Perennis

I have commented before on my willingness to accept the general facts of biological evolution. I am a theistic evolutionist, and have written quite a bit about “creationism” and how I think it does a disservice to religion in general and Christianity in particular.

Although I’ve defended the “evolution” part of theistic evolution, I think perhaps I should now devote a bit of time to defending the “theistic” part of the set. Why do I think we need theistic evolution? Isn’t plain old evolution through natural selection enough to explain the facts?

No, I don’t think it is.

It’s quite true that given reproduction, variation, and the survival of the fittest, evolution can make a convincing case on how biological change over time can and has occurred. It can even do a reasonable job of explaining many seemingly “irreducibly complex” biological systems. But note what we just said… GIVEN reproduction, variation, and survival. That’s a lot to give. Evolution presupposes a set of laws operating on an already complete, self-organizing functional system that reproduces, seeks to survive, and produces (and reproduces) variations. And even the simplest such functional system imaginable is mind-boggling in complexity.

Biologists, in discussions of evolution, usually partition the question of the actual ORIGIN of functional life into an entirely separate question of “abiogenesis”. And while enthusiasts hint that breakthroughs have occurred or are immanent that will put abiogenesis on the same footing with evolution, I don’t see it. I have followed the topic with enthusiasm for decades. There are dozens of competing theories of abiogenesis, and almost no real progress on any real explanation of the origin of life. The various theories are obviously no more than very general outlines who’s details don’t look to be supplied any time soon.

I now confess to deciding to comment on this topic after reading an interesting essay called “Thinking Matter” by James Barham. To quote him:

Darwinians often complain that such criticisms are based on a misunderstanding. It is not chance, they say, that bears the explanatory weight in their theory, it is the selection principle. Natural selection is said to act as a ratchet, locking into place the functional gains that are made, so that each new trait can be viewed as a small incremental step with an acceptable probability. But what Darwinians forget is that the way a ratchet increases probabilities and imposes directionality is through its own structure. In the present context, the structure of the ratchet is simply the functional organization of life. Darwinians are only entitled to claim that the explanatory burden of their theory lies on the selection “ratchet,” thus avoiding the combinatorial explosion problem, provided that they also acknowledge that the structure of this ratchet consists precisely in the intrinsic functional correlations among the parts of the organism. But now they have merely assumed the very functional organization that they claimed to be able to explain, thus sneaking teleology in by the back door.

Evolution works so well, in other words, because it pushes all the really interesting cosmological questions back into the abiogenesis arena. We are encouraged to have faith that great progress will be made, and not to fall into the “God of the gaps” theory that took such a pummeling with biological evolution. But it seems to me, at least, that the problems with abiogenesis are of an entirely different order of magnitude.

Is the only solution an Intelligent Designer? Not necessarily. I believe that a promising line of philosophy in this regard is panpsychism. Briefly, this is the idea that natural intelligence, including such things as choice, purpose and striving, are an intrinsic part of matter itself, down to the subatomic level. Under this principle, matter tends to organize itself into life by its very nature.

This coincides with the mystic view that God is the root reality of all things. Seen from a mystical perspective, this self-organizing property of matter is the result of the many fragments of God consciousness striving to return to unity. God doesn’t create life, or design life. God IS life, bubbling up to consciousness through the matrix of matter.

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As some of my readers know, I’ve been a reader for some time of philosopher Ken Wilber. While the level of detail in Wilber’s system can be annoying, I find it’s always good to check any new ideas against his criteria, because if you don’t – you’ve usually missed something.

One of the key components in Ken Wilber’s philosophy is the notion of quadrants, and what it says is this: Most things can be looked at in four different ways. They can be looked at either from an inner perspective or an outer perspective, and they can be looked at as individuals or as members of a group or system – giving four perspectives. Like this:

The left-hand side is the interior perspective, the right-hand side is the exterior perspective. The upper half is individual, the lower half is collective.

The easiest example of these perspectives is a human being. We can look at a human being and study him from the outside (upper right) and study his brain structure, his biology and its underlying chemistry. This will give us a great deal of insight into him. We can also study his environment and how his organism interacts with the atmosphere, the food supply, the traffic flow, etc. (the lower right). We now have a different set of insights, equally important.

But this leaves out an entire half of the picture. What is it like to be this person from the INSIDE? What are his thoughts and feelings? What meanings does he attach to things? What does he feel? These questions are all in the upper left quadrant. Finally, what is his relationship to other people, seem from within the group? What are the values and beliefs of his family, his community or his social group?

Our tendency as modern people is to focus on only one quadrant (often the upper right) to the exclusion of or devaluing of everything else. All quadrants are important, and none should be reduced or folded into another or important insight is lost.

Ok, after this overly-long introduction, how do we apply these principles to spirituality? Let’s analyze first the case of the fundamentalist. This person may believe that he or she is deriving all of their truth from the Bible or the Koran. But in fact, they are focused almost entirely in the bottom left quadrant – the inner social group. They are relying – not on the Bible, but on the meanings and values attached to the Bible by their group. The idea that another group can attach entirely different meanings to the same Bible is confusing to them.

They are also unwilling to actually examine the Bible externally in the right-hand quadrants. Objective examination of the texts would show evidence of copy errors, redactions and multiple sources. Objectively comparing the text with history and science would show evidence of historical and scientific errors or ignorance. These objective incongruities are all ignored or pushed aside in favor of the values and beliefs of the group.

Certain kinds of skeptics, on the other hand, privilege the other quadrants. They assume that the ONLY value the Bible can possess is objective factual value. That it can be a useful source of poetry, mysticism, meaning and value is ignored. That it can be a basis for community interaction,  and social solidarity – providing a literary and mythic vocabulary is likewise unimportant. Their focus is entirely on the right-hand quadrants, particularly the upper right.

Those of us attempting to live spiritually in a modern world had best be able to live in all the quadrants at once. We must be open to the mystical, the poetic and the metaphorical, and value inner spirituality. We must be aware of the prejudices and preconceptions our group mentality may lead us into. We must be willing to accept the insights of objective insights of history, science and textual scholarship without blindness. But we must also be aware of the potential blindness of those who try to live only in the upper-right quadrant of the individual externals.

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Reverend Keith Campbell is an independent priest under the jurisdiction of the Home Temple and Bishop Lewis Keizer. A lifelong student of religion and philosophy, he undertook priesthood studies in the Home Temple School of Sacred Studies beginning in 2002 and was ordained first to the diaconate, and most recently to the priesthood on September 3rd of 2006. He is also a Reiki Master.

Reverend Keith operates a small private ministry involved in spiritual counseling, teaching, deliverance, healing, and providing the sacraments to small groups. If you are interested in any of these free services, please get in touch with us through our contact page.

Reverend Keith lives in Rohnert Park California with his wife and children, and offers a Sunday Mass at his home and at other local meeting places as needed.

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Just as a preemptive warning, my political leanings are confused and variable. If there is a perfect political philosophy out there, I haven’t found it yet. That said, I do have strong predilections for the so-called Zero-Aggression-Principle (ZAP) articulated by some libertarians and anarchists. There are various formulations, but the one by author L. Neil Smith is one of the snappiest…

“No one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being, nor to delegate its initiation.”

Sounds like something Jesus might agree with.

Just to be clear, this is a prohibition against INITIATING force. It doesn’t stop you from defending yourself, or apprehending and punishing someone who has already initiated force. Also, to be perfectly honest, the definition of “aggression” can get a little wiggy, and end up including a variety of non-actions, such as withholding from someone something to which they have a right.

But on the whole, I like ZAP. The problem is that, if we really take ZAP seriously, then much of conventional society and conventional government needs to be totally re-thought. Taxes, for example, as typically administered and collected, clearly violate ZAP. That, to my mind, is an argument in it’s favor

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Science rules out all religion except the highest. "

- D.E. Harding

As most of you know, I have a lot of sympathy with atheists. There’s something noble in many of them. Since childhood, most of them have been approached with crass literal interpretations of the religious metaphors of the Bible. They have heard irrational justifications for the divine misbehavior in the Old Testament. They have been told they are damned for wrongs they never personally committed. They have been offered contradictory and arcane explanations for why Jesus dying on the cross should matter to them. They have been called fools and swine when they found all these ideas unpersuasive. Ultimately they have been threatened with everlasting torture and finally shunned.

There’s a refreshing courage in someone who can simply tell the Christian culture it can take a hike. And buried under a reasonable skepticism is often a profound regard for the truth, however stark it may be. But… I find that I cannot be an atheist. There are simply too many important things in my experience that hard-line atheism either dismisses or disparages.

One of my favorite quotations from G. K. Chesterton goes like this: “We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.”

There are moments in my experience when rationality and positivism aren’t an adequate world view. In fact, to say they are inadequate is a terrible understatement. They seem, as Chesterton said, “dead”. When I try to get into the mindset of the hard-core materialism, I feel like the men in Eliot’s poem.

“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar”

The External World

“Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all in my hand, little flower—but if I could understand what you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is.” – Tennyson

I felt the dryness of rationalism first in relation to the external features of the cosmos. My first major in college was zoology, so I had a reasonably good scientific education. But time and time again I would find that science simply pointed me toward profound states of awe, but then couldn't follow me into the wonder of it. I can remember many of the exact experiences – Looking at a map of the universe in National Geographic. Staring up into a profoundly clear night sky at sea. Studying the ATP cycle in molecular biology. I would be left with a overwhelming sense of wonder and amazement, and nothing to this day changes my belief that these things are WORTHY of amazement – in fact demand it. It makes no difference to point out that the ATP cycle, for example, could have come about by “natural” processes. All this does is rearrange the wonder, not diminish it. It is just as inexplicable that it should be possible for “natural processes” to create such a marvel. The natural processes themselves become the wonder.

The Internal World

"The heart has reasons that reason knows not of. We feel it in a thousand things. . . . . do you love by reason?" – Pascal

Looking at my own inner life inspires more wonder. Is it really possible that so much meaning and joy and wonder arises in a cosmos who’s own interior is entirely dead and inert? No physical explanation of cognition even touches the inner experience. Joy, and spirit and art and ecstasy simply are not, to my mind, fortunate epiphenomena arising out of the cold physical facts of the world. They are more important to me, and more real to me, than the physical world itself, and it seems unavoidable that they arise out of the innermost nature of the cosmos itself. And so I suspect that not only in myself, but in the entire cosmos, “inner experience” is a fact, and that the whole cosmos has an “interior life” of some kind.

Aesthetic experience

When I experience natural beauty, look at a sunset or ponder a flower – or when I read a transcendent poem or look at a great painting – what is this profound feeling I experience in connection with the quality of these objects? It is really a matter of my mere subjective preferences – just as I like carrots but abhor beets? This seems a totally unsatisfactory answer for aesthetic experience. When we appreciate quality in the world, we are appreciating something real – something supremely important. This quality is recognized by a non-thinking process, and hence cannot be defined, tested for or recorded by an instrument. And yet… we know what it is.

Existence Itself

Nothing is more amazing than the fact that anything exists at all. It's difficult to really wrap our mind around just how bizarre the fact of existence is. I remember at least one occasion, however, when the whole foreign mystery of existence itself came crashing through to my consciousness. I felt trapped in some terribly foreign state of being, totally out of place. I suspect many have had similar experiences. WHY is there something rather than nothing – this seems the ultimate question, and it is impossible to feel the full weight of this mystery bearing down on your consciousness without sensing that something terribly important is behind it all. But, as Ken Wilber pointed out, strict materialism has nothing to offer to the mystery of existence beyond what he calls "the philosophy of oops" – a reluctance even allow the question of "why?"

Mystical experience

At the end of his life, Thomas Aquinas (the real one that is) experienced a profound mystical vision that caused him to put down his pen and leave his Summa Theologica for another to finish. His scribe begged him to complete the work that would come to be considered the greatest masterpiece of rational theology of all time. "I cannot.” Thomas replied. “Such things have been revealed to me that what I have written seems but straw." Profound mystical experiences of various kinds open up a perspective that is not adequately addressed by rationality alone. These range from such things as out-of-body experiences to profound states of non-dual awareness that, while impossible to completely communicate, make it utterly impossible to look at the world without seeing it asmanifestation of a divine unity. I'd recommend the following link as an excellent example of such an experience: http://www.nonduality.com/dazdark.htm. It's understandable that a hard-line atheist would find a description of someone else's experience unpersuasive. But I believe it's utterly impossible to have one and remain entirely satisfied with hard-line atheism alone as a worldview. To quote a line from Sagan's Contact, where Ellie is explaining her experience, "I… had an experience… I can't prove it, I can't even explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real! I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever… A vision of the universe, that tells us, undeniably, how tiny, and insignificant and how… rare, and precious we all are! A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater then ourselves, that we are *not*, that none of us are alone!"

This is just a brief survey of some of the areas that make hard-core atheism, as a worldview, something I can't accept. Is it possible that I'm deceiving myself – that all this meaning and beauty and unity that I seem to sense in the world are really just epiphenomena of physics and chemistry? Logically, I would answer that yes, it's possible. But my whole point is that logic is inadequate to the task of answering this question.

I'll close with a few words from "The Silver Chair" by C.S. Lewis. The story is about several children, accompanied by a strange pessimistic creature called a “marshwiggle” named “Puddleglum” who descend from the kingdom of Narnia, ruled by the good lion Aslan and enter a subterranean kingdom ruled by a witch-queen to try to rescue a kidnapped prince. Once there, the witch puts them under a spell of confusion and forgetfulness. She gradually convinces the children that there IS no world above ground, no sun, no sky, no Aslan. They become convinced that these are all simply children’s tales and dreams – projections they have created in their minds from the drab and ordinary objects in the miserable underground world ruled by the witch. Only Puddleglum rebels.

“One word, Ma’am” he says to the witch, “All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face on I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we HAVE only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours IS the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”

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