#106. Ritual & the Evolution of Culture

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

ARCHIVE. For a list of all my published posts: 
http://www.sammackintosh.blogspot.com/
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

This is the 6th in a series of blog entries beginning with #101. It's a collection of notes and essays from my files all dealing in one way or another with the emerging new religious consciousness. They are mostly things I've written over the last decade or so to clarify my own thoughts but which I now want to make available for anyone who might be interested. This post (#106) originally was a followup to a phone conversation with a friend about the sophiological ideas of Sergius Bulgakov described in post #104.

If you have questions and think I might help, you're welcome to send me a note: sam@macspeno.com 

===

Dear R,

As I said on the phone, this topic is too big! But I can't pass up the opportunity to try to spell out some thoughts about it, and hope that something here may be along the lines of what you're interested in. I hardly know where to start, there are so many inter-related things to think about! 

Ritual may be the focal point, but in a sophiological context things like church, eschaton, the cosmic evolutionary process and our place in it-- all go together along with ritual. Since my last note to you was about Bulgakov's Bride of the Lamb, some of his ideas about church may be a good take-off place for talk about ritual.

In section 5-1 on "The Essence of the Church" (where he begins with what he calls "the primordial significance of the Church") he says that the church is nothing less than the foundation and basis of the created world. God’s eternal plan is "to gather together all things into one" and the church is the fulfillment of that plan.

It is, as I've said, a profound set of ideas. The created world has a purpose, that purpose the unity of all things, and the fulfillment of that purpose is the church. What a contrast, indeed, this is with the prevailing conventional views of scientific rationalism (that can't acknowledge that there is any meaning or purpose to our existence) and also with the views of religious dualism (that claim only that we are to escape from the world rather than be united with it utterly). And as I also mentioned, even many of the new cosmologists seem unable to acknowledge a goal to cosmic evolution. So right from the start, "the sophiological perspective stands in the greatest contrast to all the conventional views about the world as either evil or meaningless."

To all that I added the note that it is precisely sophiology's unitive perspective which makes it so relevant to our understanding of the church tradition and the new cosmology. What the church is all about is unity; its very essence is the unity of all things. "To gather together all things into one."

This means that "church" can be understood only within a cosmic context. In the old (static) cosmos, church became the means of escape from the cosmos. But the very essence of the new cosmology is its understanding of the cosmos as dynamic, and this is totally in accord with the original ekklesia's self-understanding. In Bruno Barnhart’s words, the essence of the New Testament vision is "the transformation of cosmic matter (in the human person) into its ultimate unitive state in God." And it's that unity of cosmos, anthropos and theos which in Bulgakov’s view is church.

One thing we can see immediately is how the central place of individuals-- as the agents of this cosmic unity-- stands out in this dynamic and transformational view. It's clear that sophiology and the new cosmology agree on this critically important point: that we exist and live in a dynamic person-centered cosmos. Far from being incompatible, the heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition and the emerging scientific worldview see the one same thing. (And indeed, they have the same source: the Exodus experience and Hebrew ontology.)

It's easy to say that "church" is what sophiology and the new cosmology have in common, but conventional Christianity has little real sense of ekklesia, and of course ekklesia is not part of the contemporary scientific perspective (even though the new cosmology supports the ekklesia's self-understanding and they have a common source). In both conventional Christianity and new cosmology, what's missing, as you've heard me say before, is eschatology: that the world has a purpose and we are its agents. So the new cosmology is much closer to a sophiological anthropology than is conventional Christianity, in that it sees human persons as participating in the cosmic process; it also clearly supports sophiology's view of personal creativity and inspiration in that context. Both Bulgakov and Brian Swimme even use the same word, "mission," to describe our personal participation in the process, and Bulgakov calls it the church's "very life."

So all that is the very messy situation in which we have to pursue the question of ritual!

===

When I mentioned Bulgakov's note about language not being precise enough for what needs to be said about "church" I added in parenthesis, "[That's] one of the reasons why realistic ritual remains a major need in the immense transition!"

I emphasize "realistic ritual" because an authentic understanding of ritual is as much in contrast with the conventional dualistic perspectives as are sophiology's ideas about the world's purpose and about the church as the fulfillment of that purpose. It is also, of course, equally in contrast with rationalist secular views, which see ritual at best as only meaningless and at worst as repetitive or compulsive-- pathological-- behavior.

The situation is even more complicated, however, in that, for religious dualism, "ritual" is considered to be only empty gestures except when those gestures are done by authorized persons (and for the purpose of providing temporary freedom from the possibility of eternal punishment once the individual is freed from the cosmos). 

I'm aware how odd that sounds, but you know it's not a caricature of how sacraments were (and, alas, still are) understood.

For many good-willed church people today, those who have titles such as "religious educator" or "liturgist" or "liturgical musician," and who thus find themselves responsible for educating people (primarily kids) about ritual ("sacramental preparation"), "ritual" takes on the meaning of educational activities or artistic performances. They are essentially thought of, at their best, very much like plays or lectures and concerts, or even spectator sports, where the few do something for the edification and/or entertainment of the many. I don't, of course, mean to say there's anything wrong with concerts or lectures or games; but I do mean that such spectator events are not ritual.

===

In her talk, "Teilhard and the Fabric of the Universe," (which I sent you a while back), Sister Kathleen Duffy, from the physics department at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia, describes Teilhard as a pioneer who had to "break through to the core" of both science and religion. Today, many have broken through to a post-rationalist view of science; and also many are at work on a post-rationalist view of religion. But the break-through to a specifically post-rationalist view of ritual hasn't happened yet.

The best we've come up with so far is the New Age movement from back in the 60's. It was a mind-blowing mixture of authentic ritual and utter nonsense, and although it had a broad impact on people interested in spirituality, almost none of it (good or bad) rubbed off on church leaders (clergy, DREs, liturgists, musicians). Thus church-goers (the people in the pews) are for the most part in an incredibly impoverished situation.

And of course ritual was held in utter disdain by academic people. That includes even cultural anthropologists, who do pay attention to ritual, in that they collect and record data about it. But nobody, as far as I'm aware, is into studying what it is and how it works in itself. Ritual in the academic world seems to be much like "religion" was until the early 20th century or shamanism was until the late 20th century: irrational activity, unworthy of serious attention.

===

So. All of that (all those many words!) is background explanation for why I said, when we were talking on the phone, that any talk of evolutionary ritual may be premature. It's just "too big" an issue to deal with. I said the old things (of tribal, native, "first" peoples) are best: sweat lodge, vision quest, talking-staff council, sacred pipe; things that allow us to be in right relationship with the earth. That's essentially what rituals are, a saying "yes" to our human situation, an affirmation of our belonging to the universe; and the more authentic they are, they more they result in empowerment for growth and development. (They "give grace," exactly what's said of the sacraments, but it's much more clear when we see "grace" as Bulgakov does: a "new how, not new what"). So authentic ritual is about our personal and communal growth, our development as participants in the developmental cosmos. (Which is why it is especially powerful in liminal moments, such as dawn, sunset, winter solstice, spring, puberty, birth, sickness....)

The issue, as I see it, is that for ritual to be authentic the persons involved need to have an active, participatory role in the rites themselves; they can't be passive spectators or recipients. Remember "active participation" as the rallying cry of the liturgical movement back in the 50's? The liturgists of that time were on the right track. One of the (many) reasons the liturgical movement fizzled was the "active participation" that was permitted was almost totally verbal, whereas participants in authentic ritual have to do something, not just say words. It has to be something primarily physical. (This also explains why dualistic religious disdain for matter and body is also a disdain for ritual; it explains why even the seven "legitimate" church rituals are almost totally reduced to nothing but words.)

As far as I can see, we won't be able to evolve appropriate contemporary ritual until we have moved beyond projecting "sacred" in to another worldly category. (Again, it's consciousness of making the "immense transition"-- to a dynamic cosmos, a unitive theos and a participatory anthropos-- that makes all the difference.)

Once we are moving toward making that transition, we see that there is, in fact, a treasury of appropriate ritual available to us. Much of it from tribal (native) peoples, but also much of it that is long-neglected, indeed buried, within the Christian tradition, covered over with the dust of the centuries. Someday, those buried treasures will make sense as "just what we need" by future new cosmologists and post-patriarchal Christians.

One more point to all this. I don't mean to say that we have no appropriate rituals available to us right now. But we have to "do" them in a non-dualistic and non-rationalistic context: with non-dualistic and non-rationalistic attitudes. Whatever we do, it always has to be in affirmation of our real lives in the real world, a 'yes' to our material and biological existence. It either allows us to stand at the center of the world or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it's either escape from the world, which is why secularism condemns it, or it's only artistic performance or audio-visual education. Neither of which is bad in itself, but they have to be distinguished from ritual.

Making that distinction is nearly impossible in our culture, due to the pervasiveness of rationalism and dualism. The contrast with authentic ritual-- affirming our belonging to the universe and thereby being empowered to active collaboration with the cosmic process-- is great.

In a sophiological context, authentic ritual makes good sense. It is precisely our affirmation, to use Vagaginni's neat terms, of the caro that is the cardo of salvation. (And of which the essence, as Irenaeus says, is healing and wholeness; or in Bulgakov's blunt statement, "that the body will be restored to the person and be changed.")

Also helpful are the terms of sarx and pneuma: ritual is affirmation of the developmental cosmic-body process (sarx) in light of its realization or fulfillment (pneuma). It's easy to see why rationalism would dismiss all this, and why church sacraments so easily slip in to a dualistic framework. But it's a delight to see that the new cosmology gives us a much better context for keeping ritual grounded and thus authentic.

===

So one of the main things I want to say about "evolution and ritual" is that, in the immense transition, an understanding evolution, not an understanding ritual, takes priority. Conceptually, an evolutionary cosmology supports and helps us to understand ritual, but ritual can't help us to understand evolution. We have to have some real sense of the evolutionary worldview before we can ritually "own" our place in it. (This would be true even if we created an initiation rite for moving into the evolutionary worldview.) But we don't need to "ritually" embrace the new cosmology; what we need to embrace is the cosmos. We don't really need any new rites or ceremonies; we only need to do the old ones, even the Christian eucharist, in the ways they were done before religious dualism set in.

And Homo sapiens has been doing earth-rites-- cosmos-embracing rites of belonging and participation-- for many thousands of years. If we want to recover good ways of doing ritual we have to go to those indigenous peoples whose early cultures pre-date Western civilization and who have managed to hold on, to some extent, to something of those old ways. They are, as Matthew Fox said many years ago, a great gift to the world. So at least with regard to ritual, the immense transition includes a going back as well as a moving ahead. (All this is "very messy," indeed!)

In a nut shell, what's needed, re "evolutionary Christianity," is not ritual but kerygma. Only after there's been a proclamation-- a declaration, a consciousness-expansion-- is there something to which we can give our fiat. As I mentioned in one of the earlier notes I sent, the old Angelus provides a clear pattern for authentic ritual: first the announcement by the angel, then the fiat by Mary. And only after that comes grace, cosmic empowerment, "not a new what but a new how," an incarnation of the holy breath/wind/spiritus.

So people like Michael Dowd and his wife Connie are on the right track. If you looked at the list of churches participating in "Evolution Sunday" (on one of their links I sent recently), I'm sure you noticed how few RC groups were listed: out of more than 460 congregations, only two were RC for sure. (Maybe three. There were two "Antioch Catholic" parishes listed, one of which also calls itself Malabar rite, and which may or may not be in communion with Rome; the other, also called "Antiochan Catholic," is definitely not: it lists a female bishop!) Quakers and Unitarians, the least sacramentally oriented groups, are leaders in the proclamation of the evolutionary kerygma. (I find it interesting that it may be because they are the least sacramentally oriented groups. An interesting question to pursue sometime!)

In any case, the main point I'm trying to make with all this is that-- far from being a pathological escape mechanism (from the universe and from punishment in the hereafter, as sacraments are, in a dualistic context)-- ritual is essentially the acceptance and affirmation of our cosmic-material-physical-bodily reality and, thereby, of our active role in the world's on-going development. As I've said before (probably too many times!), "it all fits together."

In a sophiological context, all these things-- evolution, cosmos, matter, caro, non-duality, salvation, ekklesia, eschaton, ritual-- all are part of a post-patriarchal "package." If we move into any one of these areas, we eventually find ourselves dealing with all of them. One very nice example is Bulgakov's comment that the physical universe is "the cosmic face of the ekklesia." Here are a few more examples of that interconnectedness.

1) As I've mentioned before, the Sanskrit term rita, from which our words "rites" and "ritual" come, means the order of the universe, the way the world works: the wisdom of the cosmos which (or who, as the old Advent hymn has it), "orders all things mightily." As the very means by which we enter into and are empowered by the universe to participate in that wisdom-ordered cosmic process, ritual is what makes evolution happen at the human culture level. So just from the Sanskrit word alone we can see how Sophia-wisdom, cosmic evolution and our unitive participation in it are all connected.

2) Thomas Berry's Principle Twelve of New Cosmology is that “the main task of the immediate future is to assist in activating the inter-communion of all the living and non-living components of the earth." Ritual activates that inter-communion; it empowers us to enter into communion with "All our relations." (Native Americans use that phrase in connection with almost all their sacred ceremonies and even in public talks.) So ritual is at the heart of the New Cosmology.

3) The "inter-communion of all the living and non-living components of the earth" is the human task. In Panikkar's words, the focused energy or concentrated consciousness of ritual is “the act by which the ‘thing’ is converted into a bit of the human world.” That's the "public work" which is accomplished by every person and community participating in the cosmos process to bring about the new creation of diversity and communion, peace and justice. (In Bruno’s words, that work is "the transformation of cosmic matter [in the human person] into its ultimate unitive state in God.") This is the work of the ekklesia, done "on behalf of all and for all," and for which the Greek word is, of course, "liturgy." So once again we see evolution at the cultural level, cosmic unity, ritual and ekklesia to be utterly interconnected.

4) The almost forgotten Christian image of "the lamb slain at the foundation of the world"-- an image which goes back to the Paleolithic (hunting culture) understanding of the game animal willingly giving itself "so that the people can live"-- is an image of the most primeval of all rita: God's, not ours, the divine kenosis by which the world comes to be.

The New Cosmology doesn't have the lamb imagery, of course, and neither does most of the Christian world. But Sophiology has it, and sees our on-going participation in the world's evolution (what Bulgakov calls Bogochelovechestvo) as nothing less than our participation in that original creative kenotic rita. So yet again we see how ritual, evolution and participatory unitive reality all go together.

Here's a few comments about our basic 'mind and body' needs with regard to ritual. I see dealing with those needs as essentials in the recovery of an authentic religious anthropology:

1) Patriarchal culture's lack of understanding of imagery makes understanding life-giving ritual all but impossible. So whatever can be done to raise consciousness of the four-fold nature of the psyche-- and thus help validate images, intuition, feelings and emotions as legitimate modes of human awareness-- is important.

2) Our collaboration with the workings of the wisdom of the universe obviously depends on our contact with nature. Legitimating for people things like walks in the park, "wasting time with the ocean," enjoying good cooking, are important. Ultimately, the need here is to see our very caro as nature. The chart on page 40 of Mary Conrow Coelho's book is invaluable kerygma.

Well, as I've said, the topic is too big. I hope something here is along the lines of what you were interested in. If it's helpful, great. If not, let me know. I can give it another shot. - Sam

+++

#46. Convergence?

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
ARCHIVE. For a list of all my published posts:
http://www.sammackintosh.blogspot.com/
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

My previous eight posts have been about Divine Wisdom. That's a lot. But I think it's worth the time and effort because even though it's relatively unfamiliar to most thoughtful persons, the understanding of the anthropos-theos relationship presented in the Hebrew Bible's wisdom literature lies at the heart of our western religious tradition.

The fact that it's unfamiliar is an advantage. It allows us to hear what the wisdom tradition is saying without too much interference by a carry-over of the prejudices that have built up over the centuries in western culture with regard to religion. Those prejudices include fundamentalist dualism and scientific rationalism. Along with patriarchy-- and its exploitation of just about everything-- they are baggage left over from the static worldview of classical Greek thought.

In contrast, the worldview of the wisdom literature is dynamic. It sees Sophia delighting in the creation of the Earth and the world of human persons-- guiding us, directing us, providing for us, and calling us to participate in her creative work in the world.

Jesus was born into that dynamic worldview of Divine Wisdom and it is the context in which the first communities of his followers were formed. In the next two posts I hope to describe what the appearance of Jesus and those early Christian communities looks like when we see it in the dynamic context of the Bible's wisdom tradition.

In this post I want to share some specific thoughts about the significance of the contemporary convergence of those dynamic religious perspectives and the evolutionary perspectives of modern science.

===

One of my main reasons for starting this blog back in December 2006 was to share my understanding of the fact that the modern scientific perspectives have their roots in the very same dynamic perspectives that underlie the western religious tradition.

I've noted repeatedly that the evolutionary worldview began with the history of the Hebrew people at the time of the Exodus and that it was a quite different outlook on life than the static worldview that previously had prevailed for many thousands of years.

I've often quoted Teilhard de Chardin's statement that the change from a static to a dynamic worldview is the most significant change in human consciousness since consciousness first appeared on the Earth several million years ago.

So, I'm calling this post "Convergence?"-- with emphasis on the question mark-- because I want to talk here about why that convergence isn't clear to most people.

If the evolutionary perspective is at the core of both western science and western religion, what happened? Why is religion still considered to be opposed to science? If the Judeo-Christian tradition and modern science share the same worldview, why does the scientific perspective seem to be in such contradiction to the western world's religious tradition?

===

It's important to note that I am not asking "Are science and religion compatible?" I'm asking "Why is it that so many people still think that science and religion are incompatible?"

It's also important to note that when I talk about the convergence of science and religion, I don't mean that science and religion somehow are merging into the one same thing. They are clearly two very different aspects of human life.

The best way I know how to describe the distinction is to say that science is about the anthropos-cosmos relationship, while religion is about the anthropos-theos relationship. And, as I've spelled out in many previous posts, I find the quaternary perspectives of our four-fold mind to be especially helpful tools for understanding that difference.

One way to express the difference, for example, is to use the imagery of the four directions on the Medicine Wheel. Science is a primarily a Gold Eagle and White Buffalo expression of our conscious minds, while religion is primarily a Black Bear and Green Mouse activity.

In Jungian language, both science and religion operate from one perception function and one judgment function, something like the old "one from column A and one from column B" idea.

Science operates by way of the perception function called Sensation and the judgment function called Thinking. Science looks at fact and details; it's always questioning and trying to formulate conceptual explanations of what it sees. It is concerned with the physical universe of matter, life and mind. Science focuses on understanding the world we live in.

Religion, in contrast, operates by way of the perception function called Intuition and the judgment function called Feeling. When it looks at the big picture of the world, it strongly values and wants to hold on to the many good things it sees, and is especially concerned with the connections between things and their significance for us. And in major contrast to our scientific effort, religion expresses its insights in images rather than concepts.

The basic Medicine Wheel teaching is that we need to make use of all four activities of our personal consciousness. If we don't, if we get stuck at one place on the circle of life, we become lopsided, out of balance-- out of harmony, not at peace.

Another helpful tool for understanding the difference between religion and science is Karl Rahner's existential analysis of human experience. I've mentioned Rahner in many posts and spelled out his existential views in post #34 (Talking About Us). At our deepest level of personal experience, says Rahner, we experience ourselves as aware, free, open and blessed.

Using this experiential language we can say that religion comes from (and at its best emphasizes) the human experience of being open and related to the things of the world, while science, in contrast, comes from (and at its best emphasizes) our experience of being free participants in the life of the world.

From these various perspectives of personal experience and four-fold consciousness, it's obvious that there's no reason for us to become lopsided. We don't have to choose between religion and science. So, once again, What happened? How did two large groups of mostly good-willed people in our culture get so out of balance with one another? How did they get stuck at such different places on the circle of life?

===

To understand what happened, we need a few facts about the history behind the opposition between religion and science.

I need first to point out that it's not quite correct to say that the Judeo-Christian tradition began in the context of the dynamic-evolutionary worldview. More accurately, the dynamic worldview is the very essence of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

That may seem like a strange claim, but that's because we're still not yet comfortable with the idea of a dynamic-- in contrast to a static-- worldview.

In Greek, dynamis means power and energy. It's the origin of words like "dynamo" and "dynamite." The Latin spiritus is a synonym. It goes back to a Sanskrit word used to describe the movement of the wind and air. It's this spirit-- air, wind, energy-- in us that makes us alive. And it's the same divine spiritus, "the dynamis of God," that's described in the first chapter of Genesis as "hovering over the surface of the waters" and which, in the psalms, is said to "fill the whole world" and "give life to all living creatures."

The Psalms and the book of Genesis were written long after the Hebrew experience of the Exodus. Those stories and poems are part of the wisdom perspective that pervades the Hebrew Bible. The entire wisdom tradition speaks of the dynamis-- the energy or power-- of God bringing us to be, guiding us, gathering us, providing for us. The whole history of the Jewish people is understood as being brought about by this holy spiritus.

In the gospel stories, the same divine dynamis shows itself in Jesus. It specifically appears in the unique story of his baptism when it leads him into the dessert in preparation for his life's work. At the last supper, this same divine power is promised to his followers, and the earliest Christian communities saw themselves called together by the same spiritus of God at the feast of Pentecost

This dynamis-and-Sophia perspective, so unfamiliar to us today, prevailed for roughly the first thousand years of Christianity. So, again, What happened?

===

We have to keep in mind that western culture includes not only the heritage of the Hebrews but also that of the Greeks, and the Greeks had a static worldview. What happened was that after the Dark Ages, the dynamic perspective of the Judeo-Christian tradition was lost to western culture when the static-dualistic worldview took over.

And in that static worldview, it's difficult to understand the human spirit except as something separate from the world. Dualism sees the human spiritus as alien to the Earth; it has a negative view of the spirit/soul as something trapped in a body and needing to escape from the material world. The static worldview and dualism go together.

The key to understanding the opposition of religion to science is the fact that, as a human enterprise, modern science began during the time when static dualism prevailed in western culture.

===

Once again, the quaternary understanding of the four-fold mind is helpful. Because science comes from our White Buffalo and Gold Eagle functions, it is especially concerned with the details of the world we live in and is continually asking questions about it. Science begins with awe and wonder-- with amazement at the world we live in-- and with the desire to know and understand it. So from the start science stood in opposition to that dualism which had come to pervade western culture and which sees the world as an evil place we need to escape from.

And because of its efforts to understand the world, science quickly discovered the fact that the world isn't static. Long before the time of Charles Darwin, early scientists working in what today we would call the fields of astronomy, geology and biology recognized that the world we live in is an always-changing, always-developing-- indeed, evolutionary-- world.

So science found itself in opposition to the religious dualism of western culture in two specific ways: not only because it values the world which religious dualism distains, but also because it recognizes what western religion forgot-- that that world is not static but dynamic.

===

As I mentioned in post #33 (Talking About God), around the time of the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species the western religious tradition also begin to recover its dynamic-evolutionary roots. But because religion is far less concerned with questioning than is science, religion moved much more slowly in recovering its own dynamic worldview.

Most people have yet to become aware of this century-and-a-half movement in western religion. They are still focused on what they see as the opposition of science and religion.

Although since the late 1800s some religious thinkers have been trying to show that religion and science aren't incompatible, progress has been slow. Even today we still hear the question, "Are science and religion compatible?" as if it was a brand new idea.

The loss of the Bible's dynamic worldview has been so thorough that many people today still can ask and mean it sincerely, "Can a Christian believe in evolution?" And they are simply bewildered by the thought that the idea of evolution not only comes from the Bible, that it is what the Judeo-Christian tradition is all about.

===

There has been progress, however. Five hundred years ago religious authorities told people not to believe the finding of scientists that the Earth revolved around the sun. Today, that's no longer an issue.

Two hundred years ago, religious authorities told people not to believe the finding of scientists that life emerged out of the pre-existing matter of the Earth or that it evolved by the natural selection process into the life-forms we know today. That's still an issue, to be sure, but for the most part, it's no longer the central issue-- even though the media still talks about it as if it is.

In our day the issue that continues to cause people to think religion and science are incompatible is nothing less than ourselves. Not planets or plants and animals but the uniqueness of human consciousness is what makes people still think we have to choose between science and religion.

The problem is commonly expressed by religious fundamentalists as, "I can see that it's possible that some animals may have evolved from lower animals-forms, but I can't believe that humans came from monkeys." They say, in brief, that "humans have a soul-- and animals don't."

This is where neurological science-- the study of the human brain and nervous system-- comes in. The main issue now isn't how the planets are arranged around the sun, or how life first emerged on Earth, but how the human brain can give rise to the human spirit.

The difficulty is that, in a static perspective, it can't. There is no way that the emergence of mind from matter can happen in a static worldview. In a static world, nothing new emerges.

So the real problem is the idea of emergence. I used the word "emergence" several times in what I've had to say so far in the post. It probably didn't stand out, but it's the key to understanding the incompatibility of the static and dynamic worldviews.

===

In a dynamic context, we can see patterns that we miss in a static worldview.

We can see, for example, that the chemical elements emerged from the nuclear processes in the hearts of stars; we can see that when that the stardust of chemical elements and compounds is collected by gravity it forms into planets; and we can see that living cells emerge from the interaction and combination of the complex chemicals of those planets.

The pattern is clear enough: when the material of the world reaches a certain level of complexity, something new emerges. That-- as we Earthlings experience it-- is the underlying structure to the entire cosmic process. In a static worldview, we just don't see this pattern, but in a dynamic context, it's obvious: at higher levels of complexity, something new emerges.

And it's this pattern which continues in the emergence of mind from the combination and interactions of our living brain cells.

The best elementary example I can give of emergence is one that's familiar to almost everyone nowadays: the fact that the when the two elements, hydrogen gas and oxygen gas, are combined chemically-- not just mixed-- the result is the emergence of a new compound, water, with totally different characteristic properties from its chemical components.

If we say that water is "only" hydrogen and oxygen, we miss the point that something new emerged. Water can do things that oxygen atoms and hydrogen atoms can't. The idea is even more clear if we try to reduce a complex chemical compound like DNA to "only" carbon, nitrogen and oxygen atoms. DNA can do things that the atoms of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen can't. Among other things, DNA can replicate itself, and self-replication is one of the basic characteristics of living things.

"Emergence" is the term used to describe the appearance of this more than-- this "newness"-- that results from increasingly complex combinations of things. The idea of "emergence" simply doesn't make sense in a static perspective. If there's no developmental change, there can be no emergence of anything.

But, as in the dynamic perspective we can see that water is something more than its chemical components, and living cells are something more than chemical matter, so the human mind and spirit is something more than just the activity of brain cells. Persons are more-- much more-- than brain cells, but it is the brain cells out of which consciousness emerges.

It's the level of complexity that makes all the difference. Two atoms combining to form a molecule is one thing. The billions of cells in our brain-- in touch with both the outside world through our senses and in touch with one another via electrochemical links-- is something else.

Scientists have been studying that complexity for more than a century; it is beyond anything else known in the whole universe.

So, in the static worldview, there is "no way that human beings could have evolved from monkeys." But when we recognize the pattern of emergence in the dynamic worldview, we can see that it takes nothing away from our human dignity and uniqueness to understand that our personal awareness emerges from the activity of those extremely complex structures.

Indeed, just the opposite.

===

Because the idea of emergence is the key to understanding the difference between the static and dynamic worldviews, it's also the key to understanding why it is not religion but the static worldview that is in opposition to science's evolutionary perspectives.

My main idea in this post is that it's not science which contradicts religion. Rather, it is the dynamic worldview of science that contradicts the old static perspective of dualistic religion.

And it is the understanding of reality as a dynamic process that's at the core of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. It is precisely this evolutionary view that makes the western religious tradition different from all the other religious traditions of the Earth. As I said earlier, I hope to spell out that idea in a future post.

I have one final point to make in this post. When we see that the real world is a process, and that the emergence of new things from previous things is the basic pattern to the process, we can see that the convergence of science and religion in the dynamic worldview of western science frees western religion from the centuries-old prison of static dualism.

In the dynamic perspective it's clear that the world isn't a prison; indeed, thinking that the world is a prison is a prison. When we look at the world from the dynamic perspective, we see that far from being in opposition to religion, contemporary science is serving the religion of the western world by rescuing it from its thousand-year prison.

The evolutionary perspective helps western religion re-discover its own dynamic heart and soul. Modern science greatly enriches western culture's religious tradition.

That's what I mean by "convergence."

sam@macspeno.com