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Finding God through science

November 26, 2020 – Jesus In The Context of Evolution

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      The Word becomes Flesh in universal complexification

Today’s Post

In the last two weeks we saw how the understanding of Jesus, as depicted by Paul, the synoptic gospels and John, represents an evolution of the understanding of Jesus which an be perceived as both ‘divine’ and ‘human’.  Jesus, the teacher of wisdom becomes Jesus, the Christ, who was ‘exalted by God’ due to his sacrificial act, and finally to Jesus, the human manifestation of ‘the Christ’, who was so integrally a part of God that ‘he’ had coexisted with ‘him’ through eternity.   As we will see, this evolution continues further as Christianity begins to understand God as ‘triune’: the ‘trinity’.

Today we will begin to put these insights on Jesus into the perspective of our search for the ‘Secular Side of God’.

The Second Dimension of Duality

As we have seen, the concept of ‘the Christ’ undergoes a distinct evolution in the New Testament.  The synoptic gospels depict Jesus as a teacher who believed that he was living in the end of times, and insisted on preparation by way of correct moral behavior.  Paul, while not denying this humanistic portrait of Jesus, summarized and expanded on his teachings (for example, in his treatises on Love and the Fruit of the Spirit), and goes on to see him tasked with and rewarded for the sacrifice required for reconciliation of sinful man with judgmental God.  The claim to divinity, in Paul’s mind, comes about as God’s ‘exaltation’ of Jesus as a result of completion of this task.  Jesus is born a human, but raised to a divine level by God because of his sacrifice.

John goes one step further, as he identifies Jesus as the human face of the fundamental basis by which creation was effected.  Jesus, as ‘the Christ’, had always existed, along with God, and collaborated with God in the act of creation.  From this perspective, God can be seen as the ‘creator’ and Jesus as the ‘navigator’.

On the surface, these two facets of Jesus, the human and the divine, appear as just another type of duality, along with body/soul, this life/the next, good/evil, in which two opposing and orthogonal concepts are juxtaposed and contrasted, requiring ‘cognitive dissonance’ on the part of the believer.  In the ‘atonement’ theory, for example, Jesus is placed into history by God to re-establish the connection between God and his creation that God intended, but failed due to Adam’s ‘original sin’.  In argument against the ‘theory of atonement’, Richard Rohr notes:

”The ‘substitutionary atonement theory’ of salvation treats Christ as a mere Plan B. In this attempt at an explanation for the Incarnation, God did not really enter the scene until God saw that we had screwed up.”

In the “cosmic Christ” insight of John that we saw last week, Jesus, as the Christ, is ‘co-substantial’ with God, and therefore had always been somehow involved in the creation process.

These two theories are, on the face of it, orthogonal.   The first posits a somewhat ‘deistic’ God whose creation process ends with the appearance of man, and man is a finished product free to turn against ‘Him’.  In the second, the ‘cosmic Christ’ is an agent essential to the raising of man’s understanding of God, becoming manifest in human history as God’s continuing presence in human existence.

The history of Christian theological development includes many disagreements among leaders of the early church on how Jesus could be man and God at the same time, with many different ‘heresies’ debated.  Was Jesus ‘only’ human, ‘only divine’ and appearing in human form, or both at the same time?

The final solution, that Jesus was indeed God and man, was presented as a ‘mystery’ to be believed, not to be understood.  Essentially, although it could not be explained, it became an article of faith, requiring a sort of ‘cognitive dissonance’, and as such introduced yet another duality.

We have seen how many such dualities can be resolved through application of our secular principles of reinterpretation, and this one is no exception.  As we have seen, many of the opposing concepts associated with God, such as those addressed in earlier posts, can come into coherence, and the dualities healed, when we understand God as the ‘ground of being’.  Once God is understood as active in both the principles of being (physics, chemistry, biology) and the principles of becoming (increasing complexity), we take a step toward seeing God’s presence reflected in every manifestation of reality.  In the same way we should be able to re-look at the person of Jesus.

Making Sense of Jesus

Thomas Jefferson was one of the first secular thinkers to attempt such a relook.  Jefferson understood that the teachings of Jesus, stripped of their supernatural and miraculous content, had much to offer the construction of a secular set of laws which could underpin a new nation.  In doing this, Jefferson was one of many who attempted to ‘articulate the noosphere’ by ‘reinterpreting religion’.

As an eighteenth century Deist, of course, Jefferson’s ideas of God were limited to ‘source’ but without recourse to the nineteenth century findings of Physics and the emerging science of Natural Selection that would later inspire such thinkers as Maurice Blondel and Teilhard.  Without these insights, he could not conceive of this ‘source’ continuing on after an initial creation, much less as an active agent which powers the increasing complexity which would eventually manifest itself in the human person and serve as a confirmation of his belief in the equality of the human person.

With the insights of Blondel and Teilhard in hand, however, we can begin to understand God as not only the ‘source’ but the ever-active ‘agent’ of a universe which comes to be over long periods of time.  This agent powers evolution, first through the complexification of matter, then through the appearance of ever more complex living entities, and eventually to the appearance of conscious entities which are aware of their consciousness.

As history has showed, it’s not enough to be aware of our awareness, we must also seek to understand it well enough to cooperate with whatever it is that powers our being to be able to move our evolution forward.  To be able to continue to move forward, we must both understand the ‘laws of the noosphere’ and learn to cooperate with them.

And this is where Jesus comes in.

The Next Post

We have seen in the last two weeks how the person of Jesus has been depicted in the Christian ‘New Testament’, and how this depiction changes over the three (Paul, Synoptic Gospels, John) groups of texts.  Next week we will take a look at how this emerging portrait of Jesus can be seen in light of our search for the Secular Side of God

April 27 – At The Root Of Everything, Part 2

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how religion can be seen as an attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’, in which the ‘laws’ of our personal and cultural evolution are sought and by which we can assure our continued personal and cultural growth.   This week we will take a look at how such articulation at the level of religion slowly informs our cultural standards.

From Articulating the Noosphere to Regulating Human Behavior

Society has long struggled to both understand the principles which underlie a ‘successful’ society and to codify these principles into what we now understand as ‘secular laws’.  As chronicled by Nick Spencer in his book, “The Evolution of the West”, religion’s role in this historic process has been dualistic.  In many cases it has found itself trapped in the perpetuation of its financial and legalistic manifestations and power structures, and in other cases it has contributed to the fundamental concepts by which civilization has successfully evolved.

As discussed in the post of 6 August 2016 (Isn’t This Just Deism?, Part 1, http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=201508), the thinking of Thomas Jefferson captured both arms of this dualism.   While his approach was to discard the ‘otherworldly’ aspects of the New Testament and focus on Jesus as a secular moralist, he nonetheless drew the basis of his understanding of human nature and personal freedom from these teachings.  The result, of course, was a basis for a set of laws which has underpinned a truly ‘successful’ society.

Larry Siedentop, in his book, “Inventing the Individual’, traces the history of ideals that form the basis of Western values.   It’s not so much that these ideals are absent in Eastern thinking, but do not enjoy the primacy seen in the West.  His take on the ‘articulation of the Noosphere’ that has emerged in the West:

o   Each person exists with worth apart from their social position

o   Everyone deserves equal status under secular law

o   Religious belief cannot be compelled

o   Individual conscience must be respected

 

As Teilhard (and many others) have noted, the Western evolution of understanding of the person and society is becoming a standard embraced elsewhere:

“…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.”

The Perennial Philosophy

While considerable diversity and frequent contradiction is paramount among the threads of thought seen in the evolution of religion, Aldous Huxley saw common cornerstones in all of them.  He defines the immemorial and universal ‘Perennial Philosophy’ which permeates all religions as:

“…the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being.”

  Translating this semi-theological assertion into the perspectives of our ‘Secular God’, we can see that this concept of the ‘Perennial Philosophy’ reflects the principle which powers the coming–to-be of the universe (the ‘world of things’) and that it is reflected in some way in the core of the human person.

Effectively, this ‘metaphysic’ points the way to the underlying activity by which we have come to be and the guidelines by which we successfully negotiate our growth.  The Perennial Philosophy recognizes that there are basic dynamics of human existence which, understood and managed properly, will lead to increased completeness.  The religious and societal norms which have evolved, therefore, are our attempt to articulate these dynamics and the activities of understanding and management of them.  By definition, as we evolve as persons and as societies, we hope to evolve them in a direction which activates our potential.

Or, as Karen Armstrong puts it in her insights on the many streams of thinking which developed during the ‘Axial Age’:

 “The fact that they all (the sages of the Axial Age) came up with such profoundly similar solutions by so many different routes suggests that they had indeed discovered something important about the way human beings worked”.

The theologian, Cynthia Bourgeault, puts it a little differently:

”I think it’s fair to say that all of the great spiritual paths lead toward the same center—the larger, nondual mind as the seat of personal consciousness—but they get there by different routes.”

What’s the Alternative?

Successfully negotiating the continuation of our evolution goes beyond fulfilling our potential.  It is obvious today that human activity always has the potential of contributing to our extinction.  Finding and understanding the ‘laws of the noosphere’ also requires us to adapt to our ever-increasing population and the effects it has on the planet.  One example of such an adaptation is acknowledged by John McHale in his book, “The Future of the Future”:

“At this point, then, where men’s affairs reach the scale of potential disruption of the global ecosystem, he invents precisely those conceptual and physical technologies that may enable him to deal with the magnitude of a complex planetary society.”

   It’s not just that we are in danger of destroying our planet, but that even more danger lurks in our ever-increasing proximity to each other.  As our population continues to expand, we are more and more at the mercy of our instincts to defend our space, to keep ‘the other’ at a distance, to defend our territory and make sure we get our fair share.  Inventing McHale’s ‘conceptual technologies’ means to develop evolutional strategies that overcome this strong resistance to closeness.

In this area it’s essential to our continued evolution for us to ‘use our neo-cortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of our reptilian and limbic brains.”

These ‘basic dynamics’ and ‘conceptual technologies’, therefore, are what is sought by humans in their attempts to ‘articulate the noosphere’.   Culling them from the enormous and often contradictory cluster of statements of beliefs that have arisen over the long evolution of religion is the main goal of the ‘reinterpretation’ process that is the focus of the last segment of our search for ‘The Secular Side of God’.

As Teilhard sees it, referring to a person’s belief:

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

The Next Post

So, if we believe that that all statements of religious beliefs include some elements of the ‘Perennial Philosophy’, what remains is to address these statements and, using the perspectives we have developed thus far, reinterpret them to find such kernels.  Next week we will begin to apply our ideas of the ‘Secular Side of God’ as we address many of these statements.

March 16 – So, With All This, Who or What is God? – Part 1

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March 16 – So, With All This, Who or What is God? – Part 1

Today’s Post

Last week we recapped how, using the methods of science, we have identified a God which can be understood in a ‘secular sense’, requiring no adherence to religious precepts, but is yet as close to us as we are to ourselves.  Such a God satisfies the requirements of science as expressed by the eminent atheist thinker, Professor Richard Dawkins as:

“The first cause …  which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence.”

   without recourse to

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

   This week we will begin the final phase of this blog, ‘Reinterpreting Religion’, by addressing how traditional Christian concepts of God can be reinterpreted in the light of such a secular approach.

God as the Ground of Being

Conventional Western religion, expressed in the form of Christianity, has evolved the concept of God from Jewish expression to that most explicitly framed in the Western Scholastic tradition.  Thomas Aquinas is most associated with this theology in his association of Greek thinking with traditional Church teaching.  His ‘Summa Theologica” developed a ‘metaphysics’ which explained reality as an association between the divine (God) and his creation, blending scripture, Greek reasoning and faith.

As discussed in the ten posts beginning in September, 2015 (http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=201509), Western religious thought has always reflected what Jonathan Sacks refers to as ‘dualism’.  Dualism sees all the major expressions of religious thought as having evolved along two parallel paths.  On one path, creation is ‘good’, creation (including humans) is destined for ‘one-ness’ with its creator, humans are reflections of the divine (‘in His image’), and God is ‘father’.  On the other, creation is flawed, separated from its creator (requiring divine sacrifice to reconnect), humans are sinful at their core, and God is vengeful.  This dualism, evident in the Basic Jewish texts (the Christian ‘Old Testament’) spills over into Christianity, with its tension between such concepts as ‘love’ and ‘justice’, ‘damnation’ and ‘salvation’, ‘natural’ and ’supernatural’, ‘this life’ and ‘the next’.

Once Rome capitalized on Christianity’s universal nature as a tool for social unity as Rome became an increasingly diverse empire, Christianity quickly became more legalistic than fraternal.  Its dogmatic statements and rules for attaining salvation increasingly replaced Jesus’ teaching of ‘the law of love’.  The pastoral ‘Jesus’ of the synoptic gospels was supplanted by the ‘universal Christ’ of John.

Sacks sees the dualism that could be found in Jewish beliefs becoming more pronounced in Christianity, as this universal expression began to incorporate elements of Greek philosophy.  As he sees it, “Christendom drew its philosophy, science and art from Greece, its religion from Israel”, thus exacerbating the dualism that had its roots in Jewish teachings.

Our concept of the ‘secular’ God is quite obviously quite different from this conventional and traditional view.  Here are three examples:

   God is not ‘a person’.  In Teilhard’s view, God is the basis for person since he is the sum total of all the universal forces by which the universe evolves from a formless block of energy to the highly articulated multifaceted reality that we see around us, including ourselves.  As science has showed us, evolution ‘ramifies’: the products of evolution branch out at each step of the universe as it rises from its initial cloud of energy through a few granules of matter which become several subatomic particles which become hundreds of atoms, then tens of thousands of molecules then an uncounted myriad of cells.   One of the threads of this tens of billions of years of becoming is that which eventually leads to ‘the person’.  Since that evolution produced the entity that we refer to as ‘the person’, person therefore is seen as one of many evolved characteristics.  As Blondel sees it

“God is not a super-person, not even three super-persons. 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.”

Our secular perspective, therefore, reinterprets God from being ‘a person’ to the much more profound understanding of God as the personal facet of the ground of being.

   God is not ‘supernatural’, if the term refers to something that exists outside, above and apart from nature.  In Teilhard’s view, the action of God (the agent of complexity) is so woven into the action of evolution as to be ‘co-substantial’ with it.  As Blondel says, there is no position that we can take which sees God as ‘there’ and we as ‘here’, since we require the evolutive action of God within us to be able to make the statement.  As we have seen over the last several weeks, our very growth as persons requires us to find that spark of ‘person’ that exists in us all, that we did not create, and which is given to us ‘gratuiously’, unearned, and finding this spark is the first step to finding God.

   Finding God is the simple realization that what differentiates us from any other product of evolution is that humans have to become aware of what it is that got us where we are, and how to cooperate with it, if we are to progress further.

   God is, in a very real, tangible and unsentimental way, ‘love’.  Once love is shorn of its emotional and sentimental aspect, it can be seen as the play of universal, integrative energy as it has manifested itself in the human person.  Just as entities at every stage of evolution have capitalized on integrative energy to unite in such a way as to effect a more complex entity, so can humans capitalize the energy of love in the same way to increase their individual complexity, to grow.

   Such a God as we have come to in our search thus far, while being understood so differently in many ways from our legacy Western beliefs, is not necessarily antithetical to the beliefs themselves.  As we shall see in the remaining posts of this blog, they can be reviewed for their relevance to human life and as such ‘reinterpreted’.

The Next Post

Next week we will continue this process of reinterpretation by taking a look at some of Western religious teachings on God in the light of our secular approach.

March 16 – So, With All This, Who or What is God? – Part 2

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Today’s Post

Last week we began to look at how God can be understood in our ‘secular’ approach, which finds God as the critical agent in the unfolding of the universe.  This week we will address some of the traditional characteristics ascribed to God as Christianity unfolded under the influence of Greek philosophy.

These characteristics, of course, include examples of the ‘dualism’ which was discussed last week.  As Oliver Sacks observes, they don’t exist in Jewish thinking, which doesn’t speculate on the nature of God but rather treats God as present in the affairs of men.  This understanding is one of the clearest threads in the ‘Old Testament’, but represents one of the many dualities (God ‘as he is in himself’ vs ‘God as he is to us’) that arose as Christian theology evolved under the shadow of Greek thinking.  This example of duality was addressed in “The Evolution of Religion, Part 7, The issue of Concepts” (http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=20151).  Sacks sees such ‘other-worldliness’ as a factor in the failure to experience God in the here and now, and hence contributing to an increasing sense of irrelevance of religious teaching.  That said, let’s move on to looking at them in the light of the reinterpretation principles which we have developed.

Immutability and Divinity   

The traditional Christian understanding is that God is “Being itself, timeless, immutable, incorporeal”.   Augustine goes on to interpret the statement ontologically, seeing God as “that which does not and cannot change”.  Aquinas, in his metaphysics, sees God as “true being, that is eternal, immutable, simple, self-sufficient and the cause and principal of every creature”.  These teachings, although not in themselves antithetical to our concept, have nonetheless led to the understanding of God as ‘supernatural’ in contrast to reality being merely ‘natural’.

Sacks see these interpretations as the “God of Aristotle, not Abraham and the prophets”.  The Greek translation of God’s self-identification to Moses is, “I am who am”.

The Jewish translation of God’s identification to Moses is, “I will be where or how I will be”, adding a ‘future tense’ omitted in the Greek translation.

As Sacks points out, the concept of the ‘purely spiritual’ does not exist in Judiasm, which rarely speculates on the nature of God.  This teaching surfaces another dichotomy which crept into Christianity with the Greek perspective: that of form vs matter, and body vs soul.

Our secular point of view goes a little further, and is more in line with the essential thinking of Augustine and Aquinas.  As God can be found in the sum total of forces that, as Dawkins claims, “..eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence”, God is not only not supernatural, as the ‘ground of being’, is supremely natural and therefore so intimately involved in evolving reality as to be virtually inseparable from it.

Omnipotentiality

This traditional teaching asserts that God is ‘all-powerful’, and can do anything that he desires.  It forms the basis for the conundrum:  if God can do anything he desires, and if he is ‘good’, he should be able to correct all the bad things that are so obvious in reality.  This points to all the suffering that can be seen, both human-caused and ‘acts of nature’ such as droughts, sickness and genetic evils.  It asserts that the only conclusion possible is that either God causes evil (in which case he is not ‘good’) or that he is powerless to stop it (in which case he is not ‘all-powerful).

Both Sacks and scriptural scholar Bart Ehrman (‘God’s Problem’) acknowledge that traditional Christianity does not offer a solution to this dichotomy.  In the story of Job, for example, all the traditional treatments of evil are addressed, but in the end none are held up as ‘the answer’.

Sacks goes on to address further the contradiction in the assertion of ‘God’s power’.  If we assume that God does not create evil, then we must assume that it comes from somewhere (or someone) else.  Assuming a second source, of course, moves belief from monotheism to polytheism.  Sacks points out that both threads of thought can be found in scripture, and that a tendency toward seeing an independent source for evil is one of the bases for dualism.  He sees the danger of such a dualism very strong in human history, with our ever-present tendency to demonize our opponents, which so often has led to victimization in the name of moral superiority.  The Nazi “Final Solution” is one of the most striking examples of this thinking, and such trends are troublingly present in contemporary American politics.

Our secular approach, which sees the action of God in the thread of increasing complexity, approaches the issue of power quite differently.  As God is not perceived as a ‘person’, much less an incredibly powerful potentate, God’s ‘power’ lies in the inexorable lifting of the universe to Dawkins’ “present complex existence”.  In order to become what it is possible for us to become, it is necessary for us to recognize and learn to cooperate with this very real universal force that lies at our core.

The Next Post

Next week we will continue our look at traditional descriptions of God, by addressing Omniscience, Chance, Transcendence and Immanence.

January 19 – Relating to God, Part 7: Loving God, Part 1

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Today’s Post

We have spent the past few weeks following Teilhard’s use of meditation to the finding of God.  We have followed this thread as it appears in the science of Psychology, noting the evolution of Psychology as ‘assisted secular meditation’, and saw how it can lead us to an understanding of the person that Kierkegaard believed “to be that self that one truly is”.

This week we will address how relating to this universal ‘principle of being’ that manifests itself in us can be seen as ‘Love”.  Now that we have identified how God, the principle of existence, can be understood as a principle of life within us, we can explore what it can mean to say that such a ground of being can be ‘loved’.

A Relook at Love

(The subject of Love and evolution is addressed in more detail in the blog “The Phenomenon of Love” (http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?page_id=57) which addressed the concept of love from Teilhard’s evolutionary standpoint.)

In today’s culture, it would seem that few things are less obvious and more ubiquitous than love.  Our culture is rife with references to it: it is used to sell things, explain behavior, understood as a prompt to procreation, as fodder for poems and music, as themes to movies and books, as an emotional, sentimental feeling.  Articulated thusly, it seems to offer a poor mechanism for connecting to the ‘ground of being’ that is active at the basis of our lives.

Even our western religion has problems with it.  For many Christians, the emotional aspect of Love far outweighs the ontological aspect: Love is more a sentimental ‘feeling good’ about God and Jesus than the facet of the universal energy which effects our growth as it brings us together.

Teilhard notes that the systematic and ever repeating act of evolution is the increasing of complexity which results from simple union.  Over and over in evolution, from the big bang to the human person, the same phenomenon can be seen:

Two entities of like complexity unite, and the product is an entity of higher complexity and greater potential for union. 

Science observes this phenomenon as active in the evolution of simple matter from the first bosons to the very complex molecules which underpin life.  Natural Selection observes the continuation of this rise of complexity, at a much higher rate, in the evolution from simple cells to the neurons which underpin the human characteristic which we call ‘consciousness’.  Without such a fundamental principle of existence, evolution as we know it would not be possible.  Without it, the universe would still be a ball of unorganized energy.

Love As The Energy Of Evolution In The Human

As we have mentioned several times in this blog, we can hardly expect such a powerful and inexorable upwelling of complexity to stop with the human person: this agent of evolution is just as active in humans today as it has been throughout the history of the universe.  The question remains: how can we see it as active in our lives?

Teilhard observes that evolution proceeds via the ‘activation of energy’.  The unions of evolution that raise the level of complexity do not occur in isolation: they are influenced and effected by the wash of energy which pervades the universe.  Atoms are unified by the strong and weak atomic forces, complex atoms by the fusion forced by gravity, atoms into molecules under the play of chemical forces.

These energies are manifold, and different types of energy come into play at different rungs of complexity.  For example, gravity was unable to have an effect on evolution until particles acquired mass.   The forces of chemistry were mute until the arrival of molecules.  And the forces of love could not play their part until the entities of evolution became conscious.  Love, therefore is the energy which effects our own ‘complexification”.

Seen through Teilhard’s eyes, the increasing complexity in living things, resulting as it does in the phenomenon of consciousness, results in entities subject to the play of energies so subtle as to be immeasurable yet so powerful as to power the ascent of complexity which is ‘consciousness aware of itself’.

The Next Post

Teilhard addresses how this concept of love is ‘the energy which unites persons in such a way as to continue the rise of complexity in evolution’.   Next week we will take a look at how he sees it at work in our lives, and how we can see cooperation with this energy as ‘loving God’.

January 5, 2017 – Relating to God, Part 6- Freud, Teilhard and Rogers in the Search for the ‘Secular Side of God’

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Today’s Post

In the last two weeks we followed Carl Rogers as he went into some detail in describing his observations of the process of finding the kernel of person-ness within us.  He also describes what emerges when we begin to trust and cooperate with this fundamental energy which Teilhard identifies as the ‘thread of evolution’ as it rises in us.  This week we will relook look at the three approaches we have addressed in the past few weeks, those of Freud, Teilhard and Rogers as they relate to our search for a ‘Secular Side of God’.

From Freud: the Dark Side

Even the most casual study of human history reveals the ‘dark side’ of humanity.  All of the great books of ancient religions recognize it and warn against it.

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

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

While Freud (and Darwin) are correct about these roots and how they affect us, they don’t take into account another perspective on such evolution.  Teilhard remarked on the ‘transitional’ states of evolution, such as the formation of atoms from subatomic particles, cells from highly complex molecules, and self-aware persons from conscious animals.  He points out that the first of each of these ‘new’ entities, in every case, initially are virtually indistinguishable from their predecessor.  He refers to the earliest, prokaryotic (non-nucleus) cells as emerging ‘dripping in molecularity’.  If it were possible to see them in a population of highly complex, non-living molecules (such as viruses), it would be very difficult to distinguish them.  In contrast, at the evolutionary level of, say, neurological cells, the uniqueness of living tissue has become obviously different from complex molecules.

He sees the same thing happening with the human.  Were it possible to see the first homo sapiens in a jungle filled with pre-humans, how would we tell them apart?  Today there is no problem with such observation.

We humans have indeed emerged as animals with more brains, but that makes all the difference.  The pre-humans, with their reptilian and limbic brains, are at the mercy of their stimuli.  The reptiles fight or fly, breathe, eat and procreate according to their basic brain stimuli.  Animals add new powers of nurturing offspring, clannish connections and adaption to environment changes.  These new behaviors, due to the new limbic brain are in addition to the stimuli from their reptilian brains, and endow them with more evolutionary fitness.

Even though we humans have a third layer to our brains, the instinctual stimuli of the lower brains is still active, but the neo-cortex provides the capability of modulating them.  I have suggested that the key manifestation of evolution in the human person can be found in the evolving skill of the neo-cortex in modulating the instinctual stimuli of the lower brains.

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

From Rogers: Toward the Light

As we have seen, Carl Rogers takes a view of our personal evolution that is quite different from Freud.  He assumes that each human person comes into the world with a quantum of potency, and that instead of being broken, he is incomplete and capable of personal evolution –growth– towards increased being.

It should be noted that Rogers’ articulation of the emerging characteristics of a maturing person are purely secular.  His methods are those of science: observe, theorize, and test.  They require no adherence to religious belief (and as we saw in the November 24 post above, are often antithetical to some), but rather a basic, fundamental belief in the trustworthy nature of the basic self, and a willingness to cooperate with it.

While there might not be a universally accepted list of the characteristics of human happiness or articulation of human potential, Rogers’ list is not only an excellent beginning but universally applicable.

Combined with the unique (and universal) nature of Rogers’ therapeutic relationship, concepts such as belief, faith and love take on a new, secular, meaning.

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

From Teilhard: The Light Itself

As we have frequently discussed in this blog, Teilhard starts from the ‘other end’, describing how God is manifest in the very basic and totality of forces which power the evolution of the universe itself.  He describes how these forces combine to effect all that we can see, and not only the human as a species but individual human persons as well.  In his view (and Blondel’s and others), it is impossible to distinguish where God leaves off and where we begin since each act of our ‘becoming’ requires recognition and cooperation with this force as it rises in us.

Freud, Rogers and Teilhard in a Nutshell

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

After identifying God as an agent of evolution,

by which things increase in complexity over time,

through which the process of evolution is possible,

from the big bang to the human,

as products of evolution: even in our lives,

to which we can come in contact

by searching for the kernel of ourselves

using the emerging insights of science

the next post will now go on to the final stage of Relating to God: the secular side of Loving God.

November 24 – Relating to God: Part 5- Psychology as Secular Meditation- Part 2: The Transition

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Today’s Post

Last week we opened the subject of psychology as offering a secular approach to meditation: finding god by finding ourselves

–          Recognizing God as the agent of the upwelling of complexity in Cosmic evolution

–          Becoming aware of this upwelling in our own personal evolution

–          Finding God by finding our fundamental selves.

We saw how Freud was the first to address this undertaking in an objective, secular and empirical manner (as opposed to that of the intuitive and  scriptural).  We also saw how, while offering a magnificent array of new concepts, and working empirically, Freud’s psychology nontheless leads to a very negative understanding of our basic selves.  Meditation, even via psychology, can be very dangerous indeed, since it shows our basic selves as highly unreliable, even untrustworthy.

This week we will address an opposite approach to psychology which emerged in America in the last century.  This different approach, while also based on the empirical perspectives and methods of science, found a core of the human person completely orthogonal to Freud.

From Freud to Existentialism

(This topic is covered in much more detail in the Post of Feb 13, 2014, “Love from the Existential Perspective”, which is included in the Blog “The Phenomenon of Love”.)

As we saw in the previous post, Freud was successful in developing an integrated system of thought which objectively addressed the whole of human activity.  He pioneered the understanding of the human in terms of inner energies, motivations, stimuli and even “economies” that determine his development from birth to death, and did this in a way which mirrored the objective approach of science.  His treatment of human irrationality is unmatched. However, with his underlying materialism, misogyny and overall pessimism he was definitely pessimistic on the human person’s potential for satisfying relationships and personal maturity.

But we can find agreement between Freud and Teilhard on several things, such as the existence of a personal core of energy which underlies human growth and relationships, and understanding love as manifested in the reciprocal exchange of this energy between individual persons.  They sharply disagree on the nature and source of this energy, and the role that this reciprocal exchange could have in positive growth, maturity, and even creation of the person involved in its exchange.  The difference between these two schools of thought sharpens further when they are applied to human relationships at the social level.

As psychiatry and psychology continued to develop in Western science, many of the negative aspects of Freud’s thinking began to be reevaluated and modified as the increasing participation of Westerners in psychoanalysis created a large body of empirical data which could be analyzed to support or disprove the propositions which originally formed the basis for Freud’s thinking.  The relation between the analyst and the analyzed evolved as well, with the increasing educational level of the middle class, the acceptability of psychology by religion, and the emergence of expectations on the part of those undergoing analysis.

The Pioneers of Existentialism

In the nineteen forties and fifties, several psychologists emerged with a distinctively different and positive understanding of the human person and the dynamics of his growth and relationships with others.  This approach generally became known as “existential”.  Their general methods became known as ‘counselling’, and adopted by religion, as “pastoral counselling”.

Rollo May understood the basic tenet of existential psychotherapy as “that which stands with scientific analysis as expressed in the genius of Freud”.  However, the empirical data that science also brings into the picture unfolds the understanding of the human person on a deeper and broader level.  This deeper understanding assumes that it is possible to have a ‘science of man’ which does not ‘fragmentize’ him (by breaking him down into Freud’s compartments) and thus destroy his humanity in the process of studying him.  Unlike therapeutic interpretation as practiced in Freudian psychoanalysis (which consists of referring a person’s experience to a pre-established theoretical framework) ‘existential’ interpretation seeks to understand how the person himself subjectively experiences reality, then works with him toward actualizing his potential.  Psychology was moving from analysis and diagnosis to guided inner search.

Psychology was emerging as assisted secular meditation.

Instead of focusing on psychopathology and what goes wrong with people, Abraham Maslow formulated a more positive account of human behavior which focused on what goes right. He was interested in human potential, and how it could be actualized.  He believed that each person has a desire for self-fulfillment; namely, the tendency for him to “become actualized in what he is potentially”.  As we have seen, this requires us to first find ourselves, and then cooperate with this primal force which rises within us.

Ashley Mongatu believed that as a consequence of humanity’s unique evolutionary history, which requires us to be  highly cooperative, human drives are oriented in the direction of growth and development in love and cooperation.  He believed that what we are born for is “to live as if to life and love were one”.  Like Teilhard, he subscribed to the belief that evolution rises along an axis, and that we are located, both as individuals and society, on that axis.

These pioneers believed that the core of human personality is positive, and not irrational and capable of destruction as Freud believed.  Their clinical experience led them to recognize that the innermost core of man’s nature, in the deepest layers of his personality, the base of his “animal nature” is actually positive, basically socialized, forward-moving, rational and realistic.  They saw the goal of psychology as to help us find this inner self, then help us learn to cooperate with it.

In scientific circles, however, this was a difficult concept to accept.  In psychology, Freud and his followers presented convincing arguments that the id, man’s basic and unconscious nature, is primarily made up of instincts which would, if permitted expression, result in incest, murder and other crimes.

In religion as well, especially in the Protestant Christian tradition, our culture has been permeated with the concept that man is basically sinful, and only by something approaching a miracle can his sinful nature be negated.  The whole problem of therapy, as seen by this group, is how to hold these untamed forces in check in a wholesome and constructive manner, rather than in the costly fashion of the neurotic.

In contrast, the existentialists believed that the reason for this negative belief by many psychologists lay in the fact that since therapy uncovers hostile and anti-social feelings, it is easy to assume that this proves the deeper and therefore basic nature of man as unrelentingly negative.  Only slowly has it become evident that these untamed and unsocial feelings are neither the deepest nor the strongest, and that the inner core of a man’s personality is the organism itself, which is, in addition to self-preserving, also social and capable of perfection.

The Next Post

This week we saw how the basic tenets of psychology began to evolve from seeing the personal core as ‘dangerous’ to seeing it as a positive and trustworthy basis for human personal growth.  Next week we will look in more detail at how one of the most pivotal Existentialists applied this approach and the results he recorded.

November 10 – Relating to God: Part 5- Psychology as Secular Meditation- Part 1: The Beginnings

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Today’s Post

Last week we showed how Teilhard’s description of his meditation can be seen in terms of the secular search for Karen Armstrong’s ‘immortal spark’: that essential agent of cosmic evolution which manifests itself at our core.  While Teilhard inevitably takes the tone of Western religious tradition, we saw how his approach to meditation is nonetheless secular at its base.

Today we will carry this one step further: to look at how meditation, the traditional religious search for self, has led to a practice entirely devoid of religious belief: psychology.

The Appearance of Psychology 

(This topic is covered in much more detail in the Post of Feb 5, 2014, “The Evolution of Love From the Perspective of Psychiatry and Psychology” which is included in the Blog “The Phenomenon of Love”.)

The rising tide of the way that human persons began to experience themselves in the emerging awareness of the uniqueness of the human person also molded the form that this thinking was taking.  Human evolution has seen a movement from ascribing events to activities of the divine to attempts to understand them as phenomena in the natural world.  This movement gave rise to the empirical approaches of science.  Initially constrained to the physical world, this approach eventually began to apply itself to the human person himself, based on clinical observation instead of intuition and biblical interpretation.

Sigmund Freud pioneered this new scientific mode of approach to understanding the human person   He applied the new methods of science to the  making and testing of hypotheses of human growth and relationships. He was virtually the first major thinker to describe the human nature which underlay sexuality (and therefore relationships) in objective, secular terms.

In Irving Singer’s comprehensive analysis of human relationships, “The Nature of Love”, he comments,

“Like other thinkers of the time, Freud sought to explain the human condition in terms of the rationalistic concepts that science was uncovering.  He proposed a completely new lexicon and analytic approach to understand the nature of “affect”, which includes all of what we normally call feelings, emotions, sensations, “intuitive” and “instinctive” dispositions, erotic attachments, hatred as well as love, and also kinesthetic impressions of any kind.  For that job we require a totally different type of methodology.”

Historically, some thinkers, such as Plato, Plotinus and Augustine, had generally proposed a positive interpretation of reality, believing that what is ultimate in reality sustains, even conforms to, human ideals; while others, such as Lucretius, and Hobbes came to see the universe as neutral, even hostile, to such optimistic assumptions.  Freud falls into this second, pessimistic, category.

Singer contrasts these two perspectives, showing the duality of thinking which results from this dichotomy:

“”Philosophers have often tried to reduce the different senses of the word “love” to a single meaning that best suited their doctrinal position.  To the Platonists, “real love”, being a search for absolute beauty or goodness, must be good itself; to the Freudians love is “really” amoral sexuality, though usually sublimated and deflected from its coital aim.  The Platonist argues that even sexuality belongs to a search for the ideal, and otherwise would not be called love in any sense.  The Freudian derives all ideals from attempts to satisfy organic needs, so that whatever Plato recommends must also be reducible to love as sexuality.”

Freud In An Oversimplified Nutshell

Freud’s thinking provided a monumental, unprecedented and unified approach to understanding the human person and the relationship between persons.  Like Teilhard’s finding of the ‘personal core’, Freud understood the person as an entity possessing a certain “life force” which empowers him to survive and procreate and is at the center of his being.  He saw this force, identified as ‘libido’, based on sexual instinct, as the ultimate agent of human growth.

In Freud’s thinking, the libido therefore is the energy that nourishes the self, and he identified the object of the libido as sexual union.  Therefore relationships that do not lead to sexual union interrupt the flow and replenishment of libido and lead to impoverishment of the self.  As Freud saw the self as initially focused on itself, this “narcissism” at birth represents a state to which the self always seeks returning.  “Nourishing the libido” therefore requires us to maintain our narcissism which is essential to our sense of self.

Freud believed that relationships required the person to “idealize” others, for the lover to transfer to his beloved an ideal that he has difficulty achieving within himself.  In his approach, we love that in the other person which we feel will compensate for our inadequacies, and thus we will recover the security of primal narcissism and maintain our libido.  The dependence upon relationships, in Freud’s approach, was therefore risky.  Failed relationships would undermine our libido and therefore diminish our self.

Further, Freud saw the force of libido as possessing an undercurrent of hate.  Freud therefore saw love as the mixture of ‘eros’ with “man’s natural aggressive instinct (the death drive)”, which is inseparable from it. In his words,

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

While Freud definitely saw love as energy, and one which effects the uniting of human persons, the resulting unifications were potentially harmful to the person because they are predicated on a personal core which is not to be trusted.  Love is dangerous because we at our core selves are dangerous.

While Teilhard heard a voice from the bottomless abyss from which flowed his life: “It is I, be not afraid”, Freud would have heard a different voice: “It is ego, be very afraid”.

While Freud definitely understood the human kernel as energy, and one which effects the uniting of human persons, its complex love/hate constitution leads to relationships which could harm the person.  Due to this basic flaw in our basic core, not only does love fail to solve human problems, but causes them as well.

So Freud, while pioneering the objective secularism of science to study of the human person, nonetheless arrives at a position at odds to Teilhard’s proposition that the kernel at the core of the person is a trustworthy manifestation of the same agent of rising complexity afoot in the evolution of the universe.

The Next Post

Freud’s approach to psychiatry, like Luther’s approach to Christianity, burst upon emerging Western society and immediately began to ramify into parallel but radically different expressions.  In today’s versions of psychotherapy, American positivism has muted much of Freud’s pessimism, materialism and misogyny, and many of the newer approaches to psychology focus more on the relation between therapist and patient than upon the therapist’s skill in plumbing and labelling the labyrinthine depths of the patient.

In the next post I will outline such a different approach, and explore how it can be seen as a ‘secular version of meditation’.

Relating to God: Part 2- Opening the Door

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Today’s Post

Last week we began to think of God as the agent of the universal phenomenon of ‘rising complexity’ as such agent continues the process of evolution through the development of our person, and how the acknowledgement of and cooperation with this fundamental agent is necessary to our growth and fulfillment of our potential.

This week we will beg to address the idea of a relationship to this agent by taking a look at the many approaches that the ancient sages have taken in the search for this universal thread which runs through our lives.

The Search for the ‘Basic Spark’

Last week we saw that if Teilhard’s assertion is true that

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

then our search for God begins with a search for ourselves.  Most of the ancient sages, including Jesus, point to the belief that the most essential core of our being must be uncovered for us to attain our most authentic expression of being.  This isn’t necessarily the ‘happiest’ or ‘most powerful’ state, but rather one in which we are ‘more complete’ and more aware of and able to achieve our full potential as persons.

Karen Armstrong, in her sweeping narrative, “The Great Transformation” identifies several areas of common ground among the six lines of thought in four parts of the world that constituted a new understanding of God and Self in the ‘Axial Age’ (900-200 BCE).  She describes one of the earliest such insights in the Upanishads as:

“There is an immortal spark at the core of the human person, which participated in – was of the same nature as – the immortal Brahman that sustained and gave life to the entire cosmos.  This was a discovery of immense importance and it would become a central insight in every major religious tradition.  The ultimate reality was an immanent presence in every single human being.”  (italics mine)

Armstrong saw this emerging realization as

“For the first time, human beings were systematically making themselves aware of the deeper layers of human consciousness.  By disciplined introspection, the sages of the Axial Age were awakening to the vast reaches of selfhood that lay beneath the surface of their minds.  They were becoming fully ‘Self-conscious’.  This was one of the clearest expressions of a fundamental principle of the Axial Age.  Enlightened persons would discover within themselves the means of rising above the world; they would experience transcendence by plumbing the mysteries of their own nature, not simply by taking part in magical rituals.”  (italics mine)

From our perspective as seeing God as the upwelling of complexity in evolution that leads to the ‘person’, we can begin to see how ‘plumbing the mysteries or our own nature’ is a primary means of connecting to the ‘mystery of all nature’.  It opens the door for a secular approach to “Finding God”.

Each of these six lines of thought (Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, Monotheism in Israel and philosophical rationalism in Greece) brought their own practices to this undertaking.  Further, with the seemingly inevitable duality that emerges in each new philosophy (as addressed in 14-Apr What is Religion?  Part 6: Stability Part 2) many different and often contradictory practices emerged even within each of the lines.  Within Christianity, as we saw, the influence of Greek thinking led to seeing God as ‘other’, as opposed to an agent of being and growth at the basis of our person.

So, as it is easy to see, the path towards developing a connection to this inner source of life that is recognized by nearly all religions is not a simple thing.  Finding a way to do so without being bound by the scaffolding and facades which abound in the canons of traditional religion is a very difficult undertaking.

The Next Post

This week we began to address the search for God as an active, immanent agent of our personal life.

But this does not answer the second part of our question: what does it mean to say that we can have a ‘relationship’ with such a God?   Having now seen how we are connected to God by participating in this cosmic upwelling of complexity, next week we will address the undertaking of such a relationship.

Reinterpreting God- Part 3, God and the Phenomenon of Person

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Today’s Post

Last week we addressed the uniquely Western concept of ‘the person’, and asked the question: “Given the perspective of Teilhard and science in general, how can the phenomenon of ‘person’ as understood in the West be brought into resonance with 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.”

Is God a ‘person’?

This week we will address this question.

The Process of ‘Personization’

In Teilhard’s understanding of evolution, the ‘person’ is a product of evolution which emerges as an effect of increasing complexity over long periods of time.   If we are to understand God in terms of the definition proposed above, where does the characteristic of ‘person’ come in?

To Teilhard, the phenomenon of ‘complexification’ (increasing complexity over time) is essential to the cosmic upwelling that we refer to as ‘evolution’.  Once the agent of complexity is added to the scientific canon of forces as found in the Standard Model of Physics and Biology’s theory of Natural Selection not only does evolution as we know it become possible but this increase in complexity can be seen to lead to the advent of ‘personness’ as found in the human.

As any educated atheist would point out, isn’t this teleology?  In teleology, one reasons from an endpoint (the existence of humans) to the startpoint.  In teleology, for example, creation exists for the purpose of making humans.  Teleology therefore seeks to rationalize history in terms of what has emerged.  Teleology is frequently used by fundamental Christianity, which sees God as intending man as the goal of his creation.  This accusation was discussed in the post of April 15, 2015 “Looking at Evolution, Part 7: Natural Selection in the Human Person”. 

This post noted the statement by Stephen Jay Gould, noted atheistic anthropologist, who asserted that “rewinding the tape of evolution” would not necessarily result in the emergence of the human.  He believed that the many accidents which have occurred in history, such as asteroid impacts which, by effectively wiping out entire species, cleared the way for the rise of mammals.  He suggests that other, different, accidents would have had different outcomes, which would not have necessarily led to the emergence of humans.

We saw how Gould’s statement nonetheless reflects his belief that evolution would still have proceeded through any combination of such disasters, and would therefore have continued to produce new and advanced species, just not necessarily mammals.  It does not take into account that such continuation of life would have also have required a continuing rise of complexity in order to proceed.  Therefore, conditions permitting, evolution would still have had the potential to produce an entity of sufficient complexity to have been aware of its consciousness.

A different play of the tape of evolution which does not produce a human person is only part of the picture.  Recognizing that the creature which would have inevitably emerged could have been one endowed with some sort of ‘neurology’ which permitted consciousness is the other part.  This potential for ‘rising complexity’ to eventually lead to consciousness is a phenomenon of the universe itself.  While entities recognizable as ‘human persons’ may not be evolving elsewhere in the universe, the probability of the appearance of entities aware of their awareness is not insignificant.

Teilhard, therefore, sees the agent of complexity at work everywhere in the cosmos, and given the appropriate conditions, will raise its constituent matter to higher levels of awareness:

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

Evolution, therefore, requires complexification, which results in personization.

So if God is to be understood as the ‘sum total of all forces’ (as proposed in our working definition), and the essential force is understood as that of ‘complexification’, then, among all the other forces (gravity, electromagnetism, chemistry), God can be seen in the force of ‘personization’.

The Process of ‘Personization’

So, from this perspective 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, adding sensory and mobility characteristics which communicate with increasingly complex centers of activity via increasingly complex neural circuits.  There is not a single step 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 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’.

The Next Post

This, of course, does not answer the question “Is God a person?”, much less address the issue of a human-God relationship.

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 a force of evolution with which we can have a relationship.