Consciousness and theology: the creation of Gods and myths in the human mind

by Paul Collins.

Presented at From Stars to Brains, a MCH conference in honor of Paul Davies, Canberra, 20-21 June 2006

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I will begin by putting my cards on the table. Firstly, obviously I am not a scientist and have, at best, nothing more than a amateurish layman's knowledge of any particular area of science. Secondly, I am going to begin with a couple of assertions which I won't attempt to demonstrate or prove because both are essentially unprovable in a strictly empirical sense. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they are not true. From my perspective they provide an underpinning philosophical basis for the substance of what I want to say.

Here are the assertions: one, I am an unashamed, even slightly aggressive, Catholic-Christian believer. This forms the matrix of the way I make sense out of life. Not that I think everything in my church is 'kosher'; far from it. I have a long and public record of criticism of Catholicism's leadership, especially of Pope John Paul II and hierarchs such as Sydney's Cardinal George Pell. I have also been critical of the church's failures and shortcomings in not confronting a whole range of centrally important social and ethical issues, particularly in the interconnected areas of population and the environment. But the fact that you are critical of your family does not mean that you want to abandon it. On the contrary, it is an indication of commitment: you care enough to stay and change things.

One of the primary reasons why I stay in the church is because at it's best Catholicism takes enormously seriously the attempt to hold faith and reason together. Even in the past blind, unquestioned faith has never been a characteristic of genuine Catholicism. We have a long tradition of mainly constructive engagement with culture. The medieval Italian-born philosopher, Saint Anselm (c.1033-1109), successively Abbot of Bec in Normandy, and Archbishop of Canterbury, argued that mature fides (faith) constantly sought intellectum (understanding) - fides quaerens intellectum ('faith seeking understanding'). In Anselm's view the two needed each other for an integrated approach to reality. I have no truck with the sharp split between faith and reason espoused, either consciously or unconsciously, by a whole bevy of people from some Protestants, such as the Danish religious thinker, Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55), to present-day fundamentalists. Nor do I support the split between the material and spiritual, the soul and the body which came into early Christianity via late Platonism and especially Saint Augustine. While faith is certainly a commitment to 'things unseen' as Saint Paul Says (II Corinthians, 4:18) and certainly takes us beyond intellectum, it is not and never should be an irrational quest. It is ultimately an experiential engagement with transcendence. It is also an encounter with the world, culture, thought and empirical reality and, at it's best, Catholicism tries to hold the two together. The alternative is a kind of radical fundamentalism in which, in varying degrees, a blind, 'leap in the dark' kind-of- faith completely dominates experience and reason.

Here, parenthetically, it is important to note that the biggest objection to fundamentalism is actually theological: it simply turns God into the master-manipulator, the puppet-master or chess player who pulls all the strings of reality according to some incomprehensible kind of voluntarism; this is the ethical notion that acts are determined to be right or wrong by God's will without relationship to reality and nature. People who think this way can't seem to get it into their heads that the manipulator-God then becomes responsible for the most reprehensible and evil acts of history. In the process human free will is destroyed. However, we should also remember that fundamentalism essentially has limited appeal. I have always maintained that it will never influence more than fifteen per cent of the population, and Amanda Lohrey has shown in her recent Quarterly Essay, Voting for Jesus, that such people have far less politico-social influence than they - and others - imagine they have.

And talking here about fundamentalists: there are scientific fundamentalists

My second assertion: I accept that evolution is an extraordinarily useful way of understanding the over-arching complexities of cosmic and earth history. In fact, the view that I am going to propose is entirely dependent on an evolutionary understanding of cosmic history. Evolution today has become part of the assumed horizon of the educated person, what the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, called the Gestell, the frame through which we view reality. But Gestell is an ambivalent word because it also means 'mask', perhaps suggesting that evolution can also hide the sheer complexity of cosmic history.

So now to the substance of what I want to say.

There has been a lot of talk lately about 'intelligent design' and generally speaking educated people have rightly rejected this as a covert way of introducing a form of 'creationism' into school curriculums and scientific discussion. As such the concept should be rejected.

However, it should be remembered that Saint Thomas Aquinas (c1225-74), for one, used the term because there is a sense in which it depends on what you mean by 'intelligent design', what interpretation you put on it. If you mean that God has some type of arbitrary 'plan' for reality - the kind of God who says "I'm sick of the dinosaurs, let's get rid of them" or "I don't like the Neanderthals. Let's send them off on a dead-end trail" - then clearly intelligent design is fundamentalist tosh. But can intelligent design be given a more benign, less intrusive, interpretation? That is, can we say that, in a broad sense, that evolution is ultimately purposive, that there is some form of intelligence and design behind it? Is there some middle ground between the fundamentalists' divine manipulator on the one hand, and the absentee-landlord, watch-making God of the Enlightenment and William Paley's Natural Theology (1802) on the other?

I would argue that there is and that evolution is ultimately purposive, even if this occurs by fits and starts, ends and dead-ends, natural selection and chance mutations. Here, parenthetically, I think you could argue theologically that evolution may not be crowned - or perhaps more accurately 'exhausted'- by the evolution of humankind. In other words, there is a sense in which we may not be the end-purpose of evolution, but rather just an interesting evolutionary experiment that ended in disaster. However, while I might get away with that in a scientific gathering, anthropocentric Christians would probably immediately declare me a 'heretic'!

Nowadays, the French Jewish thinker, Henri Bergson (1859-1941), author of Creative Evolution (1907) and the Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), is unfairly neglected. But in the first part of the 20th century he was an important philosophical figure in the dialogue between science and religion. A winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927, his contributions to the philosophical movement of spiritualism had widespread influence on continental and Catholic thought in the first decades of the 20th century. Dissatisfied with the materialism of the 19th century, he nevertheless didn't want to lose the insights provided by empiricism and evolution. Bergson's particular genius lay in his ability to hold together the findings of evolutionary science with a metaphysical and almost theological search for an understanding of the inner core of reality itself.

To understand Bergson's vision we must move beyond the Anglo-American fixation with the psychological as a clue to the deepest recesses of reality and embrace the metaphysical effort to understand the most profound levels of experience. His philosophical vision is founded on an understanding of time as 'duration'(la durée) by which he means the intuition of a living, on-going consciousness that underlies all particularities. Understanding 'pure duration' leads us to see that reality is not something permanent, fixed and static, but that it is essentially a process of becoming. For Bergson permanency is an illusion: there are no lasting realities, only on-going action. The word 'action' is another clue to his thought: this is the meta-dynamic, the living force that underlies everything. This meta-dynamic expresses itself through an élan vital, a vital, fundamental impetus, a profound life-drive, an undifferentiated living force which underlies everything and which impels evolution onward. It is what drives the struggle for survival in the extraordinary diversity of life-forms but which, in the end, never loses it's sense of direction

Bergson's sense of the profound unity of all cosmic reality and his emphasis on the superficiality of specific differentiation and individuality have a very contemporary ring. Today echoes of his thought can be perceived in the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) was a younger contemporary of Bergson. Like Bergson, he is sadly neglected nowadays, even within Catholicism where in the 1960s and 1970s he had a major influence on the kind of thinking that underpinned a renewed interest in the broader world characteristic of the Second Vatican Council (1962-5). Trained as a Jesuit and as a palaeontologist and geologist, Teilhard's thought moved in a more theological and poetic direction than Bergson's which was focused on the strictly philosophical. For many this is attractive; for others, like Nobel Laureate biologist, Sir Peter Medawar, it 'assumes an extravagant metaphysical form'.

This, I think, is an unfair assessment. Teilhard was deeply interested in the origins of the world around him and this led him to theorize about an all-encompassing dynamic which embraced the whole of world history. Geology and cosmic history provide the grand time-frame for matter to evolve into deepening consciousness and increasing complexity. In the process Teilhard refocuses theology on the temporal processes, however long range, of this world. He shifts our attention from eternity to time, from heaven to earth. He makes it possible to think about reality in a different way.

In the process he reintegrated matter and spirit, which had been split in the Platonised dualism which had dominated both Christian and scientific thought for many centuries. Teilhard's major contribution to theology - and science - is his notion that matter, even in its most primitive forms, is impregnated with a purposive energy and spirit that constantly evolves toward ever-greater complexity. Matter is not merely an inert, static mass; it is in constant evolution and is the basic building block of life. It is the indispensable pre-condition for spirit. In other words, matter already contains within itself the potentiality for spirituality.

Nevertheless, as Thomas Berry points out, Teilhard remains very much a bourgeois, pious 19th century Catholic in that his thought remains particularly anthropocentric, as is his Christocentrism. An American priest, now aged ninety-three, Thomas Berry is probably the most influential Catholic in the nexus between faith and environmentalism; he calls himself a 'geologian'. I only want to pick out one theme from the extraordinary complex of Berry's thought. He argues that theology must move toward discovering God in the cosmic process, rather than over and above it. God's creativity is shown through the geological history of the cosmos and the evolution of biological processes, rather than through miraculous interventions from outside, however spectacular. He sees life as an interactive continuum from the most primitive forms to the most highly complex. We are not separate creatures standing over and against the rest of nature. All life is profoundly related genetically and these genetic relationships constitute a profound oneness. He insists that we need to rediscover our genetic coding which will lead us back to our rootedness in the processes of organic life. Humankind is not separate and over-against all other reality. It is a constituent part of it.

So, finally, what are we to make of all of this?

First, I would want to claim that spirituality is not something extrinsic to evolution but is, in fact, an essential element in evolution. It is not something imported or infused from the outside, like a soul into a body, but arises from the very matrix of matter itself. We do not 'create gods' - as my rather unfortunate lecture title suggests - in the sense that the divine is some sort of psychological projection. On the contrary, the presence of the transcendent in nature and in the whole of reality is accessible to those who are open to this. This 'presence' has many names including the Judeo-Christian 'God'. This is what George Steiner is getting at when he talks about the experience of 'real presences' in the natural world, art especially music, literature and all of the best in human experience.

Second, in this way bridges or, at the very least, temporary pontoons can be built between theology, spirituality and science. Faith and reason are not intrinsically opposed but are rather different but inter-related ways of exploring the reality of the world around us, both material and transcendent. This does not mean that I am suggesting a retreat into some form of subjectivism or, as some have suggested that this is tantamount to pantheism - the worship of nature as God. I actually believe that contemporary notions of the universe demand a transcendent God. What I want to emphasize is that we can apprehend God when we experience transcendence through nature and the world as the product of evolution.

I believe that this is the only way that we can counter the crazy fundamentalisms that threaten our culture and civilization.