How do we use Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to search for God in our lives?

 Today’s Post

Lst week we moved from a working definition of God to seeing how this God is manifest in the roots of our personal development, Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ shows clearly how these roots are extensions of the same upwelling of complexity that underpins cosmic evolution.  While awareness of this agency in our lives is a first step toward connecting to it, how is the second step, that of connecting to it, possible?

This week we will move on to explore how the concept of a ‘personal relationship with God’ emerges naturally from this use of Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.

The History of ‘Looking For God’

Thus far, we have come to a ‘concept of God’ without recourse to scripture, dogma, or miracles.  While this may well be consistent with Professor Dawkins’ recognition that such a natural force is indeed at work in the ”raising of the world as we know it into its present complex existence”, it does not address what’s involved in a personal relationship with such a force.

We can start with Teilhard’s assertion from last week that

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

   If Teilhard’s assertion is correct, it seems clear that the very act of being a person is the starting point for experiencing such a God.  If the God that we have defined is indeed the essential center of our existence, and this essential center lies along the axis of the unfolding of the universe, it would seem that finding such a transcendent source of ourselves would be very straightforward.  The myriad, oft- confusing and frequently contradictory methods offered by the many world religions are evidence that this isn’t necessarily the case.

A case in point can be seen in the many instances of ‘dualism’ which can be found in our own Western expressions of Christianity.  As Jonathan Sacks sees it:

“Much more so than Judaism, Christianity divides: body/soul, physical/spiritual, heaven/earth, this life/next life, evil/good, with the emphasis on the second of each.”

   He sees the entire set of contrasts as massively Greek, with much debt to Plato.  Further, these ‘either/or’ dichotomies can be seen as a departure from the typically Jewish perspective of “both/and.”

As Sacks points out, this duality tends to move God from the intimacy found in Judaism (and in the teachings of Jesus) to a distance that can only be overcome through the bewildering matrix of rituals of atonement, forgiveness and salvation which have come to characterize expressions of Christianity.  This point of view, captured in Blondel’s fear that as we regard our relationship with God from the standpoint of ‘we are here and God is there’, our search for God is sabotaged at the very outset.

Not that Christianity only expresses such distance.  If one takes John at his word,

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

   Then Blondel’s statement that

 “It is impossible to say, “I am here, and God is there”

   makes much more sense.  It acknowledges that the act of God’s creative energy in me is necessary for me to make such a statement.

Blondel, Teilhard, Sacks and the contemporary theologian Richard Rohr all decry how this message of John, a logical conclusion from the teachings of Jesus and the theology of Paul, is frequently lost in the subsequent evolution of the Greek-influenced Church.  Thomas Jefferson, an early practitioner of Dawkins’ goal of “stripping the baggage” from traditional Christianity, sought to extract the essential morality of Jesus from the webs of duality which grew as Christianity was increasingly influenced by Greek philosophy.

This duality undermines the search for God within.  If we start with the assumption that “We are here and God is there”, the search is, as Blondel asserts, hobbled at the start.

All such searches begin with the facades and scaffolding that we inherit from our beginnings, which become frameworks which make it safe for us to act in a world saturated with unknown and potentially dangerous consequences of those actions.  They may keep us safe in such a world, but like all walls, they can keep us enclosed at the same time.   To discover our inner reality requires awareness of, negotiation with, and selective filtering of these artifacts.

This requires an open mind, and as universally acknowledged, a mind is a difficult thing to open.

This is not a new problem.  The subject of searching for our inner core has been the subject of religious thought for many centuries.  While the approaches found in the many religious expressions might be bewildering and often contradictory, there are nonetheless many common aspects.

The Next Post

This week we focused Teilhard’s ‘lens’ on the history of ‘looking for God’, and how the focus of the Christian church slowly shifted from the intimacy expressed in Jewish tradition to the Greek-influenced ‘over against’ decried by Blondel.

But this does not answer the second part of our question: what’s involved in a ‘relationship’ with such a God?   Having seen how we are connected to God by participating in this cosmic upwelling of complexity, next week we will continue to address how such a relationship can be achieved.

   How is it possible to relate to a ‘ground of personness’?

Today’s Post

Last week we addressed the phenomenon of ‘personization’ in evolution, recognizing Teilhard’s insight that evolution of the person is a natural manifestation of the increase in complexity that can be seen in, and indeed is necessary to, the evolutionary unfolding of the universe.

In doing so, we extended our working definition of God

“God is the sum total of all the forces by which the universe unfolds in such a way that all the entities that emerge in its evolution (from quarks to the human person) each have the potential to become more complex when unified with other entities.”

   with the missing piece by which the personal nature of these forces become clear:

“In the recognition of the comprehensive forces by which the universe unfolds, the one which causes evolutionary products to unite in such a way that they become more complex, conscious and eventually conscious of their consciousness (eg, the person) can only be understood as personal.”

   But we recognized that this definition does not answer the question, “how can we relate to this additional facet of the forces of evolution?”  This week we will take a first step in answering this question.

Personization and God

Although we began our inquiry on God with a statement from Richard Dawkins several weeks ago, he doesn’t go too much further before he states the basis of his belief that while such a god as he proposes might be reconcilable to the unfolding insights of science, the God that we posit here cannot possibly be reconciled with traditional religion.  He quotes Carl Sagan:

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

   Of course, Sagan is right.  Once we limit the laws governing evolution to those found in the Standard Model of Physics and Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection, both Sagan and Dawkins are spot on.

However, neither of them acknowledges that limiting evolution to those influences found in Physics and Biology prohibits the very phenomenon of evolution itself.  It is only through inclusion of the agent of increasing complexity that the forces identified by Physics and Biology begin to account for the observed phenomenon of increasing complexity in evolution.  As we have pointed out previously, a universe without complexification would not evolve, it would remain static and featureless forever.

However, Dawkins is correct in one respect: the definition we are considering, and the six characteristics of God that his definition suggests, do not yet point to a God suitable for our personal relationship.  It is indeed ‘emotionally unsatisfying’.  To find this missing piece we must return to the characteristic of ‘personness’.

From the point of view that we have presented thus far, God is not understood as ‘a person’, but as the ‘ground of person-ness’.  Just as the forces of gravity and biology in the theories of Physics and Biology address the principles of matter, energy and life, the additional force of ‘increasing complexity’ is required to address the essential energy which powers evolution to higher levels of complexity and thus leads to the appearance of the person.

Teilhard offers an insight on this issue

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

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

This unique human capability of being aware of the energy of the unfolding of the cosmos as it flows through our person, empowering our growth and assuring our potential for completeness, is neither earned nor deserved.  It has the same ‘gratuitous’ nature as gravity and electromagnetism: it is woven into the fabric of our being.  We can neither summon nor deny it.  Our only appropriate response to it is to recognize it and explore the appropriate response to it.

Teilhard commented on both our cosmic connection and our cooperation with it:

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

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

So, For All This Is God A Person?

We have seen how Teilhard understands the concept of ‘person’ from both the concept of God as evident in the agency of complexity and the concept of the human person as an evolutionary product.

But to answer the question, “Is God a person?”, we return to Maurice Blondel.   As part of his objective to reinterpret Western theology, he posits that:

“Every sentence about God can be translated into a declaration about human life.”

   Resonating with Teilhard, Gregory Baum paraphrases Blondel:

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

   So, in answer to the question, Baum goes on to state Blondel’s assertion that

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

   That said, if we are to undertake a relationship with this dimension of life, how can we go about discovering this universal presence in our finite and individual lives?

The Next Post

This week we have seen how our working definition of God, while totally consistent with that of Dawkins, is still open to the concept of God found in traditional Western theology once it has been (as Dawkins suggests) “stripped of its baggage”.  We have also seen how the element of ‘person’ is not compromised by our working definition once the potential for increasing complexity is understood as the process of personness.

But this does not answer the second part of our question: what’s involved in a ‘relationship’ with such a God?   Having seen how we are connected to God by participating in this cosmic upwelling of complexity, next week we will address how such a relationship can be achieved.

    How Can God Be Considered as ‘Personal’?

 Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ captures the human as

“.. the flame of a general fermentation of the universe which breaks out suddenly on the earth.”

This week we will refocus his ‘lens’ on how the result of this ‘outbreak’ can help to recognize the ‘personness’ of God.

 ‘Personization’ In The Human

Looking through Teilhard’s lens, we can see that the human person emerges from evolution not in a single discontinuous step, but instead from a slow accretion of characteristics layered one upon another over a long period of time.  Cells evolve from single-cell to multiple-cell entities, adding sensory and mobility characteristics and uniting through increasingly complex centers of activity via increasingly complex neural circuits.  There is not a single entity in this long line of development that does not proceed from a less-complex precursor.

There are two seeming discontinuities in this process.  The first is seen in the appearance of the cell itself.  At one instance in the evolution of our world, it is swimming in a primordial soup of very complex molecules.  At the next, many of these molecules are functional parts of an enclosed and centered entity, the cell.  As Teilhard notes:

“For the world to advance in duration is to progress in psychical concentration.  The continuity of evolution is expressed in a movement of this kind.  But in the course of this same continuity, discontinuities can and indeed must occur.  For no psychical entity can, to our knowledge, grow indefinitely; always at a given moment it meets one of those critical points at which it changes state.”

The advent of the cell is such a ‘change of state’ in which increasing complexity results in something totally different from its predecessor, but still composed of the same basic elements.

The ‘person’ is the second example of such ‘change of state’.  Materialists argue that the differences between humans and their non-human ancestors are too small to be of significance, denying any uniqueness to the human person.  This is true at the levels of morphology and supported by the evidence of DNA. It is just as true that human persons, through their unique ‘awareness of their consciousness’, are clearly separate from the higher mammals.  They represent the outcome from the same significant type of ‘change of state’ as seen in the advent of the cell.

Therefore, while human persons are clearly a ‘product of evolution’, their level of complexity has increased from ‘consciousness’ to ‘awareness of consciousness’.  It is in this new level of being that we find ‘the person’.  And in finding it, we can now expand our definition of God:

“God is the sum total of all the forces by which the universe unfolds in such a way that all the entities that emerge in its evolution (from quarks to the human person) each have the potential to become more complex when unified with other entities.”

   To which we add:

“In the recognition of the comprehensive forces by which the universe unfolds, the one which causes things to unite in such a way that they become more complex, conscious and eventually conscious of their consciousness (eg, the person) can only be understood as personal.”

   As Teilhard sees it, the person is

“.. nothing but the point of emergence in nature, at which this deep cosmic evolution culminates and declares itself”.

   In such declaration, evolution itself can be seen as ‘ultimately personal’.  From this refocusing of Teilhard’s lens, the human person is

 “…the flame of a general fermentation of the universe which breaks out suddenly on the earth.”

   Thus, God is not ‘a person’ (by Teilhard’s definition, a product of evolution) but the ultimate principle of ‘personness’.  In the human, evolution shows the universal process of evolution ‘declaring itself’, at least on this planet’ in the form of ‘person’.

The Next Post

Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, this understanding of the evolution of ‘personness’, while locating the personal agency of evolution in the sum total of evolutionary forces, answers the question “Is God a person?”  It does however lead to the question of a human-God ‘relationship’. Humans are learning how to align themselves with many of the other aspects of ‘the ground of being’, which accounts for human evolutionary success thus far. How can such awareness of the personal aspect of these forces be seen to provide a basis of similar alignment?

Next week we will address this side of the question of personness and explore how the concept of God as an agent of ‘personization’ can be extended to that of understanding ‘him’ as an agency of evolution with which we can have a relationship.

  Is God a ‘person’?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how an outline of the nature of the fundamental principle of existence could be derived from the writings of Richard Dawkins, well-known atheist.  In keeping with Dawkins’ secular worldview, we saw how this outline offered an excellent start to addressing God through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.  Based on this brief outline, a working definition of God emerged:

“God is the sum total of all the forces by which the universe unfolds in such a way that all the entities that emerge in its evolution (from quarks to the human person) each have the potential to become more complex when unified with other entities.”

With Dawkins’ outline of the fundamental aspects of God, this working definition, and the principles of reinterpretation that we have developed, this week we will address reinterpretation of the traditional Christian concept of God as ‘person’.

‘Person-ness”

The concept of the ‘person’ is somewhat unique to the West.  It is related to the fundamental Jewish concept of time as seen as flowing from a beginning to an end, unlike the cyclical and recursive concept of time as found in the East.  It also sees personal growth as the process of becoming not only ‘whole’, but distinctively so, as opposed to the Eastern concept of human destiny fulfilled in the loss of identity as merged into the ‘cosmic all’.  This Western concept of ‘person-ness’ is one into which the idea of evolution fits readily, which leads to the religion-friendly idea of emergent complexity.

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

Nonetheless, Western society has proceeded along the path that however the neurons work, the effect is still a ‘person’, and recognized as such in the laws which govern the societies which have emerged in the West.  While materialists can still claim that consciousness results from random neurological activity and that the basis for our consciousness is ‘just molecular interactions’, very few Westerners doubt the uniqueness of each human person.

Further, this concept of the person as unique provides a strong benefit to Western civilization.  While perhaps rooted in the Jewish beliefs which underpin those of Christianity, the Western concept of ‘the person’ nonetheless underpins the other unique Western development: that of science.  The evolution of language and use of both brain hemispheres led to the Greek rise of ‘left brain’ thinking (empirical, analytical) from the legacy modes of the ‘right brain’ (instinct and intuition), thus laying the groundwork for science.

As Jonathan Sacks sees it, when the two great threads of Greece and Jerusalem came together in Christianity, this framework evolved from a way of thinking to a disciplined facet of human endeavor.  As many contemporary thinkers have observed, it is this connection between the uniqueness of the person (and the associated concepts of freedom) and the power of empirical thinking that account for the unique successes of the West.  As Teilhard asserts, (and Johan Norberg thoroughly documents in his book, “Progress”):

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

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

Our working definition (above) and our outline of the attributes of God from the last post, however, do not explicitly reflect such an aspect of the Ground of Being.
Does this mean that from our point of view God is not a person?

 ‘Person-ness’ and God

The earliest human societies were all painfully aware of the forces in their environment which they could neither explain or control, such as weather, earthquakes, predators and sickness.  They commonly attributed these forces to the work of intelligent beings, gods, as being in control of all these mysterious phenomena.  Most of them imagined these gods as being human-like, but with much greater power.   In the earliest societies, the many aspects of their mysterious environment were personified, even given names.

As society evolved, and humans grouped themselves into increasingly larger units, from families, to clans, to cities, to states, their emerging ruling hierarchies resulted in kings, sultans and other ‘heads of state’.  Many societies evolved their understanding of the gods in similar ways, resulting in an ‘anthropomorphism’ of the gods: “like us but more powerful”.

When Jewish belief moved from a pantheistic understanding of ‘the gods’ to belief in a single god, the person-like aspect of this god was preserved.  As Christianity began to emerge, it took with it the concept of God as ‘a person’.  The writings of thinkers from Irenaeus through Augustine to Aquinas identify the attributes (as well as the gender) of God as personal.  ‘He’ is omniscient (knows everything), omnipotent (all powerful) but still judgmental, and capable of jealousy and anger.

Such characteristics invite contradictory interpretations.  If God gets angry or jealous, generally considered negative human behaviors, how can ‘he’ be said to be ‘good’?  If he is all powerful, how can he permit evil?  If he knows everything in advance, then the future is predetermined and how can human freedom be possible?

On the other hand, if God is not a person, in what way can humans be considered as ‘made in his image’?  How is it possible to have a relationship with ‘him’ if ‘he himself’ is not a person?

So, with all that, Richard Dawkins’ question remains unanswered.

The Next Post

Next week we will begin to address these questions.  Are our starting definition and list of attributes for the Ground of Being antithetical to the time-honored Western concept of God as ‘person’, or can the long development of the unfolding cosmos somehow be understood as compatible with our human personness?

Part 2: Principles from Maurice Blondel, Jonathan Sacks, Karen Armstrong, Richard Rohr, and John Haight

Today’s Post

Last week we looked at the task of reinterpreting religion through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’, extracting six principles which we will employ as we move on to reinterpreting religious teaching for their relevance to human life.  This week we will look at additional principles from other sources.

Reinterpretation Principles From Maurice Blondel (Man Becoming)

As seen earlier, in his book, Man Becoming, Gregory Baum describes the work of Maurice Blondel as he addressed the traditional teachings of Christianity in the light of science’s increasingly universal perspective.  In summary, Blondel saw the Catholic Church’s approach to theology as diminishing today in relevance to human life.  Blondel was one of the first Catholic philosophers to call for ‘reinterpreting’ church teachings to reverse this trend, and in doing so proposed several ‘Principles of Reinterpretation’.  Some of these are:

• Since we cannot know ‘God as He (sic) is apart from man’, we must understand that each statement that we make about God carries with it an implied assumption about humans and the reality in which they live. By applying that implied assumption, we can reinterpret a teaching in terms of our lives.

The Principle:  “Every sentence about God can be translated into a declaration about human life”

• As Teilhard was later to expand upon, the energies of evolution which have effected ‘Man’s Becoming’ continue to be active in his continued personal evolution. The onset of complexity that began in the ‘Big Bang’ continues to be present in human life and manifests itself in our potential for increased understanding and becoming.  Most religious teachings seek to put us in touch with this current of energy by which we grow.

The Principle:  “There is no standpoint from which a human person can say, “I am here and God is there”.  The presence of God is an essential agent in his saying of it”.

The Principle:  “(Religious teaching) is not a message added to our life from without; it is rather the clarification and specification of the transcendent mystery of humanization that is fundamentally operative in our life.”

• Any teaching must be relevant to be able to be pertinent to our lives.

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

The Principle: “Man cannot accept an idea as true unless it corresponds in some way to a question present in his mind”

• Our response to reality is a necessary factor in our personal growth

The Principle: “A person is not a determined being, defined as it were by its nature.  A person comes to be, in part at least, through his own responses to reality.”

Reinterpretation Principles From Karen Armstrong (The Great Transformation)

• In keeping with Blondel’s insistence on elements of existential value in religious teaching, Karen Armstrong also offers principles for reinterpretation.

The Principle:  “Instead of jettisoning religious doctrines, we should look for their spiritual kernel.  A religious teaching is never simply a statement of objective fact: it is a program for action.”

• Echoing both Teilhard and Blondel, she criticizes attempts to make sense of God on human terms, which can introduce anthropomorphism into the concept of God. She agrees with both the Jewish and Eastern approach to understanding God differently.

The Principle:  “It was unhelpful to be dogmatic about a transcendence that was essentially undefinable”

Reinterpretation Principles From Jonathan Sacks (The Great Partnership)

• All religions contain dualisms that in their inherent contradiction undermine their ability to map the road to human growth.

The Principle:  “Any teaching that departs from the underlying unity of the universe will be detrimental to successful application to human life”

• This principle points the way to understanding how evolution continues to proceed through the human person and society. Sacks notes how science quantifies this observation by showing that human evolution has evolved our central neural system (the brain) in three stages:
  • Reptilian: Basic instinctual life sustaining functions: breathing, vascular management, flight/fright reaction
  • Limbic: Appearance of instinctive emotional functions necessary for the longer gestation and maturation of mammals
  • Neo-Cortic: Appearance of the potential for mental processes independent of and capable of mediating the stimuli of the ‘lower’ brains.

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

Reinterpretation Principle from Richard Rohr

• Good religion always acts as a unifying principle in our lives.

The Principle:  “Whatever reconnects (re-ligio) our parts to the Whole is an experience of God, whether we call it that or not.”

Reinterpretation Principle from John Haight (The New Cosmic Story)

• Religion needs to be consistent with the ongoing insights of the universe discovered by science.

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

An Overarching Principle

• And finally, a principle which is echoed by each of these thinkers:

The Principle: ”The underlying truth of a teaching, and the key to its relevancy, can be found in its power to bring opposing points of view into a cohesive whole”

 The Next Post

This week we completed our collection of ‘principles of interpretation’, nineteen principles that we will use as we examine the insights, concepts, and teachings of Western religion for their relevancy to human life.  It should be noted that these principles are not derived from traditional religious thought.  They are general principles, secular in nature, which can be applied to religious thought.

Next week we will continue our exploration of religion by addressing the basic cornerstone of all religions, the fundamental ground of being, the ‘first cause’ which underlays the universe: God.

   How can we use Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ to recognize religion’s potential as an evolutionary tool?

Today’s Post

Last week we recognized the waning influence of religion in Western societies and addressed the need to rethink traditional beliefs in terms of human life to tap into their wellsprings of insight and recover their relevance.  We identified the concept of ‘reinterpretation’, first proposed by Maurice Blondel, and expanded eloquently by Teilhard de Chardin as the essential step for such relevance.  This week we will take a first step toward this goal by setting the stage for such new insight.

The Process of Reinterpretation

From the earliest days of human thought, humans have attempted to understand the workings of their environment, to make sense of it, and to better relate to it.  The whole of human history, from both science and religious viewpoints, contains a record of such activities.  Human artifacts such as legal and moral codes document our attempts (in Teilhard’s words) to “articulate the noosphere”.

This articulation always involves searching and growing, which in turn requires the readiness to replace previous, outworn concepts with ones more consistent with a constantly expanding grasp of the universe.

With religion, according to Blondel, such ‘replacement’ consists of discarding all the superstitious, anthropomorphic, and otherworldly statements of belief, much like Jefferson did in forging his assertion of human equality based on his reinterpretation of the Gospels.   In the resulting perspective God becomes the ‘core’, the “ground of being”, the ever-present agency which underlies everything as it ‘comes to be’.

In Blondel’s process of interpretation, this leads to new artifacts.  Statements can be made from the new perspective which emerges from our understanding that we are embedded in a process of ‘coming to be’.  To Blondel, it makes a difference that we see ourselves as ‘dynamic’, not static.  We are ‘becoming’.

Teilhard expands and refines this approach by seeing the essential act of ‘becoming’ through his ‘lens of evolution’.  From his perspective, this ‘becoming’ can be quantified by the increasing complexity of the ‘stuff of the universe’ over time which underpins the evolution of the entire universe.   His insight provides the single thread which unites the three eras of universal evolution (pre-life, life, human life), and which is the key to explaining how humans ‘naturally’ emerge.

Teilhard understood that the evolutionary energy by which cosmic particles unite to increase complexity is just as present in the human activity of love as it is in the uniting of electrons and protons to become atoms.

He decomposed our individual and collective evolution into four steps:

– we always begin with a certain plateau of understanding in the first step,

–  we then address those things which don’t work under our previous worldview in the second.,

– then in the third step we strip out those perspectives,

– and finally in the fourth step we go on to find a better vantage point, and eventually build new constructs.

Principles of Reinterpretation

So, if we can agree on the process, what about the guidelines?  What signposts can we follow when we go about ‘stripping our conventional artifacts’?  What principles do we employ when we take on the very difficult job of attempting an objective perspective on our subjective inner prejudices and attitudes?  Many of these perspectives are so fundamental as to be nearly instinctual.  We didn’t consciously develop them; they come with the subconscious acceptance of the beliefs and practices of parents, teachers, and society in general during our formative years.  Overcoming them, therefore, requires us to lose the comfort and security of well-worn beliefs and begin a risky search for replacements.

The first step, therefore, is to follow thinkers like Blondel, Teilhard, Sacks and Rohr along this arduous path.

Blondel notes that all of us are to some extent already on this path.  The simple realization that we must constantly attempt to see others objectively and to transcend our ego and self- centeredness if we are to have deep relationships with them, is a first step along this path.  This need for overcoming ego is a basic tenet for nearly every religion.  It is therefore a basic ‘principle of reinterpretation’.

Therefore, when we set out along the road to reinterpreting our traditional beliefs, we must be armed with such principles.  As we will see, application of these principles to the many, often contradicting statements of Western religion will permit us to recognize the ‘core’ that Teilhard identifies and uncover their relevance to our lives.

Teilhard’s Approach to Interpretation

Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ has guided us thus far in our search for a universal perspective on ourselves.  Teilhard’s unique approach to the nature of reality provides insights into the fundamental energies which are at work in the evolution of the universe and hence, as products of this same evolution, are at work in our own personal evolution as well.  His insights compromise neither the theories of physics in the play of elemental matter found in the ‘Big Bang” nor the essential biological theory of Natural Selection in the ongoing evolution of living things.  Instead, they bring them together into a single, coherent, continuous process which unites the pre-life, life, and human life eras of cosmic evolution.  These insights also show how the ‘knowledge of consciousness’ which makes the human person unique in the biological kingdom is rooted in the cosmic scope of evolution.

This uniqueness, unfortunately, has been often addressed by science as an ‘epi-phenomenon’ or as just a pure accident.  Teilhard instead places it firmly on the ‘axis of evolution’, that of increasing complexity.  Doing so thus affords us a lens for seeing ourselves as a natural and essential product of evolution.

As Teilhard saw it, such a comprehensive understanding of evolution is therefore an essential step toward understanding the human person, how we fit into the universe, and how we should relate to it if we would most completely activate our human potential.

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at Blondel’s suggestion of ‘reinterpretation’ as a method of recovering the relevance of religion to human life.

Next week we will look at some different approaches to how our perspective of the basic things in our lives can change: how we can ‘reinterpret’.

How can we use Teilhard’s lens to rethink religion as an essential tool for evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Maurice Blondel, early in the last century, addressed the increasing irrelevance of religion in terms of its increasing emphasis on the ‘supernatural’, and how returning its focus to the human person was necessary for our continued evolution.  His recommendation was that religious doctrines be ‘reinterpreted’ in the light of the findings of science to recover their relevance to human life.  Or, as Teilhard would have it, they need to be examined through the ‘lens of evolution’

This week we will see how Blondel’s suggestion can be implemented.

Reinterpreting Religion

Blondel is difficult to read today, but Gregory Baum offers a clear summary of his insights in his book, “Man Becoming”.  He notes that Blondel saw an impediment to the relevance of Christian theology in its tendency to focus on ‘God as he is in himself’ as opposed to ‘God as he is to us’.  Jonathan Sacks echoes this tendency, noting that the main message of Jesus focuses on the latter, while the increasing influence of Plato and Aristotle in the ongoing development of Christian theology shows a focus on the former.  Both writers point out that this historical trend in the development of Christian theology is reflected in a focus on what and who God is apart from man.  This results, as Sacks notes, in the introduction of a new set of dichotomies which were not present in Judaism, such as body vs soul, this life vs the next and corruption vs perfection.  Such dichotomy, they both note, compromises the relevance of the message.

An example of this dichotomy can be seen in the ‘Question and Answer’ flow of the Catholic Baltimore Catechism:

“Why did God make me?

God made me to know, love and serve Him in this life so that I can be happy with Him in the next.”

   This simple QA reflects several aspects of such dichotomy.

• It presents the belief that ‘this life’ is simply a preparation for ‘the next’. This life is something we must endure to prove our worthiness for a fully meaningful and happy existence in the next.  Therefore, our purpose in life is simply to make sure that we live a life worthy of the reward of heavenly existence when we die.  As such, it has no implicit meaning.
• As follows from this perspective, we can’t expect meaning and the experience of happiness in human life.
  • Ultimate meaning is understood as ‘a mystery to be lived and not a problem to be solved’. Understanding only happens in the next life.
  • Happiness is a condition incompatible with the evil and corruption that we find not only all around us, but that we find within ourselves
  • Life is essentially a ‘cleansing exercise’, in which our sin is expunged and which, if done right, makes us worthy of everlasting life.

As both Blondel and Sacks noted, the increasing Greek content of this perspective in Christian history slowly moves God from the intimacy reflected in Jesus, Paul, and John into the role that Blondel identifies as the “over/against of man”.  It is not surprising that one of the evolutionary branches of Western belief, Deism, would result in seeing God as a powerful being who winds up the universe, as in a clock, setting it into motion but no longer interacting with it.

Dualism and Reinterpretation

So, where does this leave us?  Most Western believers seem to be comfortable living with these dualities (not to mention the contradictions) present in their belief systems in order to accept the secular benefits of religion such as:

• a basis for human action
• a contributor to our sense of place in the scheme of things
• a pointer to our human potential
• a contributor to the stability of society

While these benefits might be real, many surveys of Western societies, especially in Europe, show a correlation between increasing education and decreasing belief.  Is it possible (as the atheists claim) that the price for the evolution of human society is a decrease in belief?  That the increasing irrelevancy of religion is a necessary byproduct of our maturity?

Or is it possible that solutions to the ills of Western society require some connection to the spiritual realm claimed by religion?  Put another way: is it possible to re-examine these claims to uncover their evolutionary values?  How can the claims of religion be re-understood (‘re-ligio’) in terms of their secular values?  Is it possible to look at them, as Karen Armstrong asserts, as “plans for action” necessary to advance human evolution?  If so, religion certainly has the potential to recover the relevancy that is necessary for any tool with the potential of moving evolution forward.

To move toward such re-understanding, we will look at the idea of ‘reinterpretation’ itself, to explore how the perspectives of Teilhard, Blondel, Armstrong, Rohr and Sacks can be applied to the process of reinterpreting our two thousand years of religious doctrine development.

Considering that our lives are built on perspectives and beliefs that are so basic as to be nearly instinctual, how can we come to see them differently?  Our histories, however, contain many stories of such transformations, and the unfolding of our sciences and social structures are dependent upon them.

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at Blondel’s suggestion of ‘reinterpretation’ as a method of recovering the relevance of religion to human life.

Next week we will look at some different approaches to how our perspective of the basic things in our lives can change: how we can implement the process of ‘reinterpretation’.