#21. Struggling with Words

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It isn't easy to write about the convergence of science and religion.

Each time I use the word "science" I feel the need to make the point that I'm not talking about 19th century rationalist-positivist science. 

That early form of science rejected feeling and emotion and even personal consciousness itself as a component of the real world. It was a materialist and mechanical understanding of living things and human life and it is, unfortunately, what "science" still means for many people today.

And each time I use the word "religion" I have a similar need to make the point that I'm not talking about fundamentalist and authoritarian religion. Religious dualism, like rationalist science, was unable to see humanity as a part of the physical world and emphasized our need to escape from it. It, too, is still with us today.

Although post-rationalist science has been around since the late 1800s, we don't yet have a good name for it. It includes relativity, quantum mechanics and complexity theory, but its most distinctive characteristic is its understanding of the world as dynamic rather than static, and it recognizes personal consciousness as an integral part of the cosmic process.

Our understanding of religion has likewise changed dramatically since the end of the 19th century. In the 20th century, there were major changes in religious thought just as there were in scientific thought. 

Theologians have not only recovered the inner core of the Judeo-Christian tradition which had been lost to western civilization after the Dark Ages but also have moved forward to include the best values of the modern world; those values especially include an appreciation of the universe as developmental and of persons as central to the cosmic process.

We don't yet have a good name for non-dualist religion, just as we don't have a good name yet for post-mechanistic science; but as a way of wisdom rather than theological concepts, it can be called sapiential or sophianic.

Contemporary science and contemporary religious thought converge precisely in their understanding of the cosmos as evolutionary and of human consciousness as integral to it.

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I was delighted when I discovered Biogenetic Structuralism because its emphasis-- on understanding in an evolutionary context the brain and nervous system and the religious behavior which results from it-- helps bring these things together. It attempts to integrate the various perspectives of the physical, biological and human sciences, and sees human consciousness at the center of it all.

It's those perspectives which are what I've been attempting to share with readers via this blog.

In posting #8 I offered a background to the whole Biogenetic Structuralist view and in post #10 an overview of the basic ideas found in these creative scientists' initial 1974 book, Biogenetic Structuralism. 

In those two postings I spelled out some specific points which I find especially significant in terms of the convergence of science and religion.

Most of the postings since have offered details about what I see as the main idea of this convergence: the centrality of personal consciousness and our participatory role in the cosmic process.

We're still not use to thinking of ourselves this way, so these ideas are worth bringing together here.

In post #12, The Cognitive Extension of Prehension, I described the neurological understanding of personal consciousness as being both something new to the cosmic evolutionary process and at the same time rooted in the life of the Earth.

This understanding alone marks the end of religious dualism, as I tried to spell out in post #11: it takes away nothing of the spiritual nature of the human person to know ourselves as the result of the evolution of the universe. Indeed, it greatly enhances our understanding of human dignity.

In post #13, Cognized Environment, I described some of the basic neurological findings about the workings of the human brain with regard to the fact that human consciousness is the universe become conscious of itself. I've mentioned these central ideas in many entries since.

Post #14 deals with the mystery of ourselves as a process rather than as something static. While thinking of the universe as a process is one thing, thinking of ourselves that way is much more challenging. But it opens us to a far larger self-understanding than is possible in the old static worldview.

It helps us to see, for example, the utter uniqueness of each person, as I described in post #16.

And, when we recognize that what the universe is doing is making unique personal copies of itself (post #17) and that we are called to freely contribute our personal uniqueness to the evolutionary process (post #18), we have a much more integral and wholistic of ourselves and the world than our ancestors ever could.

Post #19 has to do with how we respond to our call to take part in the creative process; each of us is called to become a personal embodiment of that diversity which appears to be a central goal of the universe. I called that participation "our service to God." And in the most recent posting, #20, I described what might be called God's service to us, resurrection of the dead.

In each case, I've tried to point out areas where contemporary science is saying something much like the insights which have emerged in the new religious thinking. Central to both is precisely the evolutionary or development perspective missing from rationalist science and dualistic religion.

The ideas in each separate blog entry are a challenge. But while the words and concepts may be unfamiliar, when taken together they begin to form a coherent picture of that very different view of things which has emerged from contemporary science and which relates to the contemporary recovery of the "sapiential" foundations of western religion.

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In trying to spell out all this, one of the major problems I encounter is a lack of clear and useful terms. We don't yet have the right words to allow us to express well these post-19th century viewpoints.

Religious people still hear "science" as a synonym for atheistic materialism, and non-religious people still hear "religion" as synonymous with superstition and ignorance. In the pre-20th century context of rationalism and dualism, religion and science are mutually exclusive worldviews. They can only be imaged together in terms of conflict and the very idea of their convergence seems to be an impossibility.

Examples of that static 19th century perspective-- often presented in terms of "faith versus reason" and "belief versus atheism"-- are still found daily in the media. It's only when we see things from a dynamic-developmental perspective that we can see points of convergence.

I offered a challenging example in the most recent post (#20) where I described how the Biogenetic Structuralist description of the relationship between inner consciousness and the external world sounds similar to the understanding of the relationship between the human spirit and the material cosmos found in the discussion by the Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov of the ancient Judeo-Christian doctrine of resurrection of the dead.

The fact that so many thoughtful people have a difficult time with the idea that completion and fulfillment might be a normal part of the cosmic process demonstrates how totally pervasive the static rationalist-positivist perspective continues to be.

In a dynamic unitive perspective, where diversity and uniqueness can be seen as central values to the cosmic process, it doesn't seem so inconsistent to assume that our personal contribution to the cosmic process will be incorporated into it.

We know so little, still, about the laws of the natural world. It may be that those laws include, rather than exclude, a completion of the cosmos process in such a way that nothing-- and especially not its central value of personal consciousness-- will be lost.

My point here is not to argue for the truth of a specific religious doctrine, but only to say that once we move out of the 19th century static worldview, some significant convergences become apparent. If, that is, we can find the right words to express them without evoking the 19th century meanings still attached to them.

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Here's a second important example of the struggle for helpful words. It's our need to express clearly the common understanding, found in both the sapiential religious perspective and the contemporary scientific worldview but totally lacking in the dualistic-mechanistic perspective, of the inter-relatedness of things.

I've found the Biogenetic Structuralist view especially useful here. Just as it helps us to spell out the nature of the individual person in an evolutionary perspective, so it also helps us to understand the communal aspects of the mystery of personal consciousness.

Biogenetic Structuralism calls itself "Anthropology Plus" because, while it began with the efforts of 20th-century cultural anthropologists, it also includes a strong emphasis on the evolutionary development of the primate brain and the consequent social-cultural aspects of human existence seen in that context. For these reasons, its understanding of personal consciousness is especially helpful in understanding ourselves in the broadest possible scientific perspectives of cosmic, biological and cultural evolution. And this, of course, is also the context in which 20th-century religious thinkers have been working out their new understandings of human nature.

But both efforts have a difficult time finding the right words to express the communal or relational aspects of human existence.

So, just as I feel the need, each time I use the word "science," to say that I mean more than its conventional 19th-century rationalist-positive sense, and each time I use the word "religion" to say that I mean more than its conventional dualist and authoritarian sense, so I feel a similar need each time I use the word "person." In the cosmic context of both contemporary science and religious thought, "person" refers to far more than individual. But "person," as the rugged individual of America's early pioneer days, still remains the ideal in conventional perspectives.

I know it sounds odd to say that "There's more to person than the individual." But that's exactly my point. Finding good words to talk about it is the struggle I'm pointing to in this blog entry. The communal and relational aspects of person are part of the perspectives of both contemporary science and contemporary religion, but in trying to express those converging perspectives well, the very words we do have available tend to get in the way as much as they are helpful.

Ours is such an individualistic culture that the very idea that there might be something beyond the ego-stage of personal development is as incomprehensible to many as is the idea, from a rationalistic point of view, that the universe's evolutionary process might have a positive outcome.

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In any case, in sharing my thoughts about the convergence of science and religion, it's some ideas about this understanding that "there's more to person than the individual" which is what I'm planning to present next.

What I hope to do is to take the ideas about person which I've presented in the earlier postings to the next step, where the emphasis is on our communion and connectedness with all things.

The words we have available to talk about the development of personal consciousness beyond the individualistic stage are both familiar and yet fuzzy for most of us. They include terms such as myth, ritual, symbol, shamanism and cosmology, and no matter what our background, most of us may be inclined to automatically dismiss one or more of them as irrelevant. But none of them are.

Religious ritual, for example, constitutes a fundamental part of humanity's religious practice, and while the idea that science might have something positive to say about it will seem to many an exaggeration, the place of ritual in personal and communal development is, in fact, a major part of the Biogenetic Structuralist perspective. The second of these pioneering researchers' three basic texts is The Spectrum of Ritual.

It is in that book that they describe the development of personal consciousness in the context of the cosmic process and the evolution of the brain as an experience of reality at three distinct levels of cosmological understanding. And it is thoughts about those levels of experience, and how the scientific understanding of them converges with the emerging sapiential perspectives, that I hope to share with readers in my next few blog postings.

Ambitious, to be sure! And sure to be a struggle to come up with the right words.

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But you can help.

We've all had teachers who obviously knew what they were talking about, but were unable to convey their ideas clearly. Less obvious is that what helps a speaker to communicate clearly with others is, more than anything else, the feedback the listeners provide.

Feedback takes innumerable forms, from an unconscious shuffling of feet or a repeated glancing at the clock to the slightest hint of a smile as well as an explicit comment or question.

So please, shuffle your feet-- electronically. Or e-mail a hint of a smile. I need your feedback.

If the formal blog-comment process seems too complicated, just use my regular e-mail. The address is below. Thanks!

sam@macspeno.com

#20. Resurrection of the Dead

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I was especially delighted when I discovered the efforts of the Biogenetic Structuralists to understand our human condition in light of the scientific findings of cultural anthropology, neurophysiology and biological evolution because it brings together the two big interests in my life, science and religion. And it's a non-dualist perspective: it does not put humans in a unique category outside the rest of the natural world but sees us, rather, an integral part of the evolution of the universe. And it doesn't dismiss religion and ritual, as rationalist science does: it understands them to be a natural part of human life.

The Biogenetic Structuralist concept of cognized environment especially caught my attention because, among other things, it sounds much like what the Russian Sophiologist, Sergius Bulgakov, has to say about the relationship of personal consciousness to the external world.

Bulgakov was talking in the context of a theological understanding of the early Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, so it's an unlikely combination, to be sure. But I found it a remarkable convergence. In this blog post I want to share the two understandings. I'll just put them side by side, and you can see what you think.

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I've mentioned the Biogenetic Structuralism concept of cognized environment in many previous posts and it is the focus of entry #13. Unfortunately, these research scientists did not come up with better names for their ideas-- names which would be more clear-- and we have to deal with their scientific jargon.

The main idea of cognized environment is that personal consciousness, when understood in terms of the functions of the brain at the third level of the cosmic process, is seen to be nothing less than the matter of the Earth become alive and self-aware.

The great value of seeing the human spirit from this neurological perspective is that it doesn't separate us from the rest of the living world, as religious and rationalist dualism does, but helps us to see that the human spirit is rooted in the Earth and the cosmic process-- that the human mind and heart is, indeed, "the universe become conscious of itself."

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Here's a quick review of the main point. In trying to respond to the question, "What's going on in the brain?" the Biogenetic Structuralists distinguish between the operational environment and cognized environment. Operational environment is their jargon term for the external world outside ourselves: the physical universe as the environment (the world) in which we exist-- and within which, of course, our brain operates.

In contrast, they use the term cognized environment to refer to the inner world which is continually being created by the structural activities of the brain. That inner world is our personal awareness. These research scientists like to call it "neuro-gnosis", meaning personal awareness-- "knowledge" in a broad sense-- which arises from the activity of the brain's living cells.

We need to keep in mind that, as the most complex thing in the dynamic universe, our brain's neural cells and networks are a dynamic field of electro-chemical reactions, and that neuro-gnosis-- our personal consciousness-- is the result of that dynamic activity of the neuro-gnostic structures.

It also helps to remind ourselves that we're talking about the third level of complexity in the cosmic process.

Since we're not used to thinking in terms of levels of complexity, here's an easy example: At one level, the letters of the alphabet are only bits of colored ink on a piece of paper, or dark marks on a computer screen. When joined together in various combinations, however, meaning emerges even at a very simple level of complexity: the letters D, G and O, for example, can be put together to mean "dog" or "God." It's clear that meaning emerges via complexity. We can, of course, put those words together to make sentences and put the sentences together to make stories, so that at greater levels of complexity ever greater levels of meaning emerge.

Living things, including ourselves, work the same way. Chemical compounds make up cells, cells make up tissues, tissues make up organs, organs make up systems, and organ systems combine to make up a whale or a maple tree. At each level of complexity, something "more" emerges.

In our brain-- the greatest level of complexity known to us-- the "more" that emerges is what Biogenetic Structuralism calls "neuro-gnosis"-- and the rest of us call conscious awareness.

The rudimentary gnosis-structure we're born with results from natural selection and the cosmic evolutionary process, and as we grow and develop, our personal consciousness grows by corrections and modifications based on data coming in from the operational (i.e., external) environment.

It's an evolutionary survival mechanism. The main idea is that the brain's primary function is to construct an internal version of the external environment, which it does in order to moderate input from and response to that external world. It allows us to recognize what's potentially hurtful or helpful in the operational environment.

It provides an evolutionary advantage because the sense data is processed in terms of how it fits with previous information already stored in the brain and nervous system. From a biogenetic (evolutionary) perspective, neuro-gnosis is the "informational content" of the neurological structures, and the neuro-gnostic structures are the media of nerve cells and their networks in which this information is "coded" and by way of which it can be modified.

And as I've said before, all this wouldn't sound so strange if it wasn't ourselves that we're talking about. But the point of it all is that personal consciousness is the "environment, cognized." Our consciousness is the world, internalized. We are the cosmos become conscious of itself.

And ours is the first age in humanity's cultural development in which we can understand ourselves this way, based on objective data from scientific studies of brain and nervous system. The main thing I want to emphasize here is that the mystery which we are as persons is the result of the physical matter of the universe; at the third level of complexity in the cosmic process, we are the matter of the cosmos showing itself as persons, each of us utterly unique in the history of the world.

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In his discussion of the resurrection of the dead, Sergius Bulgakov says something that sounds very similar. A little background will help show why what he has to say is important.

Bulgakov was born in 1871 into what was still the medieval culture of Central Russia. He became an atheist in early adolescence, studied law at the University of Moscow and eventually became a noted Marxist economist. At the age of twenty-four he began a religious conversion. It's of great interest that his conversion was not occasioned by any church-related experience but by an experience of nature: his first sight of the Caucasus mountains while he was driving with friends in a sleigh across the southern steppes of Russia.

In his autobiography, The Unfading Light, he says, "Suddenly and joyfully in that evening hour my soul was stirred. O mountains of the Caucasus! I saw your ice sparkling from sea to sea, your snows reddening under the morning dawn, the peaks which pierced the sky, and my soul melted in ecstasy.... The first day of creation shone before my eyes. Everything was clear, everything was at peace and full of ringing joy. My heart was ready to break with bliss." He describes this was "my first encounter with Sophia-Wisdom." (The autobiography is not yet available in English, but quotes from it can be found in Christopher Bamford's forward to Bulgakov's Sophia, The Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology .

He eventually rejected Marxism for the idealist philosophy of the famous poet of the divine feminine, Vladimir Soloviev. After he was ordained he was exiled from his homeland by the Communists and he spent many years as dean of the Orthodox seminary in Paris. He was well aware of the scientific developments of his day, had a special interest in cosmology and anthropology, and was on good terms with religious thinkers in the English-speaking world, including the United States. He died in 1944. He is considered by many to be the greatest Orthodox thinker of the 20th century.

His most famous and comprehensive work is his book on the nature of the church, The Bride of the Lamb. Because of his educational background in law and economics, he wrote in a heavy Germanic philosophical style-- and originally in Russian-- so his work is not easy reading. Only in the last few years has it been published in English.

He helped to recover the sapiential religious thought of the first thousand years of Christian history. It differs from the static, dualistic and rationalist worldview familiar to western Christians in that is sees the universe as one dynamic process, moving from creation to fulfillment. This includes our personal development and the persistence of our relationships. If he were writing today, Bulgakov would say something like: We have to see that there is a fourth stage to the evolutionary process, the final completion and fulfillment of all things.

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What Bulgakov has to say about the resurrection of the dead is found in the Section III, Eschatology, in his book on the church, The Bride of the Lamb. Eschaton means "last" or "end" or "final things."

He begins by noting that there are no defined dogmas concerning the eschaton, although four statements concerning the Last Things are familiar from the ancient creeds: "He will come again in glory... Of his kingdom there will be no end... We believe in the resurrection of the dead ... and life in the world to come."

Much of what Bulgakov has to say is commentary on the many scriptural passages which deal with these four articles of the creed. His first point is basic and he makes it strongly: the “end of the world” does not mean that the universe will be annulled but that it will be renewed: it will be transformed and transfigured. “It will be, but in a new way.” Our world and the world to come are one and the same world, but it will be in a different state. This, he insists, is what scripture means by a “new heaven and a new earth.”

Bulgakov notes that our language is “helpless in trying to describe the reality” of the New Creation. He nevertheless has a good bit to say about it, and much of it is commentary on various eschatological passages in the New Testament, especially in the Book of Revelations. Of these, Bulgakov says clearly, “the images of this symbolic language are not to be taken literally.”

The resurrection of the dead and the presence of Christ at the Second Coming are one identical thing; Bulgakov emphasizes that “All rise in Christ.” Just as our one human nature shared by multiple persons was assumed in the Incarnation, so it is resurrected in the Universal Resurrection. Here, once again however, Bulgakov acknowledges that we can’t get any “real ideas about all this on this side of death and resurrection.”

At the same time, he reminds us that the essence of the Christian faith is that the body will be restored and the person will be changed. This is “the hope” without which, as St Paul says, “our faith is in vain.” This means, says Bulgakov, that the risen body “will be proper to each person.” It’s our body. At the same time, he says, it will also be “the one universal corporality which is the entire natural world.”

His heavy language can get in the way, but what he's saying is that each of us will have the entire transfigured cosmos as our own risen body, and that it will be held in a way that it is personal and unique to each of us.

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Both Bulgakov and the Biogenetic Structuralists are speaking from within an non-static and non-dualistic context. And while the scientists are talking about one thing (a neurological understanding of consciousness) and the theologian about another (the "new way we will be" at the eschaton of the world), they both share the same insights within that evolutionary and post-rationalist perspective: that human beings are the universe become aware of itself and that each of us is a unique manifestation of it.

Bulgakov says, "The risen body will be the entire natural world, held in a way that it is proper to each person." The Biogenetic Structuralists say, "Personal consciousness is the external world uniquely cognized by each of us."

I find the convergence of these insights remarkable.

However, considering that we're just coming out of several centuries of rationalist positivism, it's understandable that even many New Cosmologists are somewhat reluctant to deal with the idea of a "fourth level of the evolutionary process." But if I'm understanding the neurological data correctly, as I mentioned in blog #8 about the functioning of the brain's neocortical lobes resulting in our need for endings as well as beginnings: "it would seem that our hope for a final outcome to the cosmic process is generated by the cosmic process itself."

And in that context, the promised resurrection of the dead doesn't seem so unreasonable.

sam@macspeno.com