Chapter eighteen (of 19)
Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin and the Evolution of Religion
About
Teilhard
Teilhard (tay AHR) de Chardin (d' shar DAA) was a Jesuit priest who was also a paleontologist whith many accompishments. One of the black marks on his record is his endorsement of the Piltdown Man hoax. But, he was honest and acknowledged his error. He was a prolific writer. His most famous work was a book entitled The Phenomenon of Man.
The Evolution of Religion
Religion has evolved with Homo
sapiens, just as tools, clothing, forms of fire, agriculture and transportation
have. They are all tools, contrived appendages separate from the body, used to
accomplish a purpose. The universe of ideas, the ground of which is the human
mind, is a world of tools or at least of token representations of them. The
mind-ground is the first tool.
Tools used by humans have always been
the focus of paleontological investigation of the development of human species.
Ancient human tools have been found all over the world. Modern human tools
cover Earth more completely than they used to. Humans themselves surround the
globe and their electromagnetic tools engulf it. We are eating the world with
our combination of human omnipresence, ubiquitous artifact and fertile
imagination that recognizes no limit.
All of our tools have developed from
simple, primitive forms that were sophisticated enough to accomplish their
elementary purpose and so were still quite advanced. Our most refined
inventions are exalted combinations of primal models. Religion is no exception.
Teilhard invented the idea of the
noosphere as a tool to dig into the concept of religion. He wanted to prove the
value of the concept of evolution, of natural selection, as a force in human
intellectual development. Every other idea evolves, so religion can be no
different. It is a part of the noosphere and develops with it.
Teilhard maintained that the noosphere
evolves along a trajectory that has a nonrandom component vector. He was a
scientist who loved physics. He was a paleontologist who loved ancient and
modern tools. Any tool has to have a purpose. If the purpose of the noosphere
as a tool is survival of the human species, where is survival leading us? What
is the direction of this nonrandom vector?
The noosphere shares in the tendency
of natural selection to favor more complex organisms as available environmental
niches become crowded and less hospitable.The direction of evolution of the
noosphere as an agent of the collective human organism, as part of a new
phenomenon, is dominated by the development of philosophy and religion,
especially of religion. Religion tries to know God or whatever profound alias
with which He is labeled.
The noosphere exists in space but also
exists in time. From man”s earliest days our ideas have influenced our actions
and caused us to fashion tools. Our mental tools included religious notions of
a simple Great Spirit or Godhead or of many gods that helped us to organize our
feelings and justify our self awareness. Those feelings about God or the gods
were shaped by the experiences of early man who was a hunter and his gods were
the animals he hunted.
As mankind moved into the agricultural
village environment from a nomadic and hunter/gatherer existence, experience
changed and religion followed suit. Fertility was prized and the fecundity of
the earth under the influence of the sun and moon was most important. Gods were
imagined that reflected those human needs.
When cities grew the need changed
again. A more cosmopolitan concept of religion was sought. A single Almighty
God was seen in the works of man and nature or a Ground of Being was felt as
the underlayment of man”s existence and by extension of all existence.
Simply put, today there are six main
perspectives of God: Christian, Judeo-Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Chinese
Traditional and Primal-Indigenous. They respectively represent a single united
triune God, a single unified God, a many faceted God, a Ground of All Being,
ancestral God and multiple gods or polytheistic God. As cultures and peoples
evolved their religions evolved with them and their notions of God got simpler
in some respects, moving from polytheism to monotheism, but more mystical,
foundational and consequential in other major ways.
Evolution of Homo sapiens has not
stopped, nor has cultural evolution ceased. The world of the works of Man, our
artifacts, parallels the world of our minds. Expanding knowledge and developing
ideas enclosed by the parallel evolving noosphere are following a trajectory
that has a particularly clear direction. Knowledge of God is the most important
vector component of this trajectory and it is clearly pointed at completion of
a vision, not depletion, a gain in resolution, not a coarsening.
All knowledge, all ideas, must
participate in the completion of the trend toward full and perfect knowledge of
God. The entire noosphere must evolve toward the point of fullest divine
recognition. Science and philosophy, mathematics and engineering, psychology,
biology and art as well as religion must converge on this Omega Point, which
exists in the indefinite, even infininite future. The Omega Point defines an
asymptotic limit.
The psychological analysis of religion
as Joseph Campbell's Myth must join this diffuse caravan.
The evolution of humans as psychological beings must join it. Evolution per
se must lead the way. To complement rather than critique ideas of God,
Joseph Campbell”s insight requires only that evolution itself cannot be wrong,
that it is meaningful, as long as humans survive! These trends lasting
millennia, indeed millions of years, cannot be explained away or ignored.
That evolutionary processes may be
occurring on trillions of planets throughout the universe right now means that
the process of acquiring more perfect knowledge of God invests space-time
itself with the property that it may evolve toward knowledge of God. Therefore,
the noosphere engulfs all existence. The entire universe trends toward full
acquisition and recognition of divine consciousness through sentient beings
everywhere throughout time.
The ecology of religions
A great metaphor for world religions
is of a vast climax forest. As a biologist specializing in paleontology,
Teilhard would have liked this comparison. As a prophetic nonconformist Jesuit
priest with profound respect for the natural world, he would have loved it.
A climax forest is a collection of
various kinds of living trees on land where they have lived for many
generations without substantial change. No neophyte tree types invade their
territory, no veteran types fade out. Along with the trees an established
undergrowth flourishes. The soil is stable, the microclimates are level and
constant. Insect life and other animal populations are diverse and prolific but
unchanging, invariant within fairly narrow limits. Evolution is restricted to
responses to geologic change, climatic change or incremental change in the
subsidiary flora and fauna reflective of these. The climax forest does not move
unless these factors somehow move it, but then only gradually over centuries or
millennia.
The climax forest is a little
ecological world of itself, a big natural terrarium. Its ecology resists
externally imposed disturbance, having internal buffer systems. Invading trees,
plants or animals have little chance of success there because all the available
niches are filled and cooperative and even symbiotic relations between
established species favor them over newcomers.
The arboreal types of world religion
stand in the midst of human intellectual life as a forest of spiritual
strength. They all furnish something vital to the mix, without the history of
which the structure would collapse and all of its elements die. Eliminate any
and chaotic invading species would overcome it and establish foreign colonies
incapable of providing any sense of soul, any feeling of humanity. Together
they do work and evolve slowly toward an ever increasing total consciousness of
God, however He may be called. There is a force at work here that is contrary
to entropy and allied with Ilya Prigogine”s non-equilibrium
thermodynamic dissipative process of self‑organization.
This force moves the evolution of
consciousness to higher stages, toward God. It may as well be called the Holy
Spirit. The next step on Earth will be to completely unify this consciousness
and globalize it. This higher consciousness will not become Homo machina, but
Homo fraternalis, a feeling of family, a sense of sister- and brotherhood
between every individual around the planet.
The religions of the world provide the
phenomenon of human consciousness with multiple lenses, periscopes, microscopes
and telescopes whereby a pure foundation of being or a both imminent and
transcendent divinity can be viewed from multiple perspectives. This many eyed
viewing will be available to everyone who is tolerant enough to overcome
nearsighted blindness and see across the cosmos to the united lands within. God
cannot be known to us apart from Revelation. But we certainly can see him by
studying the forest and its whole ecology, meaning its undergrowth of science
and technology as well as its spiritual timber.
This means that Revelation is ongoing and is largely embodied by studies of
both Science and Religion.
Earth is covered by forests of antennae and
surrounded by our electromagnetic transmission signals that help to interconnect
the organism that this climax community has become. We are not confronted with
a choice of whether to characterize and categorize human development according
to any predetermined procrustean knowledge framework. We are presented with an
opportunity to recognize a phenomenon representative of a new paradigm wherein
evolution in general and the trend of all human knowledge in particular has a
preferred direction, a nonrandom vector, an axis pointed at God. We will employ
greatly more sophisticated efforts to open-endedly redefine and rerefine His Word. The Human Phenomenon soon shall not
even attempt to bind God.
Some will like this metaphor, some
will not. It is only one metaphor of many that may be profitably applied. Each
one offers a fragment of truth. Each one should be accepted with suspended
disbelief until the whole class of such metaphor is understood. When
connotations of as many as possible of all this potential metaphor are known
and felt, pure Truth will out. God lives.
