg maps in detail, the speed at which we better understand what works and what doesn’t in an increasingly tight spiral of ‘trial and error’,  is ever increasing.   While Norberg and Teilhard both address this phenomenon, they also address the underlying evolutionary ‘physics’ which underlies it.

Norberg essentially agrees with Teilhard that human persons must be free to capitalize on their ‘interiority’ and be given the ‘liberty’ to continuously rearrange both their personal perspectives to identify rearrangements which can be attempted and either used as stepping stones to new arrangements or corrected if they do not effect an improvement, and to engage with other persons to freely form ‘psychisms’ to perform these tasks.

This should come as no surprise to many of us, put into these terms.  For the past hundred years, scientists and those in technical fields have experienced increasing participation in ‘psychisms’ as well as the satisfaction of using their innate skills and education to design, develop, field and deal with the consequences of their products.  They were not necessarily explicitly aware of how they were ‘articulating the noosphere’, nor always conscious of how their participation in their work groups contributed to their personal growth, but grew into an appreciation of the contributions of others as well as of the limited autonomy of those groups which bore fruit.  They were effectively participating in small ‘Teilhardic’ rearrangements.

The Next Post

For the last few weeks we have been exploring both the mechanism of increasing complexity in the human as well as the many examples of how this mechanism is playing out.  We’ve looked at both examples and risks- while progress is being made, how can we insure its continuation?

Next week we will return to address how religion, ‘divested’ of Dawkins’ ‘baggage’ can be reinterpreted to provide both relevance and functionality to such insurance.

September 27 – How ‘Noospheric’ Risks Undermine The Continuation of Human Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how, although there are risks to the continuation of human evolution in our perennial break-fix-break cycle,  faith in our ability to manage this cycle is more important than the expertise we develop to invent fixes to those things we break.

This week we will take a second look at these ‘Noospheric’ risks from the perspective of our place in the sweep of cosmic evolution.

The Fragility of Evolution

Consider that the enterprise of cosmic evolution itself is a risky business.  Evolution occurs when the ‘stuff of the universe’ thumbs its nose at the basic nature of matter by which each unification of like matter may well contribute to evolution by an increase in complexity, but at the same time is accompanied by a small loss of energy (Entropy: The Second law of Thermodynamics).  By this understanding of Physics, the universe begins with a certain quantum of energy, and as soon as it begins it it starts running down.  In seeming opposition, not only do things evolve while this is happening, but they evolve from simple configurations to more complex ones.  As Steven Pinker points out in his book, “Enlightenment Now”,  since there are obviously many more ways for things to be ‘un-complex’, disorderly, than there are for things to be ‘complex’ or more orderly, the very existence of evolution seems counter to the Second Law.  According to Pinker, “Evolution occurs against the grain.”

Worse yet,  As Teilhard observes, while nature seems to have a built-in ‘coefficient of complexity’ by which such complexity increases over time, (and without which evolution could not proceed) this factor becomes secondary to continued evolution when it enters the realm of the human and now requires ‘cooperation’.  As Richard Dawkins sees it, “Genes are replaced by ‘memes’ as the agent of evolution”.  Once humans acquire the capability of ‘reflective consciousness’, by which they are ‘aware of their awareness’, the rules change once again.

Evolution must now be chosen if it is to continue.

So What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

But if evolution needs to be ‘chosen’  to continue, what’s involved in choosing it?  In a word, ‘faith’.   Restating and simplifying the Teilhard quote from last week:

“(we need) to be quite certain, … that the (future) into which (our) destiny is leading is not a blind alley where the earth’s life flow will shatter and stifle itself.”

   Such ‘choice’ requires ‘trust’.

We saw in the last three posts how common it is to engage in denial of progress and how such denial reflects a fear of the future.  We also touched on the fact that such fear can be (and has so often been ) seized upon by populists who offer themselves as bulwarks against the woes of the future if only we would trust them.  Their first move is to insist that there is much to be feared, then to begin to use this fear to undermine trust in the Western structures of freedom which they claim to have unleased such woes  as the free press, individual freedoms and open immigration.   Other Western liberal practices are also denigrated, such as the development of a global infrastructure by which every advance, such as those reported by Norberg, can be shared globally and contribute to progress across the globe.  While walling off the rest of the world may shut us in it is advertised as necessary to make us safe.

Once traditional Western norms can no longer be trusted, Teilhard’s  ‘psychisms’ identified last week as not only one of the fruits of these norms but an essential component of continued evolution, will  become less efficacious and over time will begin to fail to mitigate the negative effects that result from future inventions such as new sources of energy.

So, while Norberg’s quantification of human progress is in optimistic agreement with Teilhard, the risks are nonetheless substantial and cannot be overlooked.  Evolution is in our hands, and stewardship of its continuation requires a clear-headed knowledge of the past, a commitment to the energy of evolution as it rises in the human species and confidence in the future.  In the words of Teilhard:

“..the view adopted here of a universe in process of general involution upon itself comes in as an extremely simple way of getting past the dead end at which history is still held up, and of pushing further towards a more homogenous and coherent view of the past.”

The Next Post

This week we took a second look at the second and more serious category of risks to human evolution.  While we acknowledged the ongoing risks of fixing what we have broken, the greater risk lies in the possibility of losing faith in our historically proven ability to, as Teilhard says,

 “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.”

   In short, the interruption of this “rise in interiority and liberty” will stifle the flow of evolution in the human species.

Next week we will sum up where we’ve been in tracing Teilhard’s ‘articulation of the noosphere’ through Norberg’s enumeration of the articulations and arriving at the risks evolution undergoes as it enters into the realm of the human.

August 30 – Why the Pessimism?- Part 1

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a summary look at the statistical data on human progress as a measure of human evolution from Johan Norberg’s book, ‘Progress’, in which we outlined the ways in which evolution can be seen to continue its fourteen billion rise through the human species.  We also noted that in spite of the sheer volume of data that Norberg provides which shows evolution rising through humanity in the form of increasing human welfare (which is the main contributor to survival of the species), ‘conventional wisdom’ as catalogued by many contemporary polls, shows that nearly all those responding to polls are either unaware of this data or disagree with it.  Steven Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”, sees this as a sort of ‘progressophobia’, particularly strong in the West, that either ignores data such as that provided by Norbert, or rejects it outright.

This week we will take a closer look at this phenomenon.

A Quick Look At The History of Pessimism

Such ‘progressophobia’ isn’t a recent phenomenon. For example, pessimists have always been able to find a basis for their negativity in their sacred books.  Based on such readings, it’s not surprising that the founders of the great Sixteenth century Protestant Reformation had a very negative opinion of human nature.  Martin Luther, whose Protestant worldview took root in Europe following the Reformation, saw humans as “piles of manure, covered over by Christ”.  Calvin went him one better, seeing them as “total depravity”.  Freud piled on with his warnings against the core of the human person:  the “dangerous Id”.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement of the late 17th and early18th centuries, on the other hand, emphasized reason and individualism rather than tradition.  Such beliefs were in distinct contrast to those of the Reformation, as can be seen in the writings of such as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Heidegger and Sarte.

With the Reformation, the basic positive message of Jesus became secondary to the need to understand the human race as in need of a future divine intervention (the ‘second coming’) in which humans would be protected from their ‘fallen’ nature directly by God.

Such recoil against the Enlightenment’s positive perception of human nature was only reinforced as Science began to see the human as an evolutionary phenomenon, progressing into the future without the need for divine intervention.

There seems to have been much profit in such predictions of future doom.   For example, with the death of the popular American evangelist, Billy Graham, his children have continued to benefit financially from prophesies of ever-increasing doom, showing clearly that ‘pessimism sells’ even to this day.

Such pessimism can also be seen today in results of polls such as those cited in the last two posts.  Even actual, tangible and supportable statistics, such as those showing a considerable plummet in the rate of violent crime, still leaves the majority of Americans to see their country “heading in the wrong direction”.  Canny populist politicians are quick to capitalize on such pessimism, and are very successful at getting elected on platforms in which such an obviously depraved human condition must be closely controlled by strong men (and it’s always a man) such as themselves.

Progressiphobia In Western Society

Pinker notes that when Westerners are polled about their opinion of progress in society, a twofold perspective can be seen.  On an individual basis, persons seem to be optimistic about their personal situation, and that of their immediate relationships (family, neighbors, friends), but pessimistic about society at large.  Pinker refers to this as the “Optimism Gap”:

“For two decades…when Europeans were asked by pollsters whether their own economic situation would get better or worse in the coming year, more of them said it would get better, but when they were asked about their country’s economic situation, more of them said it would get worse.”

This is a puzzling phenomenon: comfortable, secure, educated individuals unable to project their personal optimism onto their society.   Why should this be so?

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at the history of pessimism about human progress, through the eyes of Steven Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”.

This week we looked at how such an optimistic perception of the human capacity for continued evolution  as detailed by Johan Norberg is not shared by a large majority of those in the West that have benefited from it the most.  Why should this be true?

Next week we will take a look a few reasons for such ‘progressiphobia’.