VII. Our Earthuman Ascent: A Major Evolutionary Transition in Twndividuality

6. Bilateral World Religions and Science

Murphy, Nancey and George Ellis. On the Moral Nature of the Universe. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996. A theologian and a cosmologist seek a deeper meaning for the hierarchical emergence of life and the human personal presence in the universe. Science alone is not enough, in addition a “kenotic” ethic of cooperative self-sacrifice which reflects the moral character of God is required.

Albright, Carol Rausch. Spiritual Growth, Cognition, and Complexity: Faith as a Dynamic Process. Koss-Chioino, Joan and Philip Hefner, eds. Spiritual Transformation and Healing. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2006. A theologian and author at the Lutheran School in Chicago who specializes in neuroscience topics contends that a person’s life journey passes through six stages of spiritual encounter: Intuitive-Projective, Mythic-Literal, Synthetic Conventional, Individuative-Reflective, Conjunctive, and Universalizing. She then makes the unique leap that this developmental course expresses and can be modeled as a complex dynamical system.

As its central contribution, this chapter suggests that spiritual transformation and spiritual growth may be understood within the context of a scientific theory that has extremely broad applicability within both natural and social processes: the paradigm that comprises self-organization, complexity, and emergence. (168) Very basically, complexity theory asserts that a tendency to self-organization pervades natural systems, from the basic building blocks of the universe to the most sophisticated forms of human social interaction. (176)

Allinson, Robert, ed. Understanding the Chinese Mind. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1989. A study of a bilateral complementarity that seems to distinguish holistic Eastern and analytical Western cultures. Its introduction notes how Asian peoples traditionally view the human person at home in the cosmos.

Artigas, Mariano. The Mind of the Universe. Radnor, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2000. In this wide-ranging work, a scientist attempts to integrate the properties of dynamic systems and the organic cosmos they imply with an actively creative Divinity. Typical headings are Self-Organization and Divine Action, A Self-Created Universe?, and Reading the Book of Nature.

Barbour, Ian. Nature, Human Nature, and God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002. Barbour’s latest work is conversant with the complexity sciences but looks more to signs of God’s intervening activity than for an earthly purpose.

These ideas have led to new concepts of God – as designer of a self-organizing system, as determiner of indeterminacies, as top-down cause, or as communicator of information. (7)

Barbour, Ian. Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997. An update to Barbour’s 1990 Religion in an Age of Science tailored for classroom use. One of the premier books in the field lays out a metaphysics to join religion and science by way of process philosophy. The tacit implication is a Divinely ordained and subtly assisted self-creation of free and novel beings.

Barbour, Ian. When Science Meets Religion. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2000. Barbour’s four options or stages of Conflict, Independence, Dialogue, and Integration between religion and science have gained much currency and are here applied to Astronomy and Creation, Quantum Physics, Evolution and Continuing Creation, and Genetics, Neuroscience and Human Nature.

Barnes, Michael. Stages of Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. With a subtitle: “The Co-Evolution of Religious Thought and Science,” the author contends their historical interplay proceeds through several versions that roughly parallel the Piagetian stages of individual learning.

Belden, David. Science and Spirit. Tikkun. November/December, 2007. A report on a roundtable discussion moderated by managing editor Belden, with such sages as Frithjof Capra, Nancy Abrams, Joel Primack, George Lakoff, and Ty Cashman (altogether one woman and nine men). As usual much time was spent on auxiliary issues of ‘scientism,’ religion vs. spirituality, and the like, rather than the subject itself which begs a sorting between a waning moribund and dawning genesis universe. But a good engagement by deeply concerned thinkers.

Berger, Peter, ed. The Other Side of God. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981. As this collection carefully considers each major world faith, a dichotomy of “interiority or confrontation” is seen to represent the two great geographic options of the Asian or Abrahamic essential beliefs.

Biernacki, Loriliai and Philip Clayton, eds. Panentheism Across the World's Traditions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. This broad collection of authoritative essays could serve as a coming of age for this 21st century theological movement to (re)unite heaven and earth, father transcendence and mother immanence, God and Human, sacred and secular, past and future. Its significance is just being appreciated as a simple, obvious resolve of religious dichotomies. Scholars across the faiths and globe give praise such as “Holy, Holy, Holy! Jewish Affirmations Of Panentheism” by Rabbi Bradley Artson, “The Heart-Mind of the Way and the Human Heart-Mind are Nondual: On Neo-Confucian Panetheism,” HYo-Dong Lee, and “The Body of Pantheism” by Catherine Keller (search each author). In addition, “The Emergence of Evolutionary Panentheism” by Michael Murphy, the sage founder of the Easlen Institute, achieves a unique survey across mystic, philosophical and scientific ages, noting Jakob Boehme, Sri Aurobindo, Pierre Teilhard, and others. Might we at last allow and evoke, just in time, a true family cosmos as our home and hope?

Not to be confused with pantheism - the ancient Greek notion that God is everywhere, an animistic force in rocks and trees - the concept of panentheism suggests that God is both in the world, immanent, and also beyond the confines of mere matter, transcendent.

One of the fundamental premises of this groundbreaking collection of essays is that panentheism, despite being unlabeled until the nineteenth century, is not merely a modern Western invention. The contributors examine a number of the world's established and ancient religious traditions - Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and others-to draw out the panentheistic dimensions of these traditions and the possibilities they suggest. Panentheism is not only an esoteric, potentially heretical, and deeply mystical vision of the world's great religious pasts; it is also a key feature of contemporary global spirituality. As this volume demonstrates, the metaphors and practices associated with modern panentheism speak powerfully to the realities of our evolving species and our evolving technological world. As Panentheism across the World's Traditions shows, the dynamism between matter and spirit that panentheism offers has had a profound influence in the modern world. (Publisher)

Braxton, Donald. Natural, Supernatural, and Transcendence. Zygon. 41/2, 2006. An introduction to the “cosmologies of emergence” inspired by complexity science, which are seen as an historic shift from a transcendent Divinity to a naturalized immanence. Theological implications – “emergence as the new vocabulary for sacrality” – are then viewed with regard to ecological ethics and Philip Hefner’s sense of human beings as “created co-creators.” A good entry to this welling discussion.

How can Christian theology engage the best knowledge provided by the modern natural sciences if it is unaware that the cosmological background has changed against which all theologizing can take place? (350) To look at the world trained with the eyes of complexity theory is to see a universe composed of nested structures. (354) In this new vision of the marvelous nested biological and cultural communities of the cosmos we are given a new model for understanding our religions. (360)

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