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

6. Bilateral World Religions and Science

Han, Shihui and Georg Northoff. Culture-Sensitive Neural Substrates of Human Cognition: A Transcultural Neuroimaging Approach. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 9/8, 2008. By way of 21st century brain imaging capacities, Peking University, Culture and Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, and University of Ottawa, Mind, Brain Imaging and Neuroethics Research Unit, psychologists (search each here and their own website) discern which relative cerebral regions are a locus source of a person’s social proclivity. In regard the general inclusive wholeness of Eastern spiritualities, and individual soul-centered concerns of the West could be attributed to the alternative neural architecture of each cultural hemisphere.

Our brains and minds are shaped by our experiences, which mainly occur in the context of the culture in which we develop and live. Although psychologists have provided abundant evidence for diversity of human cognition and behaviour across cultures, the question of whether the neural correlates of human cognition are also culture-dependent is often not considered by neuroscientists. However, recent transcultural neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that one's cultural background can influence the neural activity that underlies both high- and low-level cognitive functions. The findings provide a novel approach by which to distinguish culture-sensitive from culture-invariant neural mechanisms of human cognition. (Abstract)

Cultural diversity of human cognition: By comparing cognitive functions in people from Western (European and American) and East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, et cetera) cultures, the ‘culture-and-cognition’ approach demonstrates that different sociocultural systems give rise to dissimilar thought styles. Westerners generally think in an analytical way, whereas East Asians generally think in a more holistic manner. For instance, during a perception task, Americans were better at detecting changes in salient objects than East Asians, and were less affected by contextual information. Cultural differences are also evident in social cognition. In a game that involved two individuals interacting, Chinese participants were more in tune with their partner’s perspective than Americans. Furthermore, Chinese people were more likely to describe memories of social and historical events and focused more on social interactions, whereas European Americans more frequently focused on memories of personal experiences and emphasized their personal roles in events. Westerners were better at remembering trait words that they associated with themselves than they were at remembering words that they associated with people close to them. (849)

Haught, John. Deeper Than Darwin: The Prospect For Religion In The Age Of Evolution. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2003. In this follow up work, Haught contends that the Darwinian view of evolution is incomplete and cannot explain the essence and aim of emergent life. For deeper, more valid, truth, we may still profitably consult the religions of the world.

Haught, John. God After Darwin. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999. The Georgetown University theologian conceives an evolutionary dimension rooted in Whitehead and Teilhard which can then find purpose in an unfinished cosmos with a Divine future. Its emergent, defining quality is seen as the sequential rise of a spiritual information.

Haught, John. Is Nature Enough? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. In his latest book Haught takes the paradigm of scientific naturalism to task since it concludes all entities that exist are insensate accidents, there is neither a transcendent or incarnate creative (Divine) agency. (Compare with Gary Drescher’s Good and Real just posted) What results is a soulless, material universe of random selection. Once more, the alternative to this gloom, and to a mistaken return to a primordial Eden, is a vista of anticipatory emergence, empowered and tracked by formative information, toward a new future creation.

Haught, John. The Boyle Lecture 2003: Darwin, Design and the Promise of Nature. Science & Christian Belief. 17/1, 2005. A succinct statement of Haught’s endeavor to conceive “a revived natural theology,” with roots in Teilhard and Whitehead, by way of an expanded evolution that includes symbiosis, cooperation and self-organization. By this holistic vision, nature’s seemingly contingent excesses and harshness can be leavened by the providential promise of a numinous future. Simon Conway Morris and Alister McGrath offer favorable responses but Paul Helm and R. J. Berry, with some acrimony, find this a theological bridge to far. Haught then answers with a vigorous defense of his thoughtful position.

Hefner, Philip. Technology and Human Becoming. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003. This profound edition is the text of Hefner’s chapel talks at the 2001 Star Island IRAS conference: “Human Meaning in a Technological Age.” The University of Chicago theologian seeks to meld and leaven the technical prowess of our age with traditional religious doctrines. In this regard is offered some of the most insightful meditations on the revolutionary human abilities to transform, for better or worse, themselves and this earthly realm. Amongst the pages is a consideration of artificial intelligence in light of a painting of the Cosmic Mestiza, a Mexican woman seen as a symbol of integral resolution.

Howard, Damian. Being Human in Islam: The Impact of the Evolutionary Worldview. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. After the author notes he is neither scientist nor Muslim, but a Jesuit theologian at Heythrop College, London, the work proceeds with a respectful and thorough treatment of this historic struggle between eternal heaven and temporal earth. In the case of Godly belief, worldly standing, life’s developmental path, and our place in things, a humanum or “anthropological imaginary,” is engaged. In such regard, a central chapter explores the strong influence of Henri Bergson, (1859-1941), via the writings of Muhammed Iqbal (1877-1938), who is seen to represent a Romantic, Naturphilosophie school of “vitalist cosmic progressivism,” in contrast to Western mechanical materialism.

But divisive splits and factions remain between those in pious thrall to a transcendent God, known as an anti-science, perennialist school, or those enamored with a Divine immanence, the Word incarnate, whereof self-realizing people have a creative or sustaining value and purpose. Heaven and/or earth, sacred vs. secular, vertical or horizontal, often as a teleological unfolding, along with other themes, are threaded out in scholarly depth. Islamic thought over the past decades, in its druthers, proceeds to grapple with these quandaries that continue to daunt the Abrahamic dream.

Ijjas, Anna. Quantum Aspects of Life: Relating Evolutionary Biology with Theology via Modern Physics. Zygon. 48/1, 2013. The astrophysicist author is a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Princeton University, and the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics. The curious “quantum cosmology” from which we sentient persons lately appear in wonder must then be graced by a deep generative oneness between human and universe. Somehow life, organisms, animate systems, ought to be creatively written into a foundational domain in between “blind Darwinian chance and pure Laplacian determinism.” The article is a unique, innovative contribution to a growing project to trace and explain a numinous, motive activity to explain and mitigate our fraught, remarkable existence. Hints along the way include a convergent evolution and persistent nonlinearity, so the old default to “randomness” may just be cover for heretofore being unable to rightly read.

In the present paper, I shall argue that quantum theory can contribute to reconciling evolutionary biology with the creation hypothesis. After giving a careful definition of the theological problem, I will, in a first step, formulate necessary conditions for the compatibility of evolutionary theory and the creation hypothesis. In a second step, I will show how quantum theory can contribute to fulfilling these conditions. More precisely, I claim that (1) quantum probabilities are best understood in terms of ontological indeterminism, but (2) reflect nevertheless causal openness rather than divine indifference or arbitrariness, and (3) such a genuinely creative universe can be considered as the work of a loving Creator. I ask subsequently whether these necessary conditions are also sufficient for the compatibility of evolutionary theory and the creation hypothesis. Finally, I will show that relating evolutionary biology with theology via quantum theory could also shed some light on the nature of life. (Abstract)

Impey, Chris and Catherine Petry, eds. Science and Theology: Ruminations on the Cosmos. Vatican Observatory, 2004. Authors include George Coyne, SJ, Owen Gingerich, Ernan McMullin, Nancey Murphy, Lynn Rothschild, and Trinh Xuan Thuan. Coyne, for example, draws on Thomas Aquinas’ view that a transcendent God can be known by analogy to suggest a parental Creator and the immanent universe as a developing, maturing child.

Perhaps God should be seen more as a parent. Scripture is very rich in this thought. The universe has a certain vitality of its own like a child does. A parent must allow the child to grow into adulthood, to come to make its own choices, to go on its own way in life. (31)

Iqbal, Muzaffar. Islam and Science. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002. The diametric separation of faith and research in the west is unthinkable for Muslims. The luminous history of early Islamic science and mathematics is reviewed so as to reach a necessary corrective today to again unite cosmology, physics and the many disciplines with a seamless creation.

Jaeshik, Shin. Mapping One World: Religion and Science from an East Asian Perspective. Zygon. 51/1, 2016. An exemplary article by a Honam Theological University, Korea, professor of constructive theology, in a special issue on East Asian Voices on Science and the Humanities. The author draws upon many references in our Complementarity of Civilizations above, to advise a similar religious contrast of an eastern predilection for relational, both/and, integral, sensitivities with a western emphasis on individual, oppositional mores. The general endeavor of this journal has been at an impasse for some time because the main mechanical, pointless paradigm can never accord with life and love affirmations. A topological approach is offered, along with theologian John Haught’s view of how an informational universe might revive a book of nature. In this regard, a 21st century recovery of an Oriental genesis universe would be more conducive and actually based on the latest global scientific findings.

This article aims to delineate a model of religion-science relationship from an East Asian perspective. The East Asian way of thinking is depicted as nondualistic, relational, and inclusive. From this point of view, most current Western discourses on the religion-science relationship, including the interconnected models of Pannenberg and Haught, are hierarchical, intellectually centered, and have dualistic tendencies. Taking religion and science as mapping activities, “a multi-map model” presents nonhierarchical, historical, social, multidimensional, communal, and intimate dimensions of the religion-science relationship. (Abstract)

The writer expects that the East Asian way of thinking might provide profound insight for understanding the science-religion relationship. Then, what are the characteristics of the East Asian worldview? It may generally be characterized as more cosmological than anthropological, more holistic than analytical, more correlative than causal, and more polaristic than dualistic. In the East Asian worldview, the universe is an organic whole in which all of the parts of the entire cosmos belong to one organic whole. Everything in the world is a part of a single world, and is merging and interacting with everything else without regard for mathematically or mechanically demonstrable cause and effect. The world is seen as spontaneously self-generating, self-renewing, and self-sustaining without any creator or agency. (207)

The general characteristics of the East Asian understanding of reality can be categorized into two concepts: “cosmoanthropology” and world as a dynamic whole. On the one hand, “cosmoanthropology” describes the correlation between nature and world. The inseparable relationality between the cosmos (nature or the world) and humanity is a distinctive characteristic of the East Asia worldview. This correlative insight between nature and human beings is rooted in the East Asian view of reality; everything in the world is derived from an undivided cosmological reality (Dao) and is a part of an unbroken ontological continuity. (207-208) The process of change is constituted by the interchange of the two forces of Qi: Yin-Qi and Yang-Qi. Everything gives rise to change or transformation in terms of Yin-Yang polarities and, hence, forms a dynamic whole with the Yin-Yang process of Dao. In this regard, for East Asians, the primary category by which to understand the world is not “substance,” “essence,” or “being,” but “relationship,” “transformation,” or “movement.” (208)

Johnson, Elizabeth A. She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Disclosure. New York: Crossroad. 1992. The classic volume from two decades ago by the Fordham University theologian that set this vital gender adjustment on its course. We additionally note for one of the earliest affirmations of a “pan-en-theism” to include both away father and natural mother, which essentially conceives a familial trinity.

Women typically witness to deep patterns of affiliation and mutuality as constitutive of their existence and indeed of the very grain of existence itself. From this perspective the image of an unrelated or only superficially related God is a distortion. (225) A feminist perspective that prizes mutuality in relations quickly parts company with classical theism, critiquing its isolationist and dualist patterns. Reflection arising from women’s experience also finds pantheism waning. The culturally induced tendency for women to submerge themselves in the “all” of a man or family or institution to the detriment of their own genuine personhood is a perennial temptation, as is plasticity to the direction of dominant others rather that free self-actualization. (231)

A third position, variously known as dialectical theism, neoclassical theism, or more typically, panentheism, offers another, more congenial model. Here is a model of free, reciprocal relation: God in the world and the world in God while each remains radically distinct. The relation is mutual while differences remain and are respected. If theism weights the scales in the direction of divine transcendence and pantheism overmuch in the direction of immanence, panentheism attempts to hold onto both in full strength. (231) In a unique way the paradigm of panentheism opens speech about God to a fruitful use of metaphors gleaned from women’s existence, especially maternal and friendship imagery. (233)

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