Words&Dirt

“‘I may have to come back,’ I said.  ‘But it won’t be just to swop gags.  It will be because I find something out that needs talking over.’

‘So you think I’m lying,’ he said savagely.

‘I think you have something on your mind.  I’ve looked at too many faces not to know.  It may not be any of my business.  If it is, you’re likely to have to throw me out again.'”

––The Lady in the Lake, by Raymond Chandler, pg. 25

“God in the Western tradition has two sides: the anthropomorphic and the cosmic.  God is a perfect symbol for transcendental inspiration, if we can get past the historical and mythic baggage that lingers.  The invention of God, and especially the single God that asks us to love not just ourselves or our own tribe but the entirety of humanity, has been extremely important for the survival of the human race at a time when increasing technological and organizational power continue to make war and genocide nightmarish possibilities.  However, interpreted narrowly, the Western monotheistic religions are also capable of generating the belief that only a subset of humans (the believers) are God’s chosen people, and even the belief that people go to heaven after they kill off the nonbelievers.  After all, God did it once with Noah’s Flood and also ordered genocides, according to the Old Testament.  In this sense the idea that some of us are ‘the chosen’ is the most outrageous statement ever uttered by humanity.

This dual nature of God certainly mirrors our own nature.  The coexistence of tribal anthropomorphism and a cosmically transcendent God in the Western religious tradition (and even in single belief systems and sets of scriptures) mirrors the coexistence of primitive instincts, moral sentiments, and higher consciousness in our mind.  Just as some people are unable to stop their craving for sugar and fat (formed in a previous environment of scarcity) even when food becomes plentiful, so have many followers of monotheistic doctrine, motivated by their instincts, become trapped in a bygone social environment within which their religious doctrine first emerged.  We can only conceive and communicate God in terms of our own mental categories.

The revolt against the dogma of an anthropomorphic God has been an ongoing saga since Athenian rationalistic thought, carried by Alexander’s troops, invaded the Near East.  The idea of natural evolution, and the evolution of human thought, continues to pose challenges to dogmatic interpretations of Christianity and other great Western historical religions.  Western religions’ anthropocentrism (a belief that humanity is the highest creation of God) also remains a stumbling block in the controversy over Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Enough ink has been spilled over the emotionally charged issue of creation versus evolution (including recent ‘intelligent design’ variants of creationism) by erudite thinkers.  But what is seldom recognized is that theology itself exhibits the same dynamics of selection and replication as in the biological and cultural spheres.  Just like the continuous development of Darwin’s theory itself, development of theology was driven by external factors as well as internal conflict between its own proper ideas.

For example, in the Old Testament, the soul is simply life itself, residing in the blood and disappearing at death.  Christianity, however, anchored itself to a different sort of soul, an immortal one that faced eternal salvation or damnation.  As an earliest example of the synthesis of religion and science, the early church fathers found in the Greek physician Galen’s work a solution to this contradiction.  There could be a lower soul residing in the liver and the heart, while the empty ventricles of the head house the immortal soul that avoids the corruption of the weak, mortal flesh.  As another example, the theologians of the first three centuries of Christianity expressed many ideas that after the fifth century would have been condemned as heretical.  It is a great irony that the evolutionary principle, while still facing persistent strong opposition from many Christians, is today being applied to offer a clear explanation of the success of the Judeo-Christian religion in the growing literature of the evolutionary psychology of religion.  In contrast, the search for the root cause of the Muslim world’s weaknesses inevitably ends in its unwillingness to evolve and adapt.

As Alfred North Whitehead pointed out, when a new scientific theory supersedes an old one, it is always regarded as a triumph for science and never as a defeat, even though the new idea may come from outside the scientific community.  So why should religion not adopt the same attitude when an old doctrine has to be abandoned?  Actually, some theologians have always thought that the principles of faith are eternal, but the expression of these principles requires continual development.

The tension between the scientific democratic principle and ‘the tyranny of the majority’ in a true democratic state is a crucial limit of Western wisdom.  How can we overcome the limits of our spiritual tradition while relying on them for inspiration?  How can we continue to believe we are ‘the chosen ones’ while attempting to overcome ourselves?  This is a challenge we will touch on again and again.”

––Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential: A Cosmic Vision for Our Future Evolution, by Ted Chu, pg. 63-5