Tag Archives: religion and science

October 10 An Overview of the Blog “The Secular Side of God”

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Today’s Post

For the past five years I have been publishing this blog, “The Secular Side of God”. I embarked on this undertaking as an exploration of a non-religious approach to the ‘ground of being’ (AKA God) and hence human life. This approach appealed to me as a ‘cradle Catholic’ as I found myself finally giving myself the freedom to explore the many aspects of Catholicism which I had greeted with skepticism even as a child.

This, of course, didn’t happen overnight. My education as a physicist and my lifelong experience as an aerospace engineer only deepened the sense that, as stated, many of the teachings of Catholicism became harder to accept.

By the same token, however, many didn’t. I was fortunate to have insightful spiritual mentors who pointed out many expressions of Catholicism which articulated its many beliefs differently than those to which I had been exposed. The most influential of these were those of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French priest and paleontologist who sought to reinterpret the classical foundations of Christianity in terms of the recent and revolutionary scientific awareness of the depth, span, richness and age of the universe.
To him, such awareness could be applied to traditional Christian teachings not only to show how they fundamentally resonate with scientific insight, but as ‘principles of reinterpretation’ that would restore the urgency, immediacy and intimacy of the original gospels.  By such reinterpretation, he felt that a more relevant Christianity could be brought to contemporary life as an antidote to the apathy and anxiety which often accompany us on our ‘road to the future’.

For the next few weeks I would like to recap this long string of posts which mark my own search for such antidotes.

Overviewing the Blog

By way of an overview, I’d like to summarize the key points from the twenty-two part blog.These are, in order of their appearance:

Understanding Evolution This first segment presented the concept of universal evolution as seen from Teilhard’s unique and revolutionary view of evolution, which extends the biological concept of ‘Natural Selection’ to evolution in the eras before life and after the appearance of the human species. Not only is this groundbreaking perspective inclusive of the entire universe, from its history from the ‘big bang’ to the present day, it opens the door to a ‘worldview’ in which the insights of science and religion can be seen as collaborative rather than conflicting.

Biological Evolution  This section applies Teilhard’s expanded view of evolution to integrating Darwin’s ‘Natural Selection’ into the context of ‘universal evolution’. This expanded view also opens the door to placing the human person into the scope of science at the same time that it opens the restricted religious concept of the human person to the insights of science.

Human Evolution   Being able to understand the human person in the context of both universal evolution and an expanded understanding of biological evolution permits human evolution to be understood in terms of what is new with the human: “conscious become aware of itself”.

Universal Evolution With these new insights into how the process of evolution proceeds through its pre-life, life, and human life phases, we returned to another look at the ‘structure of the universe’ and how the understanding of science is expanded by recognizing the process of ‘complexification’

The Evolution of Religion  Since religion is part of reality, it is therefore a product of evolution. Applying the insights of Teilhard and Jonathan Sacks, former chief Rabbi of London, we looked at religion as an evolving ‘universal story’.

Understanding Religion From the Perspective of Evolution We continued our look at religion from the insights of Teilhard to understand how its concepts have unfolded and the part it has played in Western History.

Reinterpreting Religion From Teilhard’s insights we looked at how the traditional teachings of Western Christianity can be ‘reinterpreted’, and how such reinterpretation offers new meaning, relevancy and immediacy to them.

Relating to the ‘Ground of Being’    Having applied Teilhard’s ‘principles of reinterpretation’ to religion we looked at how the resulting concept of ‘God’ is echoed in secular science as well as how our relationship to ‘Him’ can be better understood.

Who or What is God?  With Teilhard’s understanding of God, how it possible to comprehend ‘Him”?

Who or What was Jesus?  How does Teilhard’s ‘reinterpreted’ understanding of God, map into the central Christian person of Jesus? How is Jesus different from ‘the Christ?’

Who or What is Spirituality? Considering Teilhard’s unique grasp of evolution at a universal level, his understanding of how we fit into it, and more importantly, how his ‘Axis of Evolution’ is present in each of us, how does this play out in the concept of ‘spirituality’?

Reinterpreting Christian Teachings   Having offered a ‘reinterpretation’ of the fundamentals of Western religion in the light of Teilhard’s ‘universal evolution’, how can its traditional teachings be understood in a way not tied to traditional religious statements? This segment looks at Sacraments, Morals and Virtues in this light.

Understanding Evolution in the Human Species With Teilhard’s revolutionary understanding of evolution and how religion has attempted to map the terrain of human existence, this section takes a second look at how evolution can be seen to proceed in the human species today, offering several distinct and empirical examples.

Understanding and Managing the Risks of Human Evolution With the clearer understanding of universal evolution and our part in it, this section looks at the ‘downside’: If our evolution, in contrast to the evolution of our nonhuman predecessors, is now dependent on our choices, what are the risks and how can we manage them?

Science and Religion  Long seen as mutually hostile, this section takes a first look at their need for each other as well as the possibility of a productive synergy.

The Cosmic Spark   With Teilhard’s clearer understanding of cosmic evolution and the action of the ‘ground of being’, this section offers a second look at how Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’ is present in all products of evolution, and how understanding its presence in the human person can lead to fuller being.

Pessimism In a second look at what can hold us back from such ‘fuller being’, this section takes a look at how the negativity of pessimism can impede both our personal evolution as well as the evolution of society.

Universal Evolution This second look at Teilhard’s universal concept of evolution shows how his clearer understanding of our place in the universe offers the possibility of not only understanding science and religion as compatible, but discovering the ‘terrain of synergy’ which results when we begin to see ourselves and our universe more holistically.

Happiness With all of the positive aspects of human evolution outlined by Teilhard, human evolution, departing so drastically from the dynamic enjoyed by our evolutionary predecessors, comes with difficulty. This section looks at the idea of human happiness from several perspectives and outlines how science and religion, working from the ‘terrain of synergy’ can offer a path to happiness.

The Next Post

This week we began finalizing the blog, “The Secular Side of God” with an outline of the twenty-two part series in which we looked at universal evolution, and humanity’s part in it, through the eyes of Teilhard de Chardin.

Next week we will begin a summary of each of these topics, beginning with “Understanding Evolution”

Where Have We Got To? : A Summary of The Blog So Far – Religion

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Today’s Post

Last week’s post summarized the first two segments of the blog, Evolution and Science.  Today’s post will summarize the third segment, Religion.

Religion (September, 2015 to April: 2016, What is Religion?)

We have seen that the general rise of complexity as observed by science requires a ‘principle’, just as do the play of the forces identified by Physics, Chemistry and Biology.  However, extrapolating from this general observation to a God as reflected in the many conflicting religious creeds is quite something else.  The spectrum of ‘belief’ is very broad indeed, and each creed reflects a different perspective on ourselves as well as the reality that we inhabit.

In this third segment, we looked at Religion from a secular perspective, as the human attempt to make sense of our environment and the part that we play in it.   From this perspective religion can be seen to evolve, not in the physical sense of slow changes to our physiology, but through the cultural structures by which acquired knowledge and wisdom are passed from generation to generation.

These posts (Sept 3 – Jan 7, The Evolution of Religion) went on to examine religion as an evolving, living thing, tracing its emergence from ancient myths and rules for society, through the influence of early historical modes of thought, and on through the confluence of the great Greek and Hebrew civilizations to their impact on Western society.

With this historical perspective in mind, we went on to offer a multifaceted definition of religion.

We noted that in general, evolution in the human can be seen in the increasing skill of applying the neocortex brain to the stimuli of the lower limbic (emotions) and reptilian (fear, antagonism) brains. (February 4– What is Religion? Part 2: The Evolution of Understanding)

With this perspective in mind, we explored other areas of human existence in which religion contributes to our understanding,

–          a basis for human action (February 18– What is Religion? Part 3: Enabling Us to Act)

–          contributing to our sense of place in the scheme of things, (March 3– What is Religion?  Part 4: Belonging)

–          understanding of our potential and the basis for it, (March 17 – What is Religion?  Part 5: Transcendence)

–          as both a contributor to the stability of society (March 31 – What is Religion?  Part 6:  Stability, Part 1), and its flip side, as often an inhibitor to this stability (April 14 – What is Religion?  Part 6:  Stability, Part 2).

From these posts, religion can be seen as a plethora of assertions about ourselves and our place in the universe.  Many of these assertions are clearly in contradiction:

The Eastern emphasis on the diminishment of the uniqueness of the human person as it approaches the ‘all’, versus the Western emphasis of the enhancement this uniqueness as it approaches the ‘all’

In the Western (Judeo-Christian) tradition:

The ‘monotheistic’ assertion, in which a single God is the root of all reality, versus the ‘duality’ necessity for a second such ‘root’ to explain the existence of evil

And, closer to home:

The ‘left’ Western understanding of scripture as metaphorical truth, versus the ‘right’ Western understanding of scripture as literal truth

Nonetheless, all these systems of belief have a core which embraces a transcendent aspect of reality, the open-endedness of human person and the need to overcome the restrictions of ego to be able to be able to capitalize on human potential.

On To the Final Segment

In preparation for the final segment, in which we will re-look at many of the basic precepts of Western religion, we will employ the observations, assertions and perspectives that we have gathered in the first three segments.  In summary:

–          The universe unfolds from principles identified by Physics, but advances in the direction of increased complexity

–          Understanding that each new product of evolution contains the potential for this increased complexity is to perceive an ‘axis’ along which evolution proceeds

–          To acknowledge this principle of increasing complexity as an addition to those principles recognized by science is to recognize the existence of a principle by which we come to be as evolutionary products aware of their consciousness

–          All human thought addresses this principle by attempting to

o   articulate this principle: to describe, measure, and in general, understand how it is manifested in our lives

o   understand how our lives can be lived in order to see it more clearly

o   learn how to take full advantage of it: to maximize our potential, and therefore live our lives more fully.

–          Of all human thought, Religion comes closest to addressing this principle most explicitly.  In Teilhard’s words, religion consists of an attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’.

So given that reality does indeed contain a thread which, if recognized and followed, will lead on to an enhancement of our lives, can the many manifestations of understanding presented by our Western religions indeed be leveraged for such ‘articulation’?  If so, how?

The fourth and final segment of this blog will explore such leverage.  While the bewildering array of dogmas, theological statements, rituals and historical twists and turns found in Western religion are often contradictory and indeed often antagonistic, there are many basic concepts which are potentially compatible and even integrated at their historical base.   As quoted previously, from Karen Armstrong:

“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.”

Further, and this is the goal of the final segment, the perspectives developed in the first three segments of this blog offer a basis of reinterpretation of the traditional teachings of Christianity.  Such reinterpretation offers the prospect of clarifying their relevance to human life.  By seeing the ‘spiritual kernel’ which shines through the often clumsy statements of belief offered by our Christian expressions, it is possible to understand the potential that they offer to our human existence.

Borrowing from Maurice Blondel, the perspectives of the first three segments of the blog offer ‘principles of reinterpretation’ that seek to understand ‘statements about the divine’ (as expressed by traditional Christianity) in terms of ‘statements about the human person’.

The Next Post

In the past two weeks, we have summarized the first three segments of the blog.  Next week we will move on to the fourth and final segment of the blog in which we will address the many statements of Western belief and explore the means of reinterpreting them in the light of the perspectives offered in the first three segments.

In this way, we will explore how religion can be seen to take on the secular task which powers the continuing evolution of the human person and his society.

What is Religion? Part 5: Transcendence

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Today’s Post

We’ve looked at religion so far as a way of making sense of things, as a locus for our evolved understanding, as a basis for our acting, and as a context for our sense of belonging.  Today we will look at religion as a ‘signpost to transcendence’.

Transcendence: More Than We Can See

Human history is filled with intuitions of a reality which exists outside, beyond, above or beneath the tangible world that we all experience.  Ancient cultures, through their myths and rituals, routinely attributed supernatural causes to things they did not understand, and the gods and religions that they invented gave structure to an otherwise dangerous world.

As we saw in the post of September 17, “The Evolution of Religion, Part 2- The ‘Axial Age’, about 500 BCE the object of ‘understanding’ began to shift from our environment to ourselves.   As Karen Armstrong puts it

“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.”

This evolving awareness of our environment from ‘the unknown’ to ‘the yet to be known’ involves a new understanding of the future as ‘promising’, filled with ‘potential’, and is the basis of the human sense of transcendence.

In this sense, we stand before a future which is unknown (and hence risky) but nonetheless has the potential to yield to our yearnings.  While we may feel finite and limited (and hence weak) when we sense the risk, we may also be able to sense the potential for both understanding and dealing with the unknowns that we will encounter as we step forward.

None of this can be objectively proven, but to the extent that we doubt we are unable to take this step into the unknown.

A Brief History of Transcendence

As humanity has gone forward, slowly replacing our sense of transcendence as simple ‘intuition of the unknown’ with an increasingly clear understanding of ourselves and our environment, it might be expected that this milieu of transcendent reality would be eventually replaced by empirical facts.  This, in fact, is the belief expressed by the atheist community.

However, even the famous atheist, Richard Dawkins, recognizes that something is at play in human evolution that moves us forward.  He refers to this something as “the phenomenon of Zeitgeist progression” which he explains:

“..as a matter of observed fact, it (human evolution) does move…  (the Zeitgiest) is probably not a single force like gravity, but a complex interplay of disparate forces like the one that propels Moore’s law.“

While it is certainly true that the history of religion and society as a whole can be superficially seen as the continual replacing of supernatural rationale for phenomena by empirical explanations, as Dawkins asserts, it continues to be enriched by a ‘Zeitgeist’ which pulls it forward in the direction of increasing complexity.

Science, in particular, is enriched by such a phenomenon.  The basic principle which underlies every scientific theory is that there is something not yet known which causes something that is observed.  It may well be true that this process of discovery may result in an empirical explanation for this ‘something’.  However, faith that the nature of reality is such that it will yield to human inquiry is itself an acknowledgement of its transcendent nature.

The other aspect of this faith is that the human activity of ‘reason’ is capable of both managing the process of discovery and of understanding reality sufficiently to describe it.

From this perspective, ‘transcendence’ can be understood as the ‘open-ended’ nature of both ourselves and our environment.

Teilhard addresses this movement toward transcendence at both the personal and universal level:

“Evolution consists of the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes in a world in which there is always more to see.”

Religion and Transcendence

Religion, in its role of ‘making sense of things’ has a long history of informing human society.  In this long history, however, it has accumulated an immense amount of supernatural, mythical and otherwise other-worldly explanations for entities and phenomena.  The Western bible, for example, contains many such depictions and explanations.  In its roots of thousands of years of multiple oral traditions, fragmentation of Jewish society and scribal redactions it also contains many contradictions.

These aspects of the bible have given rise to much ado in Western religions as well as encouragement to the recent rise of Western atheism.   The Western expressions of Christianity fight among themselves over the meaning to be derived from scripture, while the atheists crow over the many inaccuracies and contradictions of literal interpretations.

But all religions insist on ‘meaning’ beyond their literal expressions.  As Karen Armstrong asserts above, religion offers “the means of rising above the world”, of rising above the obvious, the tangible, the material and the limiting aspects of reality.  This “means of rising” can be recognized as the ‘Zeitgeist’ of Dawkins, active in human evolution as it moves us forward.

Religion reminds us that there is more to life than that which appears.  As we have seen in the thinking of Teilhard:

  • in his understanding of evolution as it rises through our life through the activation of our potential for growth and relationships
  • as his perspective rounds out the findings of science as it accommodates the human in scientific thinking
  • as religion can be understood as the human attempt to reflect these aspects of life

From this perspective, religion is a signpost to transcendence.  It reminds us that the thread of evolution continues its billions of years of upwelling to flow in our lives, and in our society, continually offering us

  • an increase in our ‘complexity’: our growth and maturity
  • and a more robust energy of relationship: our ability to love.

The Next Post

The next two posts will provide a sixth and final approach to defining religion, that of “Stability”.

What is Religion? Part 3: Enabling Us to Act

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Today’s Post

In the last two posts, we have looked at religion as a social attempt and an evolved perspective which helps us to make sense of our surroundings and understand our place in them.  Today we will look at religion in the context of how to conduct our lives in such a way that we (as quoted above by Richard Rohr):

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

In other words, to maximize our human potential in our growing, maturing and thriving as persons.

Religion as a Basis for Human Action

From this perspective, religion is whatever concept of reality we work from when we make the decision to act. Before we make a decision, we have to make a little mental trip into the future to look at its probable consequences.  Acting on the decision requires that we have some measure of confidence that the decision will achieve the objective we established for it; essentially faith that the decision will pay off.

Unfortunately, as Robert Goddard remarks, life requires us to make decisions the consequences of which are unknown at the time.  These unknown consequences require even more confidence. So, essentially, one aspect of religion is whatever we believe about reality that gives us the confidence to act, even when, especially when, we’re stepping into the unknown.  Even when, especially when, the unknown appears to be threatening.   To have confidence, and to be able to act on it, we must believe two things:

We are capable of performing the intended action

Reality is such that the success of our action is possible

If we fail to believe either of both of these, it is unlikely that we will try.  This dyad of belief in ourselves and trust in our environment underlies every action we take.

The terms religion and faith from this perspective can be just as secular as religious; neither point of view has a sole claim on our ability to act.  The famous atheist, Richard Dawkins suggests that if we strip conventional religion’s concept of god of its supernatural, magical, and mythological trappings, we can theoretically work towards a secular approach to religion that is equally valid in both worlds.

Religion, Evolution and Human Action

Given this simplistic definition, where does religion fit in to a secular approach to reality?  We have seen in this blog how, as Teilhard sees it:

– Reality unfolds in the direction of increasing complexity

– This complexity manifests itself in different ways in the three (pre-life, biological life, conscious life) phases of evolution but continues as a single thread connecting the past, the present and the future

–   God can be encountered in this phenomenon of increasing complexity as it rises in evolution at both the cosmic and personal level.

If God is to be seen in the upwelling of complexity in evolution, and therefore encountered in the human as our ever-increasing potential (our ‘person’) and measured in our ever-increasing capacity for relationship (the ‘energy of love’), the question must then be asked, “how can this potential and capacity best be realized?”

Key to undertaking this task is the recognition that the full potential for the human person and our relationships is unknown.  Teilhard points out that, while this is surely true, the path toward it can be envisioned by understanding the process by which we have come to be what we are.  From the ‘Big Bang’ to the present day, he understands this process as a spiral which sees:

A rise of complexity of the entity (atoms, cells, persons)

Which is manifested by an increasing capacity for union (physics, biology, love)

By which it is joined to other entities (other atoms, other cells, other persons)

Which in turn leads towards greater complexity and capacity for union (continued evolution)

He sees this dynamic process occurring in each step of evolution, from the ‘Big Bang’ to the human, and continuing in our evolution as individual persons.

From the December 10 Post “The Evolution of Religion, Part 8 : A Relook at Human Evolution”:

“If we see the evolutionary unfolding of entities and energy through Teilhard’s eyes, as leading from more simple things to more complex things which have more capacity for interconnection, then we can extrapolate this continuation of evolution to result in ever more complex human persons and more conscious and skillful cooperation with the energies of human connection.”

This ‘skillful cooperation’ is the cornerstone of basic religion. It is one among the many skills that humans develop to actualize their human potential: the skill of using the human brain to make sense of things and the acquiring of the wisdom to do so.

In other words, valid religion is a basis of both being and acting.

From this perspective, Karen Armstrong notes:

“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.”

The “search for the spiritual kernel” opens the door for the fourth and final segment of this blog in which we will take a look at traditional statements of Western religious belief for those important insights about the way we human beings work.

The Next Post

Before we move on to this last segment, however, I’d like to address another aspect of Religion- that of ‘belonging’.