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

6. Bilateral World Religions and Science

Russell, Robert, et al, eds. Evolutionary and Molecular Biology. Vatican City: Vatican Observatory Press, 1998. Proceedings from an interdisciplinary conference to explore “scientific perspectives on Divine action” in a developmental universe. In articles by Charles Birch and Ian Barbour, the science of complexity and philosophy of process might expand Darwinian theory to include an inherent self-organization which God may then constantly facilitate.

Russell, Robert, et al, eds. Neuroscience and the Person. Vatican City: Vatican Observatory Press, 1999. A later volume which discusses how new understandings of human beings gained from the brain and psychological sciences might inform and intersect with religious doctrines.

Rutman, Joel Yehudah. Why Evolution Matters: A Jewish Approach. London: Valentine Mitchell, 2014. This thoughtful, well researched work by a pediatric neurologist, who practiced in central Texas for some years, and presently in Israel, reflects how much personal views influence what is perceived. In his studies, the author duly consulted scientists such as Eva Jablonka, Douglas Futuyma, Jack Cohen, Leon Kass, and more. If one does not accept the standard rejection by Richard Dawkins and cadre of any cosmic, evolutionary teleological source or direction, if actualities can be seen as they are, then a quite different scenario is possible. While it is allowed that vicarious probabilities do exist, life is intended to evolve from universe to us due to natural constraints, convergences on the same end, and an intrinsic self-organization. The traditional option of an unknowable reality is set aside, in this new light it is averred that our human purpose is tzaddikim, the achievement of a “righteous humanity.”

Why Evolution Matters examines the concept of evolution in relation to Judaism, showing that far from something to be avoided within the religion, evolutionary thought deepens an understanding of classic areas of Jewish concern, including free will, moral behavior, suffering, and death. The book presents a novel interpretation of biological evolution in which convergences, self-organization, constraints, and progress are seen as components of the divinely intended world. Why Evolution Matters confronts some major questions that are leveled at the Jewish religion: How can God have created the world when evolution says everything just happened? How can we believe in the truth of Genesis when it conflicts with the facts of evolution? How did we evolve and why does it matter? The book explains how Genesis and evolutionary cosmology and biology reinforce, rather than contradict, one another.

Sacks, Jonathan. The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning. New York: Schocken Books, 2012. The Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth, author of many good works such as To Heal a Fractured World (2007), offers a rapprochement to these often disparate portals. In conversation with Iain McGilchrist, a realistic alignment of the religious and scientific persuasions and methods with their right and left brain hemisphere proclivities could be a novel pathway to their synthesis. While Sacks acknowledges that religions have caused much harm, he equally indicts science for its current, quite unwarranted, atheist extremism.

Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean. Without going into neuroscientific detail, the first is a predominately left-brain activity, the second is associated with the right hemisphere. (2-3) So, to summarize: Science is the search for explanation. Religion is the search for meaning. Meaning is not accidental to the human condition because we are the meaning-seeking animal. To believe on the basis of science that the universe has no meaning is to confuse two disciplines of thought: explanation and interpretation. The search for meaning, though it begins with science, must go beyond it. Science does not yield meanings, nor does it prove the absence of meanings. (37-38)

Saroglou, Vassilis, et al. Believing, Bonding, Behaving, and Belonging: The Cognitive, Emotional, Moral, and Social Dimensions of Religiousness across Cultures. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. 51/7-8, 2020. By way of more advanced, extensive studies to date, seventeen coauthors from Belgium, the USA, Slovenia, Switzerland, Turkey, Taiwan, Italy, Greece, Spain, Germany, France and Costa Rica again find broad tendencies between Eastern and Western societies which generally favor and hold to either individualist or communitarian religious preferences and behaviors.

Based on the four prime dimensions of religiousness, Believing, Bonding, Behaving, and Belonging, and their cognitive, emotional, moral, and social motives and functions, we investigated cross-cultural consistencies as well as inter-individual variability. We studied Catholicism, Protestantism, Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism/Taoism across 14 countries. Beyond high interrelation and common personality correlates of agreeableness and conscientiousness, the four modes were less interrelated in Eastern Asia compared to the West and characterized by distinct features. Believing and bonding were preferred in Western secular societies. Behaving and belonging were related to fundamentalism, authoritarianism, and lower openness. Bonding and behaving were respectively evident in Israel and Turkey. (Abstract excerpt)

Schaab, Gloria, SSJ. A Procreative Paradigm of the Creative Suffering of the Triune God. Theological Studies. 67/3, 2006. A professor of systematic theology at Barry University, Florida, expands on the panentheistic evolution of biochemist Arthur Peacocke to propose that an appropriate way to fathom life's evolutionary struggles and travail is as female procreative experience. This fecund vision is considered from three perspectives – feminist theology, ecological action as midwifery, and pastoral ministry. Along the way we encounter She Who Is, the Matrix of all being; Shekhinah, an indwelling Kabbalist Divinity; and Sophia as creative spiritual wisdom. A luminous articulation of a genesis cosmos from a woman’s sense of carrying and birthing sacred life and new being.

And Dr. Schaab has emailed to me this preferred definition of panentheism: the belief that the Being of God includes and penetrates the whole of creation, so that every part of creation exists in God, its Creator,but that God's Being is more than, and is not exhausted by creation. See also her Teilhard Study: The Divine Welling Up and Showing Through (Fall 2007).

As evolutionary processes demonstrate, however, the being and becoming of all things in the cosmos is inevitably attended by suffering and death in the movement toward emergent existence. The cosmic child of this Mother’s womb endures these pangs of suffering and death that life may be birthed anew. (551)

Schmitz Moorman, Karl. Theology of Creation in an Evolutionary World. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1997. By way of Teilhard and Whitehead comes a process view of an organic genesis more knowable from Whom it may become than from whence material basis it came. If earth and cosmos are suitably divinized, we might encounter an expectant God, who is both Alpha and Omega. Schmitz Moorman, assisted by the Jesuit scientist James Salmon, finds the creative, vectorial informative that rises with life’s evolution to be spiritual in kind.

Setia, Adi. Taskhir, Fine-Tuning, Intelligent Design and the Scientific Appreciation of Nature. Islam & Science. 2/1, 2004. A typical paper from this new journal edited by Muzaffar Iqbal. Its author is a Research Fellow at the International Institute of Islamic Thought in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Shanta, Bhakti Niskama. Life and Consciousness: The Vedantic View. Communicative & Integrative Biology. 8/5, 2015. The author has a doctorate in oceanography and is based at the Sri Chaitanya Saraswat Institute of Spiritual Culture and Science. As the Abstract cites, this Indian, Asian wisdom tradition evokes an innately organic milieu, suffused with primordial life and consciousness, from which life’s evolution and human beings manifestly arise and embody. In contrast, the modern North/West version is a soulless, inanimate mechanism from nothing to nowhere. We add that this moribund modernity bereft any encompassing embrace, an epic failure of knowledge and nerve, could be much implicated for global civilizations descending into a new dark age of barbaric ignorance. However might such a salutary, integral 21st century numinous revolution ever dawn, as this sites tries to document?

In the past, philosophers, scientists, and even the general opinion, had no problem in accepting the existence of consciousness in the same way as the existence of the physical world. After the advent of Newtonian mechanics, science embraced a complete materialistic conception about reality. Scientists started proposing hypotheses like abiogenesis (origin of first life from accumulation of atoms and molecules) and the Big Bang theory. Modern science hypothesizes that the manifestation of life on Earth is nothing but a mere increment in the complexity of matter — and hence is an outcome of evolution of matter following the Big Bang. After the manifestation of life, modern science believed that chemical evolution transformed itself into biological evolution, which then had caused the entire biodiversity on our planet. The ontological view of the organism as a complex machine presumes life as just a chance occurrence, without any inner purpose.

On the other hand, the Vedāntic view states that the origin of everything material and nonmaterial is sentient and absolute (unconditioned). Thus, sentient life is primitive and reproductive of itself – omne vivum ex vivo – life comes from life. This is the scientifically verified law of experience. Life is essentially cognitive and conscious. And, consciousness, which is fundamental, manifests itself in the gradational forms of all sentient and insentient nature. In contrast to the idea of objective evolution of bodies, Vedānta advocates the idea of subjective evolution of consciousness as the developing principle of the world. In this paper, an attempt has been made to highlight a few relevant developments supporting a sentient view of life in scientific research, which has caused a paradigm shift in our understanding of life and its origin. (Abstract excerpts)

Sloan, Phillip, et al, eds. Darwin in the Twenty First Century: Nature, Humanity, and God. Norte Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. As the book summary notes, it is a select composite from 2009 anniversary conferences, Biological Evolution: Facts and Theories at Gregorian University, Rome, and another at Notre Dame with the above title. Proceedings from the first event appeared in a 2011 book with that meeting title from Gregorian Press but not widely available. The present volume has three revised papers from Rome by Scott Gilbert on evo-devo and symbiosis, Stuart Newman on physical sources for evolutionary life, and David Depew on accident, adaptation and teleology. Other contributors include Alessandro Minelli, Celia Deane-Drummond, Gennaro Auletta, Peter Bowler, and Jean Gayon. A final chapter Evolutionary Theism and the Emergent Universe by the late Archbishop Jozef Zycinski is a promising surmise of a hopeful resolution.

This collection of essays originated in conferences held at the Gregorian University in Rome and at the University of Notre Dame to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. These essays, by leading scholars, assess the continuing relevance of Darwin's work from the perspectives of biological science, history, philosophy, and theology. The contributors focus on three primary areas: developments in evolutionary biology that open up new ground for interdisciplinary dialogue; reflections on human evolution, with a particular focus on evolution and ethics; and new reflections on theology and evolution, particularly from a Roman Catholic perspective, drawing both on traditional perspectives and on new currents in Catholic theology.

Smedes, Taede. Chaos, Complexity, and God. Leuven: Peeters, 2004. A Dutch theologian considers a self-organizing universe, aided by Arthur Peacocke, as a means to reimagine Divine creative action.

Smith, Howard. Let There Be Light: Modern Cosmology and Kabbalah. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2006. The senior Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist discerns a deep accord between these complementary modes of human interpretative encounter. The tacit theme is that Jewish mysticism and cosmic science reflect in their ways, as they must, the one, same numinous creation. A prime concept is an expressive Sefirot image to convey Divine sources, energies and stations, quoted next. His 2016 article (search Great Earth) broaches that by the latest findings, human beings appear to be unique in the universe. And in consideration, if one may, the term “sefirome” occurred for it seems so genomic in essence.

Sefirot is a channel of Divine energy or life-force. This most fundamental concept of Kabbalah is that in the process of creation an intermediate stage was emanated from God’s infinite light to create what we experience as finite reality. These channels are called the Ten Sefirot, Ten Divine Emanations, Ten Divine Radiances, Ten Divine Eluminices, or Ten Divine Powers which are the basic terms and concepts of the inner wisdom of the Torah which is called Kabbalah. (web definition)

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