#140. Religion Has To Be As Reasonable As Modern Science

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ARCHIVE. For a list of all my published posts: 

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Blog entries beginning with #101 are not essays but minimally-edited notes and reviews from the files I've collected over the last few decades. I no longer have the time and energy needed to sort out and put together into decent essay-form the many varied ideas in these files, but I would like to share them with all who are interested.

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

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Post #140 is an April, 2004 review of Paths from Science towards God: The End of All Our Exploring by Arthur Peacocke (Oneworld Publications, Oxford. 2001)

Peacocke is a British biochemist, noted (if I remember correctly) for his work on the physical structure of DNA. He is also an Anglican priest. His bio says “founder and former Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre at the University of Oxford, and winner of the 2001 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.”

His attempts here (in this “Paths” book) to deal with the relationship between science and religion are far and away the best I’ve seen. Many such efforts are still at the stage of asking whether religion and science are compatible (as in “Can a Christian believe in evolution?”).

Peacocke’s work is much more sophisticated. He makes two main points. One is that, to be credible, religion not only has to take into account the worldview of modern science but that it also has to be as reasonable as modern science. His second main point is a delight for me: there is a significant convergence between the contemporary evolutionary worldview and the basic perspectives of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

The situation is complicated, however. As Peacocke says, modern Western science was born of a Greek mother and an Islamic midwife, and for many centuries, science and religion were seen to be distinct but compatible areas of knowledge. But since the time of Newton and the Enlightenment, the gap between reason and revelation has widened considerably, and in the last 150 years, since Darwin, it has become unbridgeable.

On one hand, intelligent educated people (who may have little scientific information, yet share in the general cultural orientation to scientific rationality) find the perspectives of religion less and less meaningful. They vote with their feet and the traditional churches are increasingly empty.

On the other hand, conservatives and fundamentalists opt to reject scientific data and the reasoning that goes with it; they adhere, instead, to religious views long rejected by biblical scholars and theologians. Their churches are filled to overflowing.

Peacocke’s view is that the basic scientific worldview that has emerged in the last few centuries is not only not incompatible with the Christian perspective but in fact leads to it. That’s what he means by “paths” in the title of his book, Paths from Science Toward God.

It’s an excellent book. Not lite-reading, to be sure, but not ponderous either. It does require close reading, however, and its British style and Anglican context are especially refreshing. There’s no verbal fluff and little reference to Roman Catholic or American views as the standard norms.

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Can religion, and specifically the Judeo-Christian tradition, be presented and understood as being reasonable-- as reasonable as science? Can the Western religious tradition become as acceptable to intelligent educated people as Western science is? Peacocke’s answer is “yes,” obviously; but he goes far beyond that. His orientation is to global humanity’s religious experience, and his claim is that, in the light of the evolutionary worldview of modern science, traditional biblical insights are, in fact, an especially good way to talk about the religious meaning of life.

Contemporary educated intelligent people will doubt that. Conservative fundamentalists will deny it. A tremendous amount of educational work needs doing.

      

The anti-scientific view opts for heavy reliance on external authority (of book, individual or institutional organization); it also opts for matter-spirit (body-soul) dualism, a cosmos which is static (and roughly 4,000 years old), and a transcendent-only divinity which exists outside the world but who, on specific occasions, interacts with it.

This fundamentalist stance includes beliefs such as eternal hell for sinners and unbelievers, a literal interpretation of the bible and a historical understanding the fall of Adam and Eve. It pictures Jesus as all-knowing, and understands his physical suffering as the payment of a debt to an angry wrathful of God for our redemption. Most people, educated or not, religious or not, don’t know that these are ill-formulated beliefs which religious scholars and theologians have long abandoned.

As Peacocke says, “What is thought by educated people to be contemporary Christian truth lacks credibility” and so “public truth suffers.” What was accepted 150 years ago and what is seen today are, as he says, “practically two different religions.” Today, thanks both to science and serious religious scholarship, we see differently. And better.

His whole point is that we need to make our own both a contemporary scientific worldview and a contemporary understanding of Christian beliefs.

Reason works in all aspects of culture, Peacocke points out. “Detectives, archeologists and plumbers all use the same basic methods. Science just does it more systematically.” The issue is whether popular religious belief can allow itself to be open to truth and revise its perspectives: can it be free, critical, and not rely on external authority? Can it take into account what has been learned since 1850, and go with tentative explanations which best fit the data-- just as science does?

The public knows that science can be validated and that authoritarian religious claims can not. Science’s focus is the intelligibility of world; religion’s focus is the world’s meaning. To be credible, belief has to be as intelligible as science. Belief, like science, has to be reasonable; i.e., based on experience. Religion needs to be able to justify itself in terms of content not source. The great need is for religion to outgrow its dependence on external authority and an external divinity.

Christianity has, in fact, continually adapted to contemporary experience and changing circumstances. St. Paul adapted the original Jewish experience of Jesus to the understanding of diaspora Jews. St. John’s gospel adapted it to the Hellenistic worldview. The “two Gregorys” and St. Basil (the famous Cappadocian fathers) adapted it to Neo-platonism in the 4th century. And in the Middle Ages, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas adapted it to Aristotle.

But Christianity did not adapt well to the Newtonian and Darwinian perspectives; it did not reformulate its vision in terms of the modern scientific worldview. That gap began to be closed, however, since 1950 in the academic world; but those efforts have never filtered down to the people in the pews. They and the public at large remain unaware that what their understanding of the Christian perspective needs to be updated.

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In the contemporary convergence of science and religion there are three areas of updating that need to be considered: 1) our understanding the world as it is, 2) our understanding the world as a cosmic evolutionary process, and 3) our understanding of communication to the world from its source.

Chapter 3: World as it is. [STASIS]. WHY ANYTHING? There must be a Source, utterly other, mystery, abyss, ultimate, self-existent; somehow containing diversity and rationality and being at least personal. [I.e., the wo-wei, no-thing-ness from which comes every thing, Mother of all that is....]

NB Swimme-Berry’s goal of the cosmos: “fullness of differentiation, the deepest subjectivity and the most intimate communion.”

Peacocke’s statement that there must be a source as the answer to why is there anything ISN’T sufficient. It gives an answer to “Where did it come from?” but not to “What’s it FOR?” I.e., what’s missing here is relationship (communion) and I think it precisely this lack which causes Peacocke to say “we can’t know anything about the eschaton.” If source is at least personal, and produces diversity and subjectivity, it surely also is interested in relationship/communion. Surely....

TIME. Thought of as a linear sequence to which God is present at every point. A good model, but not valid if future doesn’t yet exist (and so is not yet knowable except in terms of what’s possible). Need: to understand the Ultimate as not outside time but relating to us (and all) within it.

      

Time has a direction; entropy is time’s arrow. Clearly, new things emerge, new levels of complexity result (the brain and human consciousness included), which are thus aspects of the cosmos. I.e., aspects of the Ultimate manifesting and remaining steadfast (faithful in the OT sense: merciful) as new things emerge.

This is the basis for any eschatology, but no facts are available [says Peacocke, while I think it may be possible to reason to some eschatological realities just as it’s possible to reason to some fact re the Ultimate based on the existence of the world. Something like: if things exist as manifestation of the Source, they will persist.]

ONE and MANY. World is unity and diversity, with levels of complexity, each new level of organization not reducible to lower level things. There is sociology, psychology, biology, chemistry, physics... none of which is reducing to lesser organized level. Wholes act differently than their parts. New entities not needed (life added to matter, psyche/mind/spirit added to body).

[NB: Neither is there needed an entity “culture” added to human social groupings; it is “simply” their activity at a complex level, just as mind-soul is complex activity of brain-body and life is complex activity of organized matter. I.e., what emerges isn’t a new thing so much as a new complexity of activity. {Thus church, eucharist and transfigured cosmos can be understood as new emergent levels of activity to humanity and culture and thus cosmos.}]

WHOLE-PART (TOP-DOWN) CAUSATION. There are many dissipative systems, where order emerges from chaos: boiling water, genes, social activities, economics, etc. The newly emerged whole has its own ways of acting, not reducible to the parts of the whole. If creation is a whole, its source is acting from within it. No need for external intervention, from outside.

INFORMATION FLOWS FROM WHOLE TO PARTS. Science points in this direction for seeing world as a whole [“interconnected meaningful whole”], a system of systems, which is the Ultimate’s manifestation. Unpredictable events would be so even, then, to the Ultimate.

BRAIN, MIND, PERSON. Person conscious awareness isn’t a thing, an entity, but an activity at a very complex level of organization. Our own uniqueness [abyss, mystery] as persons who act via our bodies gives some idea of how the Ultimate acts via (from within) the world.

      

Again, just as we persons communicate with one another via the things of the world, so the Ultimate which is “at least personal” can communicate with us via the things of the world too.

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Chapter 4: World evolving. [DYNAMIS]. EVOLUTION. Jewish-Christian-Muslim beliefs all come from a static world [of Babylonian cosmology], such as Fall of Adam and redemptive-debt paid for by physical sufferings.

The dynamic worldview of modern-evolutionary science challenges this static perspective. It can be seen as threatening, but it is in fact a stimulus to creativity and growth toward a globally acceptable theology.

      

Darwin“ism” and the new cosmology show us a dynamic world and thus a dynamic creator. A theology that doesn’t adapt to this new situation is dead; can only become extinct.

TIME-SPACE/MATTER-ENERGY... LIFE... PERSONAL CONSCIOUSNESS... DURATION. In all this, are pre-human life-forms only by-products of the process? Or do they have value in themselves? Are they somehow manifestations of the Ultimate that are good and of significance in ways that we can hardly begin to make sense of.

NATURAL SELECTION. Not a struggle for survival, especially or even figuratively (says Peacocke), but involves things like good adaptability to environment, best use of food resources, best care of young and good social cooperation. Deaths of individuals is pre-requisite for genetic advance. No need for outside intervention for any of this.

CHANCE AND NECESSITY. There’s not just chance but also regularity (patterns, laws), so that life and psyche are inevitable, given enough time.

HUMANS. Because there was no golden age in the past and no “Fall”, the “work of Christ” needs to be re-thought in terms of forward movement, evolutionary transformation. The real issue is “Where should we be moving?”

ETHICS (BEHAVIOR). That social behavior is based on genes is a relatively new idea, but it’s an obvious aspect of evolution.

TRENDS?? Definitely. [Peacocke presents what in Swimme-Berry terms are called “diversity” and “subjectivity” but he doesn’t seem to see communion as an evolutionary goal.]

SUFFERING. Pain is inevitable result of nervous system and brains (needed for personal consciousness) and higher things need to incorporate lower into themselves. Older needs to give way to allow for new.

GOD AND WORLD. Thus, suffering is unavoidable and the only reasonable thing is to think the creator suffers via its expression as world. Since all birth and creativity takes much effort/pain, we by our suffering share in the creator’s suffering.

      

As co-creative creators, we share in the suffering of the creator in its self-giving (“self-emptying,” says Peacocke) which IS the world’s evolutionary development. This self-giving suffering is CREATIVE ACTIVITY, and somehow overcomes the evil which comes from human freedom.

RISK. Question: If creation is the Ultimate’s expression, what is being manifest by human evil? Answer: That freedom from the intentions of the creator is part of the intentions of the creator. Somehow, freedom even from the intentions of the creator, is a good. And thus human evil is somehow part of the intentions of the creator and in that sense somehow itself a good.

      

Whatever could that good be? The world’s source suffers via the world and via human freedom risks its own intentions, in demonstration of how willing it is to give itself. [How wonderfully this understanding is imaged in the epitaphios thrinos icon as image of the lamb slain from the foundation of the world!]

      

The primordial sacrifice is the creator’s self-giving even to risking its own intentions being violated.... Something like that. But there is also a gnostic/Gnostic interpretation, that the Ultimate as creator screwed up in wanting/needed evil due to human freedom. [No easy answers, still!]

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Chapter 5: God’s action in the world. PROBLEM. Judeo-Christian tradition believes God acts in world. How, without interfering from the outside? Question of how the Ultimate can act without interfering has been seriously studied in last 20 years; study instigated by Vatican Observatory (1987 Berkeley Center conference) is light-years away from popular Christian belief in miracles.

POST-MEDIEVAL VIEWS. Asks “What’s there? How do those things relate? Are there patterns?” This led to sense of mechanistic predictability, especially via Newton, astronomy, etc. But predictability is not as easy as once thought, on many levels (such as chaotic systems and quantum events).

WHOLE-PART INFLUENCE. Maybe the Ultimate influences the world in a whole-part (top-down) way; the action would be from within itself but as it is in relation to world; which is the LOGOS concept. People have believed God does communicate. How can we understand it?

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Chapter 6: The sound of silence. The ISSUE: How can we understand the widespread experience of divine communication in a way that it is not seen as something coming from “the outside”?

REVELATION. Human communication is always is mediated by things, including the brain. The same must be true of divine communication.

GENERAL REVELATION. The created in-process world itself is understood to be divine manifestation.

RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS. Communities and traditions have language and symbols available in art, thought, liturgy and devotional actions, etc., that can serve as the “things” for divine communication.

SPECIAL REVELATIONS. Some communications seem to serve to initiate communal experiences.

REVELATION and RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. Note that all these distinctions (above) are somewhat blurry, and they happen as well without as within established religious traditions. So the issue is: Can we understand the Ultimate as communicating personally in a top-down (whole-part) way?

The basic idea is that the personal communication takes place no differently than from a human person, via things and events that are perceived as meaningful.

      

So there could be meaningfulness at a new level of complexity (the way there can be consciousness from life-forms and life from non-living matter), and it would not be reducible to sociology or psychology or biology or chemistry, etc. (Call it “mystical”?) [OK, if what that means basically is “Not easy to talk about.”]

      

NB: No intervention from outside is needed, no non-natural mediation is called for, nothing “supernatural” is required. And it is real communication, via sounds, images, symbols, etc. (also in terms of the conditions of the brain activity, etc.)

[Peacocke needs a somewhat better section on kinds of religious experience. He’s a little vague on that; fuzzy.]

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Part III: Where all this takes us: attempt to validates humanity’s global religious experience via talk about religion/theology in light of 21st c science. Five chapters:

Plea for openness, world as non-dual, world as sacramental; logos, sophia and the uncreated energies; trinity, incarnation and grace.

Chapter 7: Plea for Openness. Several aspects of understanding of divine creator differ here from the more traditional ones, including the idea that the Ultimate is not seen as apart from but involved in the cosmic process and that the Mystery acts on the world and communicates with human persons from within rather than externally to the world.

For these abstract ideas to be accessible to personal and communal belief, they need to be enriched with images and symbols, rites and stories, art.... What’s here is addressed not to wobbly Christians but the general educated public, aware of science and its dynamic worldview, but often theologically uninformed.

      

Especially strong is the need for a dynamic understanding of Creator relating to the world which is consistent with what’s known from science of the cosmic evolutionary worldview.

      

Church services can only be meaningful is they relate to public truth, not to external religious authorities or outdate biblical interpretation. If Christianity is to be evangelical and catholic, it must be more open, radical, liberal, so that it can be respected as public truth for all humanity.

      

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2012 update: my notes end here, except for two bits of biography and the titles of the next four chapters:

Chapter 8: The World as Non-dual.

Chapter 9: The World as Sacrament.

Chapter 10: [participation via] Logos, Sophia and the Uncreated Energies.

Chapter 11: Humanity’s global religious experience is valid in terms of Xn understanding of Trinity, Incarnation and Grace.

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About the Author: The Center's 1999 Witherspoon Lecturer, Dr. Arthur Peacocke is a widely published biochemist and past chairman of the British Biophysical Society. Founder and current director of Oxford's Ian Ramsey Centre, Dr. Peacocke has devoted more than 25 years to exploring the relation of science to theology and his work on the attendant philosophic questions earned him the Doctor of Divinity from Oxford University. A priest of the Church of England and former dean of Clare College, Cambridge, he is a founder of the Science and Religion Forum in the United Kingdom as well as the Society of Ordained Scientists. His most recent books include: Christ and Prometheus? A Quest (1988); Encountering Marx: Bonds and Barriers between Christians and Marxists (1977); and The Faith We Confess: Ecumenical Dogmatics (1984).

Peacocke bio info: Dr. Arthur Peacocke was born in 1924. He is currently a Warden Emeritus at the Society of Ordained Scientists and Hon. Chaplain and Honorary Canon at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford. In 1973, he was awarded the Le Conte Du Nouy Prize, and in 1986 he became an Academic Fellow at the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science. He is the Vice President of the Science and Religion Forum and of Modern Church People's Union. He is also a Council Member of ESSSAT, The European Society for the Study of Science And Theology. In 1971, he was ordained as a priest in the Church of England.

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#87. Stardust's Imperative: Reinterpretation

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In our day we have "a new mode of religious understanding," as Thomas Berry says. And it's not thanks to our religious traditions, he emphasizes, but to science.

The religious traditions are part of the problem. I quoted Bede Griffith in post #86: "The different world religions-- Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam-- have themselves to recover the ancient wisdom, which they have inherited, and this now has to be interpreted in the light of the knowledge of the world which Western science has given us."

The context for our new mode of religious understanding is the recovery of what Berry calls our "awareness of spiritual communication with the natural world." It was the religious experience of our earliest human ancestors and we remain genetically coded for it today.

While this is obviously not easy for some to accept, modern science is far from being in contradiction to religious perspectives; it offers, in fact, a contemporary context for the re-interpretation of the basic perspectives of our religious traditions.

We are "recovering reverence," says Berry. "Evolution has become our sacred story."

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For a long time, the Western world didn't have a sacred story. We didn't even know we didn't have a sacred story! We were doubly estranged by both religion and science and, as a result, much of the Western world gave up on religion.

Secularists, agnostics, and atheists gave up on it completely, while those who describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious" gave up on its institutional forms. Those who remain in the traditional churches are in a different situation: they find themselves increasingly dismayed by their churches' irrelevance.

And then there are those of us who-- by personal inclination, curiosity, education, or stubbornness-- see something of great value in the old traditions and don't want to discard them. We want to see them in the new scientific context where they can once again be life-giving.

That's the topic of this post. Berry calls "reinterpretation." I've called it "Stardust's Imperative."

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"Stardust" is a faithful reader of this blog; over the last several years she has contributed many good comments to my posts. In response to one of them, I suggested recently she re-read posts #20 and #39. The details are complicated but the main idea isn't: with regard to a view which I'd pointed out to her of the Russian Sophiologist, Sergius Bulgakov, she said, "What a beautiful thought!"

Then she added, "Everything I go back to now gets reinterpreted through a new filter."

That's "Stardust's Imperative": to reinterpret everything-- all the religious teachings that have come down to us-- through the "new filter" of evolutionary science.

As I said in another context, "when the traditional Western religious teachings are reinterpreted in terms of the New Cosmology, the result is an even deeper, richer and more beautiful understanding than was available earlier."

Thomas Berry says that when we look at the data itself, "we begin to see a story of immediate significance." Big History, the largest cosmic perspective, "reveals the mysteries of the universe coming forth from the original flaring forth of primordial energy, then passing through a series of irreversible transformation episodes that have brought into being the visible world around us."

In our day, Stardust's Imperative is the imperative of all of us. We all have to join with Stardust, Thomas Berry, Bede Griffith, Michael Dowd, and many others who are on the growing edge of Western culture, so that we too can have "an even deeper, richer and more beautiful understanding than was available earlier."

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I want to give some examples of the "reinterpretations" Thomas Berry offers. But I want first to share an important thought about the process of reinterpretation itself.

Reinterpretation isn't just something for academics and scholars. It's part of everyday life. We do it all the time, because we know from personal experience that we see things differently when we understand them better. There's no reason to exclude our religious perspectives from this common human experience.

Beyond that, understanding old things in new ways is, for some of us, a special delight. It's exciting when we find that even our understanding itself is evolving. And one of the most significant things we come to understand is that, often, a new interpretation don't negate an older one but puts it in a larger context. It lets us see a bigger picture.

I think that's especially the case with regard to reinterpreting religious ideas in the new scientific context, but religion isn't the only area of life that needs reinterpretation as a result of new scientific findings. Science itself is constantly reinterpreting its own ideas.

Probably the most famous example is Einstein's theory of relativity. It's essentially a reinterpretation of the laws of gravity formulated by Isaac Newton back in the 17th century.

Newton's understanding wasn't wrong; we still experience gravity in everyday life just as he described it 350 years ago. But Newton's 17th-century-formulation is now understood in the larger, more-inclusive context of Einstein's laws of relativity.

That's a key idea to keep in mind with regard to Stardust's Imperative: reinterpretation lets us see older ideas in a newer and bigger context, but it doesn't negate them.

So we don't need to be afraid to look at earlier teachings in the larger context of modern science. Just as Einstein's laws of gravity don't contradict the earlier ones formulated by Newton but give us a better understanding of them, so the perspectives of the New Cosmology don't contradict the basic teachings of Western religion but put them in a much larger and more inclusive context.

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In his 1985 essay "Christian Cosmology," Thomas Berry lists several big ideas from the Judeo-Christian tradition which can be reinterpreted in light of the New Cosmology. Here he's speaking to a Christian audience and so uses familiar Christian terms: "biblical revelation, the incarnation, redemption and the shaping of the Christian community."

Because the idea of community applies equally to all the Earth's religious traditions, East and West, I want to describe Berry's ideas about community first. From my experience I know that a sense of community is especially relevant to those who describe themselves as atheist, agnostic or secular or who think of themselves as "spiritual but not religious."

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Sociologically, we know that community is a fundamental human need, and that our understanding of community, Christian or otherwise, centers on the idea of person.

Asian cultures are often criticized for not valuing human individuals as much as the Western society does, but both of the Earth's largest cultural groups, East and West, have something of importance to learn about persons in light of the cosmic perspective provided by modern science.

In Berry's words, "Persons are a cosmic phenomenon-- both a part of the process and also the process itself come to self-awareness." And it's this cosmic perspective, he says, which allows us to see our proper role in the universe. It allows us to see what persons are "for."

That role (our job, our common task) is, in Berry's words, "to return the universe to itself and to its numinous origins." And he points out that in doing this work we are dependent "for every aspect of our intellectual insight, spiritual development, imaginative creativity and emotional sensitivity" on the findings of science.

Berry's terms for the three main aspects of the cosmic process are differentiation, subjectivity and communion. And he notes that while differentiation-- the diversity of persons, "individuation" in Jungian terms-- is a central aspect of the cosmic process, our industrial society requires standardization. So do our religious institutions.

From the point of view of cosmic evolution, however, persons simply are not subject-able to standardization. So it's only when we have a clear understanding of the individual person as a cosmic phenomenon that we can have good sense of a community of persons.

It's in this perspective, says Berry, that the idea of "community" can be recognized as nothing less than the very goal and purpose of the cosmic process. In his words, "the ultimate community is the whole universe together." And in an extremely significant comment, he adds that "it is the task specifically of the Christian community to articulate and move the world towards the achievement of this purpose."

What a profound understanding of Christian community this is! For me, it's an outstanding example of the recovery of a buried treasure. It's an understanding of "church" utterly un-like that of the authoritarian patriarchal institution to which that name is usually given.

It is the sacramentum mundi of Karl Rahner and the mysterion tou cosmou of Raimundo Panikkar which I wrote about in several earlier posts. It is the Christian community's ancient understanding of itself as a sacred sign, a sacramental symbol of the ultimate community which the New Testament calls the "recapitulation" of the universe, "God all-in-all," the fullness of God in everything (Ephesians 1:10).

This is, indeed, a profound understanding. And Berry's understanding of the idea of "redemption" in the evolutionary context of the New Cosmology is no less profound.

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Berry observes that at every level of the cosmic process-- from sub-atomic particles uniting in stars to form atoms of the chemical elements... to single-celled life-forms uniting to form the Earth's plants and animals... even to parents sacrificing themselves for the sake of their children-- "redemption" or "sacrifice" in some sense is always made at one level "for the emergence of a higher level."

In the static-dualistic worldview of the past, redemption was understood as a legal, even a financial, agreement: "a price must be paid." But in the dynamic evolutionary perspective we can see that "sacrifice"-- Berry even says "self-immolation" at one point-- is "a primary necessity in activating advanced modes of being in the cosmic process."

From the world's creation described in the book of Revelations as the sacrifice of "the lamb slain at the foundation of the world," to the life-story of Jesus, and to every parent changing a diaper at this moment anywhere in the world-- redemptive sacrifice is understood to be a primary necessity. It's a totally valid understanding of how the world works. We don't need to limit our understanding of redemption to the work of one person or one group of persons.

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The same is true with regard to our understanding of "incarnation" and "revelation." In the perspectives of the New Cosmology, we can see that divine incarnation doesn't need to be limited to the life a single individual, nor does divine revelation need to be limited to the sacred stories of only one of the Earth's cultural groupings.

By whatever name-- the familiar Logos of John's Gospel, the less familiar Greek terms such as theosis or Raimundo Panikkar's cosmo-the-andric unity, even the quite unfamiliar Bogochelovechestvo of the Russian Sophiologists-- the divine-human unity expressed in the gospel story of Jesus makes good sense in terms of the New Cosmology.

So does the Passover story, the story of the Great Escape from Egypt recorded in the book of Exodus. Berry calls this biblical revelation "the historical unfolding of the divine in human history." He also notes that, as I've mentioned in several previous posts, it is the very source of our contemporary evolutionary cosmology.

Isn't this a fascinating thought, that Western religion gave us science, and western science is now returning the heart of Western religion to us!

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The main thought I want to share in this post is that "Stardust's Imperative" really is an imperative. We simply cannot go back to the older dualistic religious perspectives-- any more than we can try to understand the universe or our human world without Einstein's ideas about relativity and Darwin's understanding of natural selection.

And just as Einstein's 20th-century theory of relativity doesn't invalidate but deepens our understanding of the law of gravity that Newton formulated in the 17th century, the same is true of Berry's understanding of our need to see traditional Christian teachings in the larger context of the New Cosmology.

Berry sums up these thoughts nicely: "We need to see that revelation, incarnation and redemption are primarily for the entire universe," he says. "And not," he adds, "for any [specific] individual or group."

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That sounds good, but does "Stardust's Imperative"-- reinterpreting everything in our religious teachings through the "new filter" of evolutionary science-- really result is an "even deeper, richer and more beautiful understanding than was available earlier"?

I think it does. The new scientific cosmology helps us recover the most basic aspects of the Western world's religious traditions as they were understood before Western society became "doubly estranged" from the natural world and our spiritual communication with it.

One example that immediately comes to mind is the earliest known description of a gathering of a Christian community. The ancient text says that when the early Christians got together, they began by reading the scriptures and sharing news of the lives of their fellow believers. "And then," it says, "we stand up and pray for all the world."

This ancient practice is explicitly continued in the Christian communities of the Eastern churches. When they gather for what they still call their service of thanksgiving-- "returning the world to its numinous source" in Berry's language-- they pray, "We offer You what is Yours, on behalf of all and for all."

So from a traditional Christian point of view, the Eucharist is quite literally a work (a "liturgia" in Greek) done "for the entire universe." 

From the point of the view of the New Cosmology it is no less. An awkward but I think helpful way to say it is that it is the actualization by a community of cosmic persons of their cosmic role in the cosmic process.

We don't need to refer only to ancient texts and liturgical practices to appreciate this central understanding of service and its sacramental expression in the Eucharist. A contemporary example appears in a recent (January 27, 2011) New York Times article by a two-time 

Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, Nicholas Kristof.

Kristof is reporting on a complex situation in Phoenix where a bishop excommunicated first a nun, and then an entire Catholic hospital-- by refusing permission for the eucharist to be celebrated there. He quotes Jamie L. Manson, columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, who expresses beautifully the ancient understanding of eucharist and its connection with service "on behalf of all and for all."

"Though they will be denied the opportunity to celebrate the Eucharist, the Eucharist will rise out of St. Joseph’s every time the sick are healed, the frightened are comforted, the lonely are visited, the weak are fed, and vigil is kept over the dying."

Clearly, the "new mode of religious understanding" which is ours thanks to science helps us to recover even the most basic teaching of Jesus.

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The New Cosmology also helps us recover the confidence and trust that is the very essence of our personal lives when lived according to the religious perspective of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

When we recognize that "evolution is our sacred story" we see not only that creation is still in process and that we are co-creative participants 
in it, but also that we have an especially good way to understand our personal participation in that story: "passover."

As the text of the Passover Seder says, "this story holds true for us today." The Passover story tells us that we have nothing to lose in the long run, that we don't need to be afraid.

As I see it, Stardust's Imperative-- reinterpretation in light of the New Cosmology-- isn't something to shy away from. It's exciting.

sam@macspeno.com

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#23. Ontogenetic Development

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I called my previous post (#22) "The Other Half of Person" to stress the point that there's more to the mystery of our selves than our individual consciousness.

The focus of many of my earlier postings has been the evolutionary and neurological perspectives of contemporary science which allow us to see that our individual consciousness is not something separate from, but an integral part of, the evolving universe-- and that each of us, as an utter unique expression of the cosmos process, is called to make a personal contribution to it.

In each entry I've also tried to show how I see these scientific findings about ourselves as individuals converging with some of humanity's core religious values.

Now I want to expand the context to include the social, communal and relational aspects of the mystery which we are, the "other half" of our reality as persons.

===

Some readers may feel that seeing ourselves in a cosmic and evolutionary context is already a big enough challenge.

But that immense transition in human self-understanding, which began at the end of the 19th century and is essentially a shift from the static worldview of past centuries to the evolutionary perspectives of modern science, also includes the shift from a personal and private to a social and communal self-understanding.

Just as the words "science" and "religion" mean something more nowadays than they once meant, so does the word "person." So I want to look now at another area within the Biogenetic Structuralism perspective, one which especially helps us to understand the social and communal aspects of ourselves: cultural anthropology.

When we see person in the broadest possible scientific perspectives of cosmic, biological and cultural evolution, the resulting communal and social aspects of our self-understanding allow us an even richer sense of the convergence of contemporary scientific perspectives with the insights of humanity's core religious insights than we have if we are looking only at the individual aspects of the mystery of person.

===

But the findings of cultural anthropology are even less familiar to the general public than those coming from contemporary brain and nervous system studies.

I'm often asked, for example, by persons who know of my interest in evolution whether I think evolution is still going on in human beings. When I answer, "Yes; it's called culture," I usually get blank stares. So the transition I'm making now in these blog entries, from an neurological to an anthropological focus, may not be clear to readers.

The problem is that we're just not attuned to thinking in terms of culture, let alone thinking of humanity's cultural development as a continuation of the cosmic evolutionary process that produced stars, galaxies, plants, animals and ourselves. It's tough enough for many to grasp the fact that human consciousness has emerged from the cosmic process; seeing cultural development as also part of the cosmic process is even more challenging.

But as I said in the previous post, it's only when we can see that the social-relational nature of personal consciousness is also a part of evolution of the universe-- from the Big Bang and the formation of galaxies and stars to the emergence of life on Earth and the development of the primate brain-- that it becomes clear why culture is such an important concept in the converging perspectives of science and religion.

===

In moving from an neurological to an anthropological focus we need to keep in mind the distinction between the primal emergence of conscious awareness among our animal ancestors several million years ago and the growth and development of individual consciousness as it takes place in every human being today.

That first kind of conscious emergence is called "phylogenetic." It's what happened in that group ("phylum," in a broad sense) of mammals out of which primates and eventually humans arose. It's the transition from the second to the third stage of complexity in the cosmic process as it takes place on Earth.

To make sense of phylogenesis we need to think about primate brain structures in terms of things like the cognitive extension of prehension and cognized environment, and I have talked about those concepts in many previous blog entries. The key idea is an understanding of the neurological structures of the primate brain which allow for the adaptation of the individual and the species to the external environment.

Biogenetic Structuralist researchers use words like "assimilation" and "accommodation" to describe what's happening in the brain of individuals as they take in and/or adjust to what's encountered in their world. And they note that it's always for the sake of survival.

The second kind of conscious emergence, which the Biogenetic Structuralists refer to as "ontogenetic" development, has to do with the normal pattern in the development of self-awareness in individual human beings. ("On" and "ens" are Greek and Latin for "being.") It's this ontogenetic development-- ontogenesis-- that's a principal focus of cultural anthropology.

===

While the findings of neuro-physiology help us to understand the phylogenetic emergence of human consciousness, the perspectives of cultural anthropology help us to understand the emergence and growth of self-awareness as it occurs in every human being.

That phylogenetic emergence was a transition from the second to the third level of complexity in the cosmic process, which first happened, probably in Northeast Africa, about two and half million years ago. In contrast, the ontogenetic development of human consciousness begins with the embryological development of every human child and continues throughout the life of each of us.

Biogenetic Structuralism sees three distinct stages to the ontogenetic development of consciousness. And, as I've said earlier, it's here-- in our perception of the growth and development of the "other half of person"-- that the convergence of understandings from the human sciences and from global humanity's religious insights begins to take on an even richer and fuller sense than previously.

So my focus in the next few blog posts will be on cultural anthropology, especially on how the Biogenetic Structuralist researchers see the development of human consciousness in terms of social and communal relationships taking place in three separate stages.

===

To get a good sense of our communal and relational aspects we need to see something of how personal consciousness develops in each individual, of what ontogenesis is all about.

As I've said, the Biogenetic Structuralist perspective sees it taking place in three stages. And even from the brief descriptions of these stages which follow it becomes immediately apparent that they are of great significance in terms of global humanity's religious perspectives.

It might be better to call the stages "phases" since, while they are sequential, there's also a great deal of overlap.

And of course, as with everything connected with Biogenetic Structuralism-- or indeed with any specialized branch of science-- there's a lot of jargon to deal with. "Ontogenesis," as a term for the growth and development of personal consciousness, is a good example. And you may remember from earlier postings that these researchers like to use the Greek term, gnosis, for consciousness itself. They also use the term neuro-gnosis to emphasize that it's the structures and functions of the nerve cells in the brain which are the basis for our conscious gnosis.

So our topic here is ontogenetic neuro-gnosis-- or even neuro-gnostic ontogenesis. (It's no wonder these scientific findings haven't filtered down to the popular level!)

And even finding simple and clear names for the three stages seems to have been a problem.

Biogenetic Structuralists refer to the first phase of ontogenetic development as "received gnosis" but they also talk about it as "beliefs." The second stage of personal conscious development is simply called "experience" or "personal experience." And the third phase is referred to as "transpersonal" or "contemplative" experience.

Needless to say, that word "contemplative" will rings bells for anyone interested in religion and spirituality. I hope it can serve for now as a hint, at least, of the extent of the convergence of the perspectives which I think can be found in Biogenetic Structuralism's understanding of cultural anthropology and humanity's religious traditions.

===

I will describe those stages or phases in the ontogenetic development of our personal self-awareness within the cultural context in the next few posts.

Meanwhile, I want to step back a moment to emphasize that we need to keep in mind that we're trying to see that ontogenetic development of each human individual in the very largest context possible: nothing less than the entire cosmic process as it takes place at three levels of increasing complexity.

I spelled out that long view in post #8 (Background to Biogenetic Structuralism) and more specifically in post #16 (Our Own Inner World). Here's a quick review.

The first level is that of matter: from the Big Bang and the evolution of galaxies, stars and planets. The second level is that of life: the emergence of life on Earth several billion years ago and the development by way of fish, reptiles and mammals, of the primate brain. And the third level of complexity is that of mind: the emergence of personal self-awareness several million years ago.

As I've said above and stressed in the previous blog entry, we also have to take into account the fact that there's an "other half of person," what we call it "culture"-- our social, communal and relational side.

And we need to keep in mind that, from the anthropological perspective, "culture" means whatever humans do that's not controlled by our genes and instincts.

It includes anything and everything that needs to be "passed on" from more experienced persons to the younger and less experienced for the survival of life: all the learning, skills and information which need to be passed on precisely because they are not part of our instinctual or genetically-based behavior.

My purpose in reviewing this "largest possible context" for human cultural development is to make the point that it's only when we can see ourselves in this very large cultural context that we can understand our place in the scheme of things specifically in terms of dealing with our contemporary concerns. I have in mind things such as equality, peace and justice issues and environmental problems.

The issue is still life's survival, just as it was in the original phylogenetic emergence of consciousness several million years ago.

When Al Gore acknowledged the Nobel Peace Prize, he observed that the ecological crisis is a spiritual issue. "It is," as he said, "a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity."

I couldn't find a better example of the need for an understanding of the contemporary convergence of scientific findings and humanity's core religious insights.

sam@macspeno.com

#22. The Other Half of "Person"

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I entitled my previous blog entry (#21) "Struggling with Words" to make the point that in sharing my thoughts about the convergence of science and religion, I continually feel the need to say that neither "science" nor "religion" mean today what they once meant. I also feel the need to say the same about the word "person." That's what this post is about.

The immense transition in human self-understanding which began at the end of the 19th century was essentially a shift from the static worldview of past centuries to the evolutionary perspectives of modern science. Thanks to it, we can see that personal consciousness is not something separate from, but an integral part of, the evolution of the universe.

I've devoted many previous blog postings to spelling out some of the details of this awesome fact, that each human person is nothing less than an utterly unique expression of the universe become conscious of itself.

But I still struggle with using the word "person." Like the words "science" and "religion," the older 18th and 19th century meanings of "person" still persist today in the conventional understanding of popular culture. The ideal of person as a "rugged individual," left over from America's frontier days, is clearly inadequate for our times. It leaves out the communal and relational aspects of person, precisely those perspectives which are needed for dealing with contemporary problems such as social equality, peace and justice issues and the ecological crisis.

So each time I say "person" I feel the need to add that, just as "science" doesn't mean rationalism and "religion" doesn't mean dualism, so "person" doesn't mean individualism.

There's another half to person.

==

Readers won't be surprised to hear me say that in struggling to express a fuller understanding of person I've found the Biogenetic Structuralist view especially useful.

Just as the combined neurological and anthropological perspectives of Biogenetic Structuralism help us to see the place of individual persons in an evolutionary perspective, so it also allows us a much better sense of the communal and relational aspects of the mystery of personal consciousness. It attempts to understand persons in the broadest possible scientific perspectives of cosmic, biological and cultural evolution.

It's those cultural aspects that I find especially challenging here. Just as we don't yet have good words to talk about post-rationalist science and post-dualistic religion, so we also still lack an appropriate language to talk about the post-individualist understanding of person.

As I said in the previous post, "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."

Even with that statement I feel the need to add that by "contemporary" I mean a growing edge understanding, one that includes the communal and relational aspects of the mystery of person and not the conventional assumptions of the media where "person" seems to mean nothing more than the ego-centric personalities of politicians, sports figures and the celebrities of the entertainment world.

Ours is such an individualistic society that the very idea that there might be something beyond the ego-stage of personal development is incomprehensible to many. And yet if we don't have a good sense of the communal-cultural nature of person-- of our communion with others and of our inter-connectedness with all things-- we have only half a sense of our own personal reality.

So what I hope to do in the next few entries is to take the ideas about person which I've presented in the earlier postings to the next step: to emphasize, with help from the perspectives of Biogenetic Structuralism, our communion, connectedness and inter-relatedness with all things. It's here that I find the convergence of science and religion to be most explicit.

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A key idea in an understanding of this "other half of person" from the Biogenetic Structuralist perspective is that the development of human consciousness takes place in three clearly defined stages. Seeing these stages as Biogenetic Structuralism sees them is particularly helpful in understanding the communal-cultural aspects of our personal existence.

The Biogenetic Structuralist view offers insights which simply are not available in either the mechanistic-rationalist perspectives of 19th century science or in the static worldviews of dualistic religion.

I hope to spell out those stages of personal consciousness development as Biogenetic Structuralism sees them and to offer an interesting example of their convergence with the emerging sapiential-religious perspectives in the next posting.

Before that, I feel the need to say a few words about the term "culture" from an evolutionary perspective. It's a word we take for granted and one I've used frequently without trying to spell out its meaning, but a clear idea of what "culture" means as it's used in the human sciences is a big help in understanding the religious aspects of "the other half of person."

===

"Culture" obviously refers to something more than attending operas or visiting museums. In the broadest sense, from the point of view of anthropology, "culture" refers to everything humans do that's beyond what's controlled by our genes and instincts.

The neurological basis of culture is the understanding which Biogenetic Structuralism expresses by its jargon term cognitive extension of prehension. I tried to spell out that concept in some detail in posting #12. The main idea is that because of the human brain's specific structural developments beyond that of other primates, humans can function in such a way that we have a certain amount of freedom, which the other primates lack, in our responses to whatever we encounter in our external environment.

It is a limited but real freedom from an automatic or instinctive response to the threats and opportunities encountered in our world. It accounts for our spiritual nature and for all of our specifically human characteristics such as language, technology and creativity. It also accounts for our relationships with one another and for our behavior in groups-- indeed, for all that's meant by human culture.

A traditional anthropological definition of culture is "passed on learning." It refers to skills and information needed for survival which older, more experienced persons pass on to the younger and less experienced. It has to be passed on precisely because it's not part of our instinctual or genetically-based behavior.

A common example is the fact that even as three-year-olds we seem to have a clear aversion to spiders; it's "in our genes." From a very young age we tend to be cautious about such potentially dangerous creatures in our external environment. But electricity is a recent technological invention and three-year olds don't have an in-born aversion to playing with electrical wires. They have to be taught to avoid them. That's culture.

And it's "culture" in this sense that's what I mean by the "other half of person." Even from that common example it's clear that culture involves communal relationships. What's easy to overlook is the fact that such communal relationships are biological components of the evolutionary process.

We need to see that culture evolves just as planets and stars do. The "other half of person" is this dynamic-evolutionary communal-cultural nature of human consciousness. It's only when we can see that the communal nature of personal consciousness is a part of cosmic evolution that it becomes clear why culture is such an important concept in the converging perspectives of science and religion.

===

Everyone with a sense of history knows that culture evolves. We know, for example, that our early human ancestors learned to hunt cooperatively in groups, that Paleolithic hunting camps evolved (roughly eight thousand years ago) into settled agricultural villages, and that those Neolithic villages eventually evolved (roughly four thousand years ago) into the earliest cities of the civilization period. In this sense, we easily can see the developmental nature of global human culture.

But I want to say something more here, something even larger: we need to see humanity's communal-cultural evolution as itself part, and indeed a significant part, of the entire cosmic process-- from the Big Bang through the evolution of galaxies and stars to life on Earth and the development of the primate brain and the emergence of personal self-awareness.

And as I see it, it's only when we have this sense of human cultural development within the broadest cosmic context that the insights of the core of humanity's religious perspectives begin to make a great deal of sense. It seems to me that a contemporary understanding of the convergence of science and the sapiential religious perspective depends on our seeing human culture on Earth as part of the evolution of the universe.

===

For example, there clearly are aspects of humanity's sapiential perspective, such as the pre-Christian idea of the resurrection of the dead, that make some sense in terms of a neurological understanding of our relationship with the physical universe. I offered an example in the previous blog entry (#20), where I pointed out the similarity between the Biogenetic Structuralist concept of cognized environment and theological understanding of Sophiologist Sergius Bulgakov with regard to the possible meaning of bodily resurrection. Even though they are coming from very different starting points, they seem to share a common insight into how personal consciousness is related to the rest of the material cosmos.

Scientific rationalists would, of course, dismiss the very idea of resurrection as childish wishful thinking. But even the fact that humans desire a life beyond the grave seems to make some sense when we understand humanity's cultural evolution as part of "the other half of person."

An interesting article about this desire, written by the award-winning Canadian scholar Charles Taylor, professor emeritus of philosophy at McGill University, appeared in a recent issue of Commonweal.

In his article,"The Sting of Death, Why We Yearn for Eternity", Taylor notes that a recent sociological study of unbelievers indicated that the point of their “creed” hardest for them to hold to is the thought that there is no life after death. He observes that even many rationalists-- with their often dismissive attitude which assumes that our desire for eternity is simply a desire not to have our lives stop-- frequently want to have religious funerals.

But it's not that we just want life to continue, says Taylor. Rather, it's the permanent loss of our relationships which is most difficult to accept. As he puts it: "Joy strives for eternity."

When we recognize "the other half of person" as the communal and relational nature of personal consciousness resulting from cosmic and biological evolution, it looks like our very "yearning" for the continuation of our communion and relatedness may be itself an aspect of the cosmic process-- rather than simply reducible to childish wishful thinking.

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The doctrine about resurrection isn't exclusively Christian, of course, nor is the desire for the persistence of our relationships. But there are also some religious ideas specific to the Christian tradition which seem to me to become especially clear when we see them in terms of "the other half of person."

Probably the most significant is the very nature of the Christian tradition itself which, in its formative period, saw itself precisely as the communal growing edge of humanity's cultural development. That dynamic ecclesial perspective was lost to the western world for a thousand years, but it emerged again in 20th century theological thought with the recovery of the sapiential core of the Judeo-Christian tradition and it makes good sense in terms of the dynamic-evolutionary and communal-cultural nature of our personal consciousness. I hope to share some thoughts along those lines in future postings.

There are also some "in-between" ideas which are much more clear in light of our awareness of "the other half of person." I have in mind things like symbol, myth and ritual, and related concepts such as shamanism and cosmology.

I call them "in-between" ideas because, while we don't think of them as scientific concepts and we know they're not religious doctrines, they are in fact perennial aspects of humanity's global religious practice and they are in fact objects of study in the human sciences.

Much like what Charles Taylor calls our "yearning for eternity," however, the very idea of things such as symbolic rituals or shamanistic cosmologies tend to be dismissed as belonging to an earlier and more immature stage of human development. But they all make some sense in terms of the "other half of person" and Biogenetic Structuralism's understanding of the stages of personal development.

I see them as nothing less than central aspects of the contemporary convergence of science and religion and it was my life-long interest in such things, along with my life-long interest in evolutionary science, that made my discovery of the Biogenetic Structuralist perspective so fascinating.

===

I entitled my previous blog entry (#21) "Struggling with Words" to make the point that, as I said above, in sharing my thoughts about the convergence of science and religion, I continually feel the need to say that neither "science" nor "religion" nor "person" mean what popular culture takes them to mean. Even the word "culture" has a much more cosmic meaning than is clear from the term "popular culture."

This struggle to find good words is due to the immense transition in our human self-understanding which began with the 19th-century shift from the static to a dynamic-evolutionary worldview.

Today, we can see personal consciousness as an integral part of the dynamic cosmic process, and precisely for that reason we can see that there is an "other half of person"-- the cultural and relational aspects of the mystery of our personal awareness-- in a way former generations could not.

My whole purpose in writing this blog is to share what I see as the riches of these deeper perspectives with anyone interested, and to do so with that rather odd and mostly unknown branch of the human sciences which calls itself Biogenetic Structuralism and offers more help than anything else I know to spell out the convergence of science and religion.

===

So that's where I'm going with all this. With this posting on the "other half of person" I feel that I'm at a turning point in these efforts. It's a good time to say "thank you" to all who have offered encouragement so far with this project.

Thanks, especially, for hanging in there when you repeatedly come across phrases like cognized environment and cognitive extension of prehension and see them linked up with things like myth and ritual. I see them, in terms of Biogenetic Structuralism's understanding of the stages of personal development, as nothing less than central aspects of the contemporary convergence of science and religion.

So... Thanks, thanks, thanks!

sam@macspeno.com