#37. What's Next

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"Behind every blade of grass is an angel telling it 'Grow! Grow!' "

That's a Medieval Jewish saying. A messenger of God is standing behind every living thing in the world, urging it to grow. It's a good image of the dynamic-developmental worldview seen within a religious context: the Mystery behind the universe desires each of us to become all that we can be.

The fact that it's a Medieval saying makes clear that the developmental worldview isn't all that new; what's new in this time of the Immense Transition is that the evolutionary perspective is entering into the conscious awareness of everyone.

My efforts with the blog to share these kinds of thoughts about the convergence of science and religion were mentioned in an article in the May 2008 issue of This Active Life, the National Education Association's magazine for retired members. The cover story is on the use of technology by retired teachers, "Retirement in the Digital Age."

As a result of that NEA article, an 85-year-old retired teacher sent a comment asking if I would explain how the people of early times could live, as the Bible says, for 700 or 800 years. I used the opportunity to talk a bit about the early Christian practice of understanding Bible stories in four different ways rather than only in a literal sense. (That ancient idea of the "four senses of scripture" is yet another-- and important-- example of the quaternary perspective.) You can read her comment and my response at the end of post #34.

The main point of my response was to say that "the Bible stories about God, Christ and the Holy Spirit," as the questioner put it, are about the same thing science is: the evolutionary development of the world.

It's a big claim-- not one that people still living in the context of a static worldview can hear easily or take seriously. But I think it makes good sense in terms of the Immense Transition. I hope to spell out some of the details of it in the next few posts.

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Many of my earlier posts are devoted to the ideas about human consciousness that we have today thanks to modern brain studies.

In the dynamic-evolutionary perspective, we see that the world shows itself at the three levels of cosmos, life, and mind. That's been a neglected area of religious thought. I offered some ideas about how mind shows itself via the biological brain in posts #10-#20.

As I see it, those findings of contemporary neurological studies which can help us most to become comfortable with this view of the human spirit (soul, person) is the understanding that consciousness is a naturally emergent result of cosmic and biological evolution. I've emphasized the ideas of Biogenetic Structuralism which calls itself "Anthropology Plus" in its attempts to understand the mystery of personal consciousness. It looks at biological evolution, neurophysiology and cultural anthropology together.

It's not an easy perspective to grasp, to be sure. My efforts to spell out basic neurological ideas in posts #12 and #13 on the Cognitive Extension of Prehension and the Cognized Environment are a challenge for many, but those concepts are essential aspects of the Immense Transition humanity is currently experiencing. The main idea is that soul (spirit, person, mind, consciousness) is the natural next step in biological evolution after the appearance of our primate relatives. And saying that in no way denies, of course, the existence of an incomprehensible source standing behind the whole evolutionary process telling us "Grow! Grow!"

In a recent op-ed piece, "The Neural Buddhists," in the New York Times (13 May 08), columnist David Brooks writes that the science-religion debate is now shifting to a focus on neuroscience. He says, "The revolution in neuroscience is having an effect on how people see the world." (Indeed! It's been described as "possibly the most important cultural issue of our time.") Brooks notes specifically that "The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going end up challenging faith in the Bible."

I don't often agree with David Brooks; one of my earliest posts, #5, has some very negative things to say about his science-religion views. But I agree with his main point here, although I'd put it a little differently. I don't think the cognitive revolution is "going end up challenging faith in the Bible" so much as that it's going to end up challenging a static understanding of the Bible.

When we look at the Bible stories from the dynamic-evolutionary perspectives of contemporary science, we can see that what they are all about is nothing less than early versions of the same dynamic-evolutionary perspectives which contemporary science is making known to us. As briefly as I can say it: The evolutionary worldview is precisely what the Judeo-Christian tradition is all about. And that is the convergence I'm referring to when I call this blog "sharing thoughts about the convergence of science and religion."

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Back in post #28 ("Where I'm At") I presented three "snapshots" of where I wanted to go next with these blog efforts. The first "snapshot" had to do with spelling out the four-fold nature of the mind. For me, the quaternary perspective is of tremendous value in understanding the stages of personal and cultural development; it provides us with what I think of as the essential tools we need for understanding the Immense Transition. I've shared those thoughts in seven recent posts: #29-#31 and #33-#36.

The second "snapshot" in post #28 has to do with what I called "re-situating the Christmas story." By that I mean understanding the Judeo-Christian tradition in the context of that new Universe Story which has become available to us thanks to modern science. As I said in that post, "I'd like to share my thoughts about how different-- and indeed exciting-- the story of the coming of Jesus looks in the context of cosmic, biological and cultural evolution."

So that's "What's Next" in these blog efforts.

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I often refer to the "Judeo-Christian tradition"-- as if Jews and Christians are parts of one single religious tradition. They are, in two senses. One is that all western culture-- which until recently was the dominant culture of the world, and out of which arose major human cultural endeavors such as the quest for democracy and for an understanding of the natural world-- has its roots not only in Greek philosophy but also in the Bible stories found in what Christians call the Old and New Testaments.

C. G. Jung says that if we westerners are to understand ourselves, we have to know the Bible stories. They're in our blood. We are influenced by their images whether we're conscious of them or not.

A good example is the Adam and Eve story. It has had a tremendous impact on how almost everyone in the western world understands our human origins. A better example, in the sense that its influence is less obvious, is the story of Jonah. Everyone in the world-- at least everyone in Europe, North and South America, and all those parts of the world which were influenced by European colonization-- knows something about the ancient story of a man who was swallowed by a whale. We may not know what it means, but we all know the story.

The second sense in which the Judeo-Christian tradition is one tradition is that Christianity really is a branch of the Jewish religion. Jesus was Jewish, of course, and so were his early followers in the first few decades of the Christian church. It was a major event when those early Jewish-Christians were confronted with non-Jews wanting to be part of their communities.

We can see just how Jewish those early Christians were in the question that arose which sounds very odd today: Did a non-Jewish male have to be circumcised if he wanted to become a Christian? (Luckily for generations of European males, the answer decided on was "no.")

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My plan with regard to looking at the Judeo-Christian tradition in the context of that New Cosmology is to start at the beginning by asking: What is the origin of the dynamic-developmental worldview? Where did the idea of evolution come from in the first place?

The answer is not "Darwin" but "the Bible." It turns out that monotheism and evolution go together. They characterize the Hebrew perspective. The developmental worldview began with the Jewish Exodus, with reflections by the Hebrew sages on the Great Escape from Egypt.

So that's going to be my starting point. I want to look first at the stories of the Jewish Bible within an evolutionary worldview context, then look at the New Testament stories about the coming of Jesus in that same context, and eventually look at the understanding of his followers in that same evolutionary worldview.

I don't intend to introduce any new ideas or images, but rather to look at those stories on their own terms-- but always in a dynamic rather than static context. It will seem to many like new ideas.

The briefest overview I can offer is to say that from beginning to end-- Old Testament, New Testament and early church-- it's all one consistent picture. "One single design," as the early 20th century theologian Henri de Lubac put it.

I wish "one single design" didn't sound so much like "intelligent design"! But once again, we're stuck with the words. We have to make do with less than ideal terminology.

And that, too, is part of what we're being urged to do when, in this time of Immense Transition, we hear in our hearts "Grow! Grow!"

sam@macspeno.com

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Added later: This is a link to the New York Times article, "Put a Little Science in Your Life" by Brian Greene, referred to in the first comment below.

#34. Talking About Us

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Talking about God means talking about us." That's how I ended the previous post.

While bumper stickers proclaim "God is the answer," many today recognize that "God" is part of the problem. In the dynamic worldview that's ours thanks to modern science, a static understanding of God doesn't work. We need a participatory understanding of the anthropos-theos relationship to go with our participatory understanding of the anthropos-cosmos relationship.

In the dynamic worldview, we can see not only that cosmos, anthropos and theos go together, but also that anthropos has a central position. It's obvious that we can't say much either about the world or about God without talking about ourselves. That's what this post is about.

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In sharing my thoughts about the convergence of science and religion via this blog, I've mentioned many times how valuable I find the Biogenetic Structuralist perspective, with its combination of insights from the three big scientific areas of evolutionary biology, neurophysiology and cultural anthropology. It's called a "structuralism" because it looks at the underlying structural aspects of all human cultures; it focuses on what groups of persons, from small communities to large ethnic groups, have in common.

In the realm of religious thought, Karl Rahner, a great genius of 20th century theological and philosophical understanding, does something similar. He too tries to analyze what all humans have in common; his emphasis is not on human culture, however, but on personal experience. Rahner focuses on the underlying structural aspects of the most basic experience we human have: our awareness of being a human being. (It's so basic it even sounds odd to say it!)

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As an attempt to analyze the fundamental structural aspects of our experience of being human, Rahner's work is a kind of "experiential structuralism."

I want to emphasize that this is no small example of the contemporary convergence of science and religion. Just as Biogenetic Structuralism asks, "What do we come up with when we take into account biology, brain studies and the Earth's cultures?" so Rahner asks, "What do we come up with when we reflect on our experience of ourselves as a person?" The creative growing edge of scientific thought and the creative growing edge of religious thought are using very similar methods to enlarge and enhance our self-understanding.

"What's it like to be a person?" is not a question that most of us ask ourselves often, not only because we are taken up with the practical details of living, but also because we live in what has been called-- in a recent book, The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby-- a "culture of distraction." The superficiality of so much in contemporary society prevents us from focusing on the deeper aspects of our lives.

Such questions are, however, the ones that matter most to all of us in the long run. They matter because how we understand ourselves shapes how we act. As Teilhard de Chardin expresses it, "Seeing is being." How we see ourselves determines how we live our lives.

Creative thinkers on the growing edge of both scientific and religious understanding are offering us new ways of seeing and offering us, therefore, new ways of being. They help us to a new understanding of our own existence, which we need in order to deal with our contemporary problems. It has always been the case in the Earth's cultural evolution that every evolutionary advance is the result of people dealing with new problems. Individuals and groups who don't deal with their problems eventually die off.

Rahner's starting point is to ask, " What touches all of us? What can everyone agree on about what's basic to human experience?" He attempts to articulate what all humans experience-- whether young, old, male, female, Christian, Jew, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, secularist, atheist or agnostic-- simply because they are human.

The great power of this effort is that, in looking at the underlying basics of personal experience always and everywhere, it allows us to link the static worldview of the past with the present dynamic perspectives of evolutionary science, and to see the world's various religious and cultural traditions, even contemporary secular values, in terms of our common human experiences.

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I've emphasized repeatedly in these posts that we are a mystery to ourselves. Rahner's effort is to ask what aspects or structures of the experience of being a mystery to ourselves we can make explicit. What can we put into words about what's basic and common to the conscious experience of every human being who ever lived?

Rahner sees four underlying structural aspects to the mystery of being a person; he calls them "existentials" and names them self-presence, freedom, transcendence and grace.

His terms aren't as helpful as they might be. They come from a basically Germanic philosophical tradition, and just as C. G. Jung's German names for the functions of the four-fold mind (as I mentioned in post #29) don't really convey their meaning well in English, neither do those of Rahner.

Because at least two of them sound like traditional religious terms, it's especially important to recognize that Rahner is not relying on the traditional religious thinking of the past to talk about human experience.

He is relying neither on biblical and liturgical imagery (as was done in the Patristic period of western religious reflection) nor on abstract rational thought (as was done in the later Thomistic-Scholastic period). Rahner is doing something new.

His analysis of concrete human experience is part of the very broad movement in the modern world called the "turn to the subject" or "turn to the person." This "turn" toward episteme (personal consciousness), comes out of the more or less "Germanic" philosophical tradition which includes Descartes, Kant, Heidegger and the Enlightenment thinkers; it earliest roots go back to the time of Dante. It might best be described as an increasing awareness of awareness.

Karl Rahner calls this "turn to the subject" the "awakening of person in the world." In a way that our ancestors of past centuries never were, we are aware of ourselves today as autonomous and responsible "subjects." Rahner's focus is the anthropos-cosmos relationship which I have frequently referred to in these blog postings. And it's this awareness of the mystery of ourselves as conscious participants in an evolving universe that leads to new spiritual-religious perspectives appropriate to the New Cosmology. It really is a new start.

One important note. In Rahner's "structural" analysis of our experience of being a person in the world, it is you and I who are the authorities. Rahner can help us-- and he helps a great deal-- in putting words on our experience of being a person. But we're the ones who decide. In what follows, I'll describe as well as I can my understanding of Rahner's four "existentials." You can see if you think they fit your experience-- and whether, as Rahner says, all human experience.

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[1] Self-presence. The first of Rahner's existentials-- of the fundamental aspects of the experience of being a human being-- is the easiest to understand; it is that we are aware of ourselves. Rahner calls this self-possession or self-presence.

As is the case for each of Rahner's existential aspects of human experience, we can express what he's trying to say in many ways: we are in possession of ourselves, we are present to ourselves, we experience ourselves as experiencing ourselves, we are conscious of ourselves as being conscious of ourselves, we know ourselves as knowing ourselves....

And although we can't give a simple definition of consciousness, we know what we mean by it. We understand what we're talking about, even though it's understanding that we are trying to understand. That's why we have so many names for the mystery of being a person: "mind," "consciousness," "experience," "gnosis," "knowledge," "awareness," "episteme"....

The problem is that a satisfying definition always has two parts: we always define something by saying it's "like such and such, but it differs in some way." A familiar scientific example is defining a plant by naming its genius and species. At familiar example at the cultural level is the term first used for a self-moving (auto-mobile) machine: a "horse-less carriage."

But we haven't anything to compare our conscious awareness with. We can say we experience ourselves as "subject" in contrast to being an "object," but that only distinguishes us as being self-aware from things which are not self-aware; it doesn't really help us to understand what self-awareness is in itself.

Probably the best and truest thing we can say about our consciousness is that "it's the same thing as God, but created." That's not helpful either, of course, unless-- as the Asian religious traditions have done-- we do some serious reflection on what we mean by "God." All the Eastern traditions begin with the insight that we and the Ultimate are a-dva: "not two."

And maybe that's the best we can do. And maybe, also, that's not so bad. Thinking about our self-presence leads us to an awareness of our own deepest mystery: our non-duality with the Great Mystery. (Clearly, "Talking About God" and "Talking About Us" go together.)

It's important to note that in Rahner's view, the awareness of the non-dual nature of personal awareness has nothing to do with religious doctrines as such.

He specifically mentions that while many people today reject religious beliefs, it's "not because they abhor the incomprehensible." What contemporary people reject, he says, is "the complications of human reasoning which has tied itself up in knots." It's the rationalism of religion and theology that they reject, not mystery.

Rahner stresses that people "sense and revere the nameless and inexpressible." It is "a mysterious simple thing of infinite fullness," he says, that, based on our experience of being a person, we find ourselves to be "a being in face of the nameless mystery."

This takes us well-beyond the rationalism of recent centuries in the western world, where the mind is "tied up in knots." As anthropos-in-cosmos-- "person in the world"-- we know ourselves in a new way. And this allows us to be in a new way.

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[2] Transcendence. Rahner names his second existential aspect of human experience "transcendence." While the word is traditionally used to describe a creator who is above, apart from and independent of the world-- utterly different than anything we know or imagine-- Rahner uses it to describe human experience. He says we are self-transcendent.

It sounds as if he's saying that we experience ourselves as being beyond or separate from ourselves, but that's not what he means. He's saying that our deepest personal experience is something more profound than that of our everyday ordinary consciousness. There's more to us than the awareness we have when we are carrying out the normal everyday aspects of living. We are conscious that we have (or are) a deeper (or higher or bigger or truer) self. (Again, how we struggle with words!)

Probably the best word to use to express what Rahner means is "open." As a "person in the world," we experience ourselves at a deep level as being utterly open to everything that exists.

Another way to say it is that we experience ourselves as being "many-sided." Very many-sided.

This experience of being unlimited-- open to everything, unbounded, infinite-- is what Thomas Aquinas meant when he said that a person is "that which can become all things." We are potentially open to everything. We don't have any limits. We participate in infinity.

At first hearing, this may seems difficult to make sense of, but in fact it's something we experience all the time. As Aristotle said, "We desire to know." And everyone has had the experience, for example, of being interested in something-- whether it's growing roses or the structure of atoms or major league batting averages-- and wanting to know everything about it.

And as anyone with a passionate interest in anything has experienced, the more we learn, the less we know. The more we realize, that is, how little we know.

A good example is how we feel when we look up something on the internet. There are millions of sites and many millions of topics. Just now I checked out "Abraham Lincoln" and got 24 million entries. If I looked at one per minute, it would take me 500 years.

We may not be especially interested in Abraham Lincoln, but there are many things that we are interested in, and some of us seem to be interested in everything. The experience of wanting to know everything, to experience everything, to go everywhere, to see every interesting place in the world, to try every thing at least one, maybe even to go into outer space or certainly to go into the bigger world of inner space-- all of this is the kind of thing Rahner means when he says we experience ourselves as "transcendent."

Maybe the best way to say it is that nothing exists outside the realm of our possible experience. We really are open-ended. We are in some way one with all things. We experience ourselves as infinite, unlimited, unbounded, potentially present to all of reality, participants in infinity. We do not exist apart from the infinite unbounded reality underlying everything.

Western people are not at ease with such understanding of ourselves, even though it is a familiar experience when we reflect on it. But it, too, appears clearly in the Asian traditions, and this is, as I mentioned in the previous post, one of the main reasons westerners today are so interested in those ancient traditions.

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[3] Freedom. Rahner's third existential is the very opposite of experiencing ourselves as open to all things: it's knowing ourselves to be limited, finite, particular, to be "this" but not "that."

This aspect of the experience of being a person is just as familiar as that of being open to and participating in infinite reality. And it, too, is an aspect of our being participants in the cosmic process. As "person in the world" we are not apart from and separate from the world. Indeed, as anthropos, we are the cosmos become aware of itself.

This means that we have a specific place in the world. We have a history. Each of us can say something like... "I'm male. I'm American. I have a mixed Scotch, German and Polish ancestry. I'm 5 feet, 9 inches tall. I'm 70 years old. I live in New Jersey. I'm married. I have two adult married children and two grandsons. I'm not good at languages, but I can do math fairly well. I don't like broccoli...."

Each of us can fill many pages with this kind of specific information about ourselves, but no other person in all the world can say exactly the same things we can. Rahner calls this "existential" aspect of ourselves, which is the opposite of openness or self-transcendence, our "historicity."

It has to do with "actualizing"-- making actual or real-- our uniqueness, our individuality, our creativity and freedom.

At first, "freedom" may seem to be the wrong word, but it's not. Rahner is talking here about what he calls our "awareness of the unbounded scope of the human spirit" and of bringing it down to earth.

It is precisely this experience of being a free and autonomous person which allows one to know one's self as a responsible subject. In the conventional religious context, "responsibility" usually has negative connotations; it readily evokes guilt feelings which religious authorities abusively exploit. But Rahner's emphasis is on the experience of being responsible for and to ourselves.

At a very deep level, we know we really are free, at least to some extent, to choose who and what we will be. And it is this freedom, which is ours precisely because we are specific and finite, that makes us a mystery to ourselves.

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[4] Grace. Rahner's fourth existential is less easy to express clearly than the others. Not because it's difficult to understand, but because it's difficult to put into words that aren't easily misunderstood.

In responding to the question, "What is the experience I have of being a mystery to myself?" Rahner says we experience ourselves as "graced" or "blessed." A better English term might be "given." We experience ourselves as having been "given" to ourselves.

This is precisely the point that I made in the previous post (#33) when I noted that, in contrast to the idea of creation ex nihilo, the idea of creation by kenosis sees the creative source of the world as bringing us into existence by pouring itself out as the world and us.

In that post I quoted the pioneer 20th century theologian Henri de Lubac who explicitly says with regard to the Mystery's creative out-pouring that "there is no prior recipient." In calling this fourth existential "grace," Rahner is making the point that at a very deep level we do in fact experience ourselves as the "embodiment of an incomprehensible source."

I want to emphasize again that Rahner is not proposing a theological doctrine. It's what might be called a "pre-theology." He is intending a description of our experience of being a "person in the world" and offering an insight about human self-understanding which is independent of any specific religious or cultural tradition. A problem is that in our rationalist culture we can hardly hear it except as a theological concept.

But of much greater interest is the fact that the growing-edge scientists who have moved beyond the rationalism of 19th century science are saying something very similar to what Rahner is saying. I described some of these ideas in my very first blog entry.

In talking about what they call the "mind-matter issue," theoretical scientists working in fields with still-unfamiliar names such as "Systems Theory," Chaos Theory" and "Unified Field Theory," conclude that we and the world appear to be expressions (or manifestations) of an underlying order of reality for which they use terms like the "Vacuum Plenum," the "Quantum Sea" and the "Implicate Order."

Rahner says we experience ourselves as the "embodiment" of an "incomprehensible source." Back in the 1930s, the Russian theologian Sergius Bulgakov used the phase "actualizations of the divine potentialities." And Jungian analyst Michael Conforti, a contemporary pioneer in matter-mind studies in the realm of the psychotherapy, uses a more traditional religious term. "The patterns of reality," he says, "are continually being incarnate in space and time."

Conforti's book, Field, Form, and Fate: Patterns in Mind, Nature, & Psyche, is an especially good collection of many of these concepts. (It was published in 1999, but it is recently new to me. My thanks to Mary Conrow Coelho for pointing it out to me.)

Once more, I want to emphasize, with regard to this existential aspect of being a person Rahner calls "grace," that he is not talking theory or theology. He says it's a matter of personal experience.

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Some last thoughts. If you feel that Rahner's existentials aren't all that different from one another, I agree. They seem to be different ways of looking at the one same experience, of being a human person, from slightly different points of view.

And if you're thinking that this sounds a lot like the ideas about the four-fold mind that I've talked about in recent posts (#29-31), again, I agree. And there's even more to it: I've found that seeing Rahner's existentials in the light of quaternary consciousness is especially helpful for understanding the Immense Transition global humanity is in the midst of. I hope to share some thoughts about that in a future post.

My final thought is that whether we're talking theoretical science or personal experience, we are in fact "talking about us." These insights are available to all humanity, no matter what our ethnic and cultural and religious background. In recognizing ourselves as self-aware, open, free and blessed, we find ourselves not only to be mystery in the face of mystery, but personal participants in the progressive embodiment of the Great Mystery.

The New Science Story of the cosmos, life and anthropos-- of seeing ourselves as "person in the cosmos"-- is the heritage of all the people of the Earth. And it really is something new.

sam@macspeno.com

#33. Talking About God

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What can we say about God?

Thomas Aquinas says "the only accurate thing we can say about God is that we can't say anything accurate about God."

So maybe I should just leave this post blank? I'm tempted!

But obviously I can't share "thoughts about the convergence of science and religion" without saying something about God. The problem here is the same "struggle with words" I described in post #22 with regard to terms like "science" and "person." Everyone already knows (or thinks they know) what "science" and "religion" mean.

We have the same problem with the word "God." Only it's much worse.

There's no one in our culture who doesn't know that "God" refers to the a "Higher Power" or "Supreme Being who made all things." Or, even, "the Man Upstairs." At the popular level, this seems to be the best western culture is able to do when trying to talk about God.

We don't critique our own assumptions about what the word means. And Fundamentalists drive cars with bumper stickers proclaiming "God is the Answer."

Nope!

Today, our religious self-understanding is in worse shape than our scientific self-understanding! Nowadays, "God" is part of the problem.

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For a thousand years, the static and dualistic view of the world has so dominated western culture that the very idea-- that words like "Supreme Being" might not be such a good way to talk about God-- is hard for most of us to imagine. It's simply not part of our cultural heritage.

And if we do start to think about it, we become like Saint Augustine in that famous passage in his autobiography where he tries to talks about time. "Of course I knows what 'time' is," he says. "Except when I'm asked to describe it. Then I have no idea."

With regard to "God," we're like Augustine. Once we start asking questions, we find ourselves growing quite uncomfortable with our understanding of God. What it comes down to is whether the Supreme Being really is almighty or not: Does God enjoy seeing creatures suffer?

It's easy to see how the static worldview leads to unattractive ideas about God and to the conclusion that many reflective persons come to, that "there simply isn't any such thing."

So, just as we need to work our way out of the static worldview with regard to the material cosmos and our personal consciousness-- and we can do that now, thanks to contemporary science--we also need to work our way out of western culture's dualistic understanding of "God." 

But it's a tough problem.

Can we deal with it? I think we can, and that-- even if slowly-- we're on our way.

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In science, the 20th century marked the beginning of an Immense Transition in human understanding away from the static worldview. As a result of the work of scientists since the middle of the 1800s, we know that the world isn't static but dynamic: we live in an evolutionary universe.

We have a much better understanding, for example, of things like the natural selection process and the nature of time, space and matter (thanks to Einstein's Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and Complexity Theory). We have a much better understanding of the origin of life on Earth (thanks to genetic and DNA studies), the emergence of personal consciousness via the activity of the brain (thanks to neuro-physiology), and the development of human cultures (thanks to cultural anthropology).

Much less well-known is the fact that the 20th century also marked the beginning of a new post-dualistic worldview in the realm of religious thought. There are a number of 20th century religious thinkers whose efforts can help us to work our way out of dualistic ideas about God.

And, as I mentioned in post #29 (with regard to C. G. Jung's discovery of the four-fold nature of personal consciousness), sometimes it's not so much a dis-covery of something which had been previously unknown but rather a re-covery of an earlier perspective that can be found outside of western culture in many of the cultural traditions of the Earth.

For example, I used the animal imagery of the Native American Medicine Wheel in posts #29, #30 and #31 to talk about the ways in which we deal with the things that are most important to us and about how those animal images can help us to move out of the prison of patriarchal rationalism. Images like the shamanic Black Bear and the relationship-conscious Green Mouse are especially valuable precisely because they are not coming from the rationalist and dualistic views of the isolated Thinking function.

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But when it comes to talking about God, it's even more difficult to dig our way out of religious dualism. I've found that using the Greek terms theos, anthropos and cosmos helps us to avoid automatically attributing our culturally inherited dualistic meanings to words like "world," "person," and especially "God."

It's a complicated situation because we're dealing with two kinds of dualism: an anthropos-cosmos dualism on one hand and an anthropos-theos dualism on the other. Science helps a lot in our movement away from anthropos-cosmos dualism. In the dynamic perspectives of modern science, we can readily see that we are not separate from the rest of the world but part of it. We can also see that we not only belong to the world but that, at the cultural level, we have a creative role to play in it.

Many of my earlier posts are attempts to spell out some details of that anthropos-cosmos relationship, especially of the insights offered by the neurological sciences which help us to appreciate how the human mind (our "soul" or "spirit" or "self") emerges from the world of living matter via the structural functioning of the brain. It's that kind of information which most helps us to see that, on our Earth, personal consciousness and cultural development are, in fact, what the evolution of the universe is all about.

As I've said many times in these posts, it's the genius of Biogenetic Structuralism that it puts together the three areas of evolutionary biology, neurophysiology and cultural anthropology; that combination of perspectives makes clear, as nothing else I know of does, the central place of anthropos in the anthropos-cosmos relationship.

One of my points here is that it's only after we have a better understanding of the anthropos-cosmos relationship that we can make good sense of the anthropos-theos relationship. If we're going to talk about God in our day, we have to talk about the evolution of the universe and the central place of person in the cosmic process first. And religious thinkers have begun to do that.

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Just as much has happened in the realm of religious thought in the 20th century as has happened in the world of science. The Immense Transition in the anthropos-cosmos relationship has been paralleled by similar changes in our understanding of the anthropos-theos relationship.

But while everyone has heard of scientists like Darwin and Einstein, we are much less familiar with the names of the major creative thinkers in the 20th century transition in religious thought. I'm thinking, for example, of the Russian Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov and the French Jesuit scholar Henri de Lubac.

Theirs are not household names, to be sure. But they are pioneers no less than Darwin or Einstein. An introductory essay in a recent collection entitled The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology Since 1918 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2005) names Bulgakov and de Lubac the two most significant religious thinkers of the 20th century.

I've mentioned Bulgakov a few times in earlier posts, and I hope to offer some extensive thoughts about his significance in the future. I haven't mentioned Henri de Lubac previously, but I have a few things to say about his work in this post. He was, among other things, the first religious thinker in modern times to question the rationalist assumptions of Scholastic theology.

And just as happens in the world of science, many subsequent thinkers built on his pioneering work. The most comprehensive religious thinker of the 20th century is the German Jesuit Karl Rahner. His is not a household name either and his work has yet to become widely known. 

But he is already considered by scholars to be no less a comprehensive thinker than Augustine or Aquinas. Rahner recognized that the idea of God is part of the problem in our day, and he constructed a whole new non-static and non-dualistic religious worldview starting not with God but with the basic human experience of being a conscious person.

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I can hear readers saying to themselves... "This post is called 'Talking About God' but you're not talking about God, you're talking about people." Right. I think it's important to know something about the religious geniuses of the 20th century who can help us to re-think our understanding of God, just as it's important to know something about the work of the 20th century scientists who helped us re-think our understanding of the physical universe.

If we have been slow to catch on to that new scientific understanding of the non-static anthropos-cosmos relationship, we've been even slower to catch on to the new non-dualistic understanding of the anthropos-theos relationship.

For the vast majority of people in the western world, "God" still means a being who is separate and apart from the world, a supreme being who exists in some other realm of reality outside the material time-space universe. Or-- for those who gave up on that idea of a God-- who simply doesn't exist at all.

It's that little word "or" which sets the stage for the antagonism between science and religion. Fundamentalists assert the existence of "the Man upstairs." Rationalists deny it. Clearly we need to move beyond that dualistic sense of God.

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Henri de Lubac offers help. One of his main ideas is that God isn't a being in any sense at all, so that it's quite accurate to say "God does not exist." Not, at least, in the sense that a robin or a shoe-- or any other thing-- exists.

And Karl Rahner provides a good alternative. Rahner describes God not as something that exists along side other things but as "the context and precondition" for the existence of all things. He gives us a way of talking about the creative source of the world without making it sound like we're talking about a highest or supreme thing.

Rahner's name for God is mystery, "the great and holy Mystery." He doesn't mean that God is a puzzle that we can't figured out, but that the Mystery of God is something of which we can never exhaust our understanding. He says, "the great question of our time isn't whether God exists, but whether we are willing to make the effort to be sensitive and responsive to a mystery which is always and everywhere giving itself to us."

I think those words may be the very essence of a new, non-static and non-dualistic, understanding of the anthropos-theos relationship.

And I find it fascinating that this profound thinker-- one of the all-time greats in the history of theology, right up there in the big leagues with Augustine and Aquinas-- uses the same words to describe God that Native Americans use. The Lakota term, wakan tanka, for example, means exactly the same thing Rahner means: not a being above and beyond the world but that which is always and everywhere making itself known to us. As a Native American prayer says, "Great Mystery, we see you all around."

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In a comment at the end of post #25, reader Mollie asks "where God fits in" to the dynamic and non-dualist worldview of the new Universe Story. As a supreme being, God doesn't.

You can see why I put off talking about God until I was able to present some thoughts about the anthropos-cosmos relationship-- about how consciousness and culture are related to the physical world and about how an understanding of the fact that we have a four-fold mind can help us in our self-understanding.

The idea that God is not a supreme being existing somewhere apart from the world is a very powerful idea. Of course it takes some time to get used to: it's not easy to move into a larger and more mature understanding of the anthropos-theos relationship after so many centuries of religious dualism. But as Karl Rahner insists, it makes good sense. It makes sense specifically in terms of our deepest personal experience of being mystery to ourselves. It's there, he says, that we can be open to the Great Mystery.

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It may sound strange, but reflection on the phrase "God made all things out of nothing" is especially helpful in moving to a more mature sense of the anthropos-theos relationship.

Theologians call the idea that God made all things out of nothing "creation ex nihilo." It's the well-known biblical image of God saying, "Let there be light!" ("And there was LIGHT!")

But there's another understanding of the idea of creation. This one is also expressed in a familiar biblical image: God making humans by breathing into the clay of the Earth. To put it into its starkest form, this image says that we're made of the life-breath of God. Whatever God is, that's what we are. In the most literal sense, we're made of God.

This second understanding is known as creation by kenosis; it comes from the Greek word for "pouring" (as milk is poured out from a pitcher into a glass). The idea is that creative source of the world brings us into being by pouring itself out. Not into the world, however, but as the world. Here's where Henri de Lubac is especially helpful. He says clearly and emphatically with regard to the Mystery's creative out-pouring that "there is no prior recipient."

It's the self-giving of the Great Mystery that creates persons and world. And this kenotic understanding of creation makes clear that the anthropos-theos relationship is not one of separation and distance but of unity and communion.

Aquinas still had it. So did the Eastern church thinkers. But once the isolated Thinking function took over in the late 13th century, it was lost to all subsequent philosophical and theological thought, and western culture is marked by that loss.

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Personally, I don't think there's a great deal of difference between creation "ex nihilo" and creation via kenosis. At a deep level, they're saying the same thing. But at the unreflective level of popular thought, they sound different. What's really different is the emphasis.

In any case, it's easy to see why patriarchal authority would promote the ex nihilo understanding; it emphasizes a dualistic God who exists above and apart from the world in contrast to the Mystery of God manifesting itself as the created world.

Whether parental, political or religious, patriarchal authority isn't interested in promoting human dignity-- any more than it is interested in promoting the natural mode of the Thinking function (questioning), as I mentioned in post #31 on Integrating the Four Functions.

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Many centuries before Scholastic thinking appeared in western culture, Saint Leo the Great, in a famous Christmas sermon that's still read today in monasteries said: "Be conscious, O Christian, of your dignity!" 

He was talking precisely about this kenotic understanding of the non-dualistic anthropos-theos relationship of unity and communion.

Our dignity is nothing less than that we are what God is. The briefest way I can say it is that nothing exists apart from God. We participate in God.

This understanding is utterly incompatible with religious dualism. And its recovery, with regard to the anthropos-theos relationship, is the very essence of the Immense Transition we are experiencing.

And when we combine this participatory understanding of the anthropos-theos relationship with the basic insights of modern science about the anthropos-cosmos relationship-- that we are nothing less than the universe become aware of itself-- we can say to one another, "Be conscious, O person, of your dignity!"

And this isn't as radical an idea as it may at first seem. In the earliest chapters of the Hebrew Bible it says that humanity is made in God's "image and likeness," and one of the earliest New Testament letters says that we "participate in the nature of God." In Christian tradition this understanding became known as "grace" (which is Greek for both "gift" and "love"). Catholics called it "sanctifying grace" (although those words took on a negative understanding) and Eastern Christians referred to it by the Greek word theosis, usually translated as "deification."

And there's a powerful image of creation by kenosis at the very end of the Bible. The Book of Revelations speaks of "the lamb slain from the beginning of the world." This is an image which probably goes back to the Hunting Culture of Paleolithic times and is still found among Native American people today, where the spirit of the hunted animal is understood to give itself willingly as food for the life of the people. In Revelations, the lamb's willing sacrifice of itself is a primordial image of the creation of the world by divine kenosis.

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But, you may be thinking, this unitive understanding of the kenotic anthropos-theos relationship and its connections with the anthropos-cosmos relationship only has to do with the convergence of modern science and the Christian or Judeo-Christian tradition.

But that's not at all the case. The unitive perspective-- that human persons are what the Ultimate is-- is a fundamental insight of all the world religions. In fact, it's much clearer in Asian religious cultures such as Taoism, Buddhism and the Hindu tradition. And it's one of the main reasons why Eastern practices such as yoga, tai chi and zazen became so popular in the last half of the 20th century. Those practices all are based on the same fundamental insight-- that we and God are "not two"-- that was lost to western culture.

So... while there is indeed a fundamental antagonism between religious and science-- if we mean dualistic religion and rationalistic science-- once we come to recognize that the revolution which happened in 20th century religious thinking is no less immense than what happened in 20th century scientific thought, we can see that there really is a convergence in our understanding of the anthropos-cosmos relationship and the anthropos-theos relationship.

And we can see that it's our human self-understanding that ties together our understanding of God (theos) and the world (cosmos). We can't talk about God or about the world without talking about ourselves (anthropos).

Karl Rahner has a stimulating idea that helps make clear the central position of anthropos in the Immense Transition our planet is experiencing. If God can create anything, he says, God can not in fact create anything other than persons.

What a fascinating idea this is, that God's creative activity is "limited" to making persons. It's obviously not meant to be a down-grading of God but an up-grading of the mystery of person and cosmos. It may sound at first that Rahner is trying to put a limitation on God's activity and power, but what he's really doing is putting no limit on the meaning of person. Rahner isn't saying that God is finite or limited but that human consciousness is infinite and unlimited.

What an incredibly large idea of "person" this is! And from the scientific point of view, what an incredibly full understanding this offers of the universe! Persons are the universe become conscious of itself, and stars, trees and animals are literally our ancestors. They might be thought of as "pre-persons." Or as Native Americans say, they are "all our relations."

In a static world view, the idea that stars and trees and animals are "pre-human" is nonsense, and this is one of the main reasons why religious fundamentalists so object to the evolutionary worldview. But in a dynamic-evolutionary perspective we can see quite clearly that everything leads up to the mystery of persons. This is why I've given a lot of time and energy in these posts to trying to spell out neuro-science concepts such as the cognitive extension of prehension and the cognized environment that Biogenetic Structuralism emphasizes. And why I put off talking about God.

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In sum: we can't talk about God without talking about ourselves, and we can't talk about ourselves without talking about the evolutionary universe. We are at the center of it all.

I want to stress that I'm not saying that I think the idea of creation by kenosis converges with modern scientific ideas, but I am saying that we need the ideas of modern science to help us understand the richness and fullness of this non-dualist religious understanding of a creator spiritus.

As I've said, it's not a downgrading of the Mystery's creative power but an upgrading of the significance of the mystery of our personal self-awareness.

Talking about God means talking about us!

sam@macspeno.com