Last night, the thunder followed the lightening with sonic booms, causing the dog to cringe in panic and me to think of monsters and gods. How simple and natural for our ancestors to think of natural events as the work of anthropomorphic gods! When the thunder booms or the earth quakes or the sea goes wild, the first instinct is to huddle and utter something to oneself - oh, please, not me! God or gods or monsters of weather, spare me!
But we have dispatched such beliefs, first through monotheism and now through science. Nothing to fear except the potential for destruction, no gods to placate, no God to pray to for deliverance. And such starts the essay by Ilia Delio in her essay from the book, "From Teilhard to Omega." In it, she outlines the philosophical atheist of our age - not the snide and arrogant materialist who sees all spirituality as bunk, but the reluctant atheist who honestly can't believe in a god or gods, but wants to and, most importantly, needs to. Most of us can no longer look to Zeus as the cause of the lightening, and many can no longer look to a transcendent god who judges our life from afar as a supreme and all-powerful superhuman. But without that personal touch, what is a person to do? How do we believe in something that is undefinable and as such, unreachable? In the present era of cause and effect rationality, how can we conceive of a god beyond such rules?
The solution, Delio believes, is found in Teilhard's belief that science should enter the core of religio-spirituality, and at the core of this core should be evolution. Building on the former essay (in yesterday's blog), Delio reiterates the notion that the static view of most traditional religions simply will not do in the face of evolution, and instead we should change our perspective of God to suit the new knowledge. While this might smack of heresy - and it did to the Catholic Church, which forbade the Jesuit Teilhard from publishing his works until Vatican II in 1962 - Teilhard and Delio resolve this simply; if it is God who has prefigured evolution (and novelty and eternal renewal) into creation, then it is through evolution that we get a clearer picture of God. Looked at from this way, we remain steadfastly spiritual and hardly iconoclastic - for weren't the prophets of the People of the Book intended to change things? And more: a god of evolution now changes from a clock maker who watches his machine run, to something with a "draw" or pulling force, much like gravity, who encourages growth in life to fulfill ITSELF - that is, God acts as a force to pull us towards IT in completion and unity, as we cooperate more and more through our cells, and then with other human beings and beings in general, and finally with All THAT IS.
This "draw" is called "love," that which, like human lovers, makes each more an individual just as it forms the two as one. For an atheist who wants to believe, the ground work is there, with all the pieces fitting, for in the final analysis, evolution did not HAVE to be; rather, it is a law built into the universe. For what purpose? For greater complexity and, in this, for greater unity, including the development of a conscious that could conceive this unity. And what lies ahead, then, would be higher complexity, higher consciousness, and greater unity. That is, we are led to hope and a new age, or Teilhard's "Omega Point." Not a bad start for the confused post-modernist and scientific mind. FK
But we have dispatched such beliefs, first through monotheism and now through science. Nothing to fear except the potential for destruction, no gods to placate, no God to pray to for deliverance. And such starts the essay by Ilia Delio in her essay from the book, "From Teilhard to Omega." In it, she outlines the philosophical atheist of our age - not the snide and arrogant materialist who sees all spirituality as bunk, but the reluctant atheist who honestly can't believe in a god or gods, but wants to and, most importantly, needs to. Most of us can no longer look to Zeus as the cause of the lightening, and many can no longer look to a transcendent god who judges our life from afar as a supreme and all-powerful superhuman. But without that personal touch, what is a person to do? How do we believe in something that is undefinable and as such, unreachable? In the present era of cause and effect rationality, how can we conceive of a god beyond such rules?
The solution, Delio believes, is found in Teilhard's belief that science should enter the core of religio-spirituality, and at the core of this core should be evolution. Building on the former essay (in yesterday's blog), Delio reiterates the notion that the static view of most traditional religions simply will not do in the face of evolution, and instead we should change our perspective of God to suit the new knowledge. While this might smack of heresy - and it did to the Catholic Church, which forbade the Jesuit Teilhard from publishing his works until Vatican II in 1962 - Teilhard and Delio resolve this simply; if it is God who has prefigured evolution (and novelty and eternal renewal) into creation, then it is through evolution that we get a clearer picture of God. Looked at from this way, we remain steadfastly spiritual and hardly iconoclastic - for weren't the prophets of the People of the Book intended to change things? And more: a god of evolution now changes from a clock maker who watches his machine run, to something with a "draw" or pulling force, much like gravity, who encourages growth in life to fulfill ITSELF - that is, God acts as a force to pull us towards IT in completion and unity, as we cooperate more and more through our cells, and then with other human beings and beings in general, and finally with All THAT IS.
This "draw" is called "love," that which, like human lovers, makes each more an individual just as it forms the two as one. For an atheist who wants to believe, the ground work is there, with all the pieces fitting, for in the final analysis, evolution did not HAVE to be; rather, it is a law built into the universe. For what purpose? For greater complexity and, in this, for greater unity, including the development of a conscious that could conceive this unity. And what lies ahead, then, would be higher complexity, higher consciousness, and greater unity. That is, we are led to hope and a new age, or Teilhard's "Omega Point." Not a bad start for the confused post-modernist and scientific mind. FK
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