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

6. Bilateral World Religions and Science

Kaplan, Stephen. Vidya and Avida: Simultaneous and Coterminous? Philosophy East & West. 57/2, 2007. A visit to the Advaita Vedanta website (via Google) would be a helpful entry to this Vedic Upanishad Indian wisdom. A Manhattan College scholar offers a current analogy as a way to grasp the essence of these esoteric yet vital concepts. In this regard, the unmanifest implicate and worldly explicate realms of David Bohm’s holographic physics can be seen to have much affinity. Their most attractive feature may be a universal redundancy since every shard of a hologram contains a modicum of the whole source image. Brahmin and Atman, if one might say, may then be imagined to accord with these roles.

Kathami, Mohammed. The Soul’s East, Reason’s West. New Perspectives Quarterly. Spring, 1999. The philosopher president of Iran believes a much needed rapprochement on our bipolar planet might occur if eastern spirituality can come to mutually complement the rational West. As for Islam, Kathami states that its premier tenet is to see the human person as an exemplary microcosm.

Kaufman, Gordon. A Christian View of Creativity. Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy. 6/2, 2007. In a special section on Confucian and Christian Conceptions of Creativity, the eminent Harvard Divinity School theologian ventures an innovative view of “God as Creativity.” Three dimensions or phases then accrue – an original act of Big Bang proportions, the interim self-organizing evolutionary dynamics of complex adaptive systems, and lately a phenomenal human contribution as “co-creators.” A companion article by Harvard-Yenching Professor Tu Weiming goes on to explain how the traditional Chinese cosmos of spontaneous self-generation can accommodate, through its on-going interplay of Heaven and human, various anthropo – morphic, centric, and cosmic realms. Along with papers by Robert Neville and Thierry Meynard, a numinous issue.

Kim, Heup Young. Cyborg, Sage and Saint: Transhumanism as Seen from an East Asian Theological Setting. Calvin Mercer and Tracy Trothen, eds.. Religion and Transhumanism: The Unknown Feature of Human Enhancement. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2015. In this unique edition (search) which seeks to relate and resolve past and futures, the Kangnam University, Korea theologian, dean, and founder of the International Society for Science and Religion is deeply troubled by western technological excesses. Our mechanical model daunts any sense of an encompassing organic, anthropocosmic unity and balance of human and universe. Prime sources for this oriental wisdom are the Korean sage Yi Toegye (1501-1570) and today Tu Weiming, the Confucian theologian at Harvard. As ever a deep affinity between natural macrocosm and human microcosm is the iconic crux. Its essence is then a sustaining complementarity of the gender archetypes, which is conveyed in this quote from the Benedictine monk Bede Griffiths (1906-1993).

This may sound very paradoxical and unreal, but for centuries now the western world has been following the path of Yang of the masculine, active, aggressive, rational, scientific mind and has brought the world near destruction. It is time now to recover the path of Yin, of the feminine, passive, patient, intuitive and poetic mind. This is the path which the Tao Te Ching sets before us. (Bede Griffiths Universal Wisdom 1994)

Knysh, Alexander. Sufism: A New History of Islamic Mysticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. A University of Michigan professor of Islamic studies writes an insightful exposition of this “ascetic-mystical” phase of Muslim beliefs. For reference, in Complementarity of Civilizations above, an East/West and South/North dichotomy is well documented. This section goes on to cite how their relative religions hold to these modes. But it ought also to be noted that within each pantheon and panoply (more or less) a similar archetypal duality exists. This reciprocity may be most evident in Islam, whence Sufism embraces rhythmic prosody and whirling dance. But sadly, an unresolved, internal conflict with literal scripture has led to massacres of Sufi worshippers such as in Egypt. On page 112 is a 2016 photo of the Sufi sage Shaykh Kabbani (now in the US) in traditional robes, looking at his iPhone. We would like to believe that humankinder’s 21st century bicameral edification in vision and text, which this website seeks to convey, might finally reveal and heal.

Ibn (al-)Arabi’s (1165-1240) exegesis can be subdivided into three distinctive levels: the metaphysical-cosmological, the analogical (microcosmic/macrocosmic), built around implicit or explicit correspondences between the universe and the human organism, and the existential-experiential that rests on his claim to possess an intuitive, supersensory comprehension of the underlying unity of God, man, and the universe. (97)

Lee, Hyo-Dong. Spirit, Qi, and the Multitude: A Comparative Theology for the Democracy of Creation. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. As the publisher and quotes convey, a Korean-American, Drew University, theologian astride the continents and centuries draws a luminous synthesis of bicameral world wisdom as “A Meeting of Two Stories” of “Eastern and Western Learning.” Once again, from every portal, a complementarity of archetypal gender principles, in their infinite iteration, distinguish each global hemispherical mode. In regard, an Asian “pre-Axial” mode is seen as a double domain of energy and emanation, more “indigenous and contextual” in kind and contrast. In closing, a “pneumatocentric and panentheistic” conception is advanced based on this mutual nature, along with a 21st century familial spirituality. See also Panentheism Across the World’s Traditions edited by Loriliai Biernacki and Philip Clayton (Oxford, 2013) with a chapter by Hyo-Dong Lee.

As befits a world so interconnected, this book presents a comparative theological and philosophical attempt to construct new underpinnings for the idea of democracy by bringing the Western concept of spirit into dialogue with the East Asian nondualistic and nonhierarchical notion of qi. The book follows the historical adventures of the idea of qi through some of its Confucian and Daoist textual histories in East Asia, mainly Laozi, Zhu Xi, Toegye, Nongmun, and Su-un, and compares them with analogous conceptualizations of the ultimate creative and spiritual power found in the intellectual constellations of Western and/or Christian thought namely, Whitehead's Creativity, Hegel's Geist, Deleuze's chaosmos, and Catherine Keller's Tehom. The book provides a model of Asian contextual theology that draws on the religious and philosophical resources of East Asia to offer a vision of pluralism and democracy. A reader interested in the conversation between the East and West in light of the global reality of political oppression, economic exploitation, and cultural marginalization will find this book informative, engaging, and enlightening. (Publisher)

Psychophysical energy is the primordial energy of the universe that constitutes whatever exists – visible and invisible, with form and without form, nonliving and living, and material and ideal. The entities that appear to be solid and unchanging are in fact temporary coalescences or harmonies of psychological energy’s own bifurcated and mutually complementary modalities of the receptive force (yin) and the active force (yang), which are themselves in a constant process of following and turning into each other. The creatively harmonizing operations of the two modalities of psychophysical energy is captured by the symbol of the Great Ultimate (Tao) that depicts a ceaseless dynamic union of complementary opposites. (42)

Furthermore, this relation of mutually dependent coming into being has a “fractal” structure in which each pole of the binary reproduces within itself the polarity of the whole. The receptive force always carries within itself the seed of the active force, which always carries within itself the seed of the receptive force, which always carries within itself the seed of the active force. In other words, the Great Ultimate has a dynamically fractal structure of constantly self-differentiated opposites that come into being and cease to be in through an unending process of one differentiating itself from itself by having the other within to negate itself. (43)

Lightman, Bernard, ed.. Rethinking History, Science and Religion: An Exploration of Conflict and the Complexity Principle. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. A latest collection from an international conference in Rio de Janeiro in mid 2017 about this multifaceted, recalcitrant issue. The “complexity” theme was meant to consider whether a common resolve could be possible, or a diverse, pluralist view is more apt. Some entries are History and the Meaning(s) of Evolution by Ian Hesketh, The Instantiation of Historical Complexity, and Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s Interpretation of Science in Islam by Sarah Qidwai.

Luminet, Jean-Pierre. Big Bang Cosmology and Religious Thought. arXiv:2305.19273. The Aix-Marseille University, CNRS astrophysicist polyscholar (bio below) provides an insightful retrospect of the prime conceivers of a point origin for the present galactic universe with regard these early 20th century mindsets. See also his The Dark Matter Enigma entry (2101.10127) as an example of cosmological frontiers a long century later.

Alexander Friedmann and Georges Lemaître are the main originators of Big Bang cosmologies a century ago. During his career Lemaître (1894-1966) faced criticisms from non-believing scientists, who reproached his primeval atom cosmology. In the former case of Friedmann (1888-1925), we know that his 1922 proposal of a "creation of the world out of nothing" was criticized by Einstein. Since their theories have broadly held up, a theological gleam can play an important role inside the science research processes. (Abstract)

Jean-Pierre Luminet is a world-known astrophysicist at the Meudon Observatory in France and a leading expert on black holes, cosmology, and the new field of cosmic topology. In addition to his research work he has published acclaimed novels and poetry books.

McGilchrist, Iain. God, Metaphor, and the Language of the Hemispheres. Chilton, Paul and Monika Kopytowska, eds. Religion, Language, and the Human Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. In this chapter, the British psychiatrist and author of the 2009 epic treatise The Master and His Emissary (search) continues his lucid exposition of this incredible cerebral complementarity. We include extended quotes because they provide a clearest citation of and contrast between these cosmic archetypal halves. We have, one could say, a microcosmic bicameral universe in our own double brain (a hemi in our head). As noted in his book review above, these attributes, or lack thereof, can well be applied to scientific, political, national, herewith to religious domains, and onto an imperiled global ecosphere presently bereft any phenomenal identity, image and common purpose.

Birds and other animals have to solve a conundrum on which their survival depends, namely how to eat and to stay alive at the same time. Each must pay attention to something that is already prioritized – a seed, one’s prey – at the same time as being open to whatever it is that might come along – be it predator or conspecific. For the first of these, one needs a narrow-beam, sharply focused attention to something; for the latter, just the opposite – a broad, open, vigilant, sustained attention. Paying two kinds of attention in one consciousness is an almost intractable problem. The solution appears to have been the bihemispheric brain. The left hemisphere provides narrow focus in order to get food, a twig for a nest, and to manipulate the world; the right hemisphere sees a wide view to watch for predation and bond with mates, and in general to understand oneself in relation to the world at large. (137)

The left hemisphere’s world requires precision rather than breadth, and aims to close things down as much as possible to a certainty, where the right hemisphere views the broad picture and opens things up to possibility. In focusing on its object, the left side renders it explicit, and abstracts it from its context; the right side is aware of, and able to deal appropriately with all those things that are required to remain implicit, and are denatured once removed from their context. The left hemisphere conceives of its object as static, fixed, and atomistic, rather than, as the right hemisphere does, fluid, evolving, and interconnected with the rest of the world. Where the left hemisphere sees disconnected fragments from which the whole scene might be constructed, the right sees the whole, the Gestalt, which is more than the sum of the parts. If the left is concerned with what can be counted, the quantitative and measurable aspect of experience, the right hemisphere is concerned with the qualitative. One could say the right hemisphere’s world is living, where the left’s is mechanical and inanimate. (140)

McGrath, Alister. Science and Religion. London: Blackwell, 1999. One of many books by the prolific British theologian. An introductory review of paths to convergence that cover epistemology, natural theology, the doctrine of Creation. While the book touches on cosmology, physics, biology and psychology, it is light on thematic coherence and more preoccupied with God than a consideration of human significance.

Miller, James, ed. Cosmic Questions. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Volume 950, 2001. . Proceedings of an April 1999 conference in Washington, DC sponsored by the AAAS Program of Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion. Scientists and theologians weigh in on three questions: Did the Universe Have a Beginning?, Was the Universe Designed?, Are We Alone?. Includes the transcript of a notable debate between the theistic conviction of John Polkinghorne and an adamant denial by Nobel physicist Stephen Weinberg.

Miller, Kenneth. Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientists Search for a Common Ground between God and Evolution. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. To this Brown University biologist, the course of evolution can be just as readily interpreted as the way God intends to create sentient life and human beings.

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