a) The Latest Scientific Discoveries and Insights Have Made It Possible for Science and Religious to Once Again Recognize That They May Be Complementary: For thousands of years in both the East and the West during the first four stages of Bellah’s religious evolution, religious and natural human knowledge were seen as not opposed to one another. They were believed to be part and parcel of a single reality and a single system of truth. This unity slowly turned into opposition as the scientific revolution slowly got under way. This revolution was centered in changes in our understanding of our cosmos. Copernicus started the process in the sixteenth century, with his mathematically based notion that our solar system is not earth-centered as both natural science and the religious teaching of many religions had long thought and taught. The new idea (not totally new actually) was that our world was sun-centered.

Next, Galileo proved Copernicus right with the help of the new invention: the telescope. Then Isaac Newton further widened the gap between these scientific discoveries and the stubbornly resisting Catholic Church is teaching by showing that gravity was the force that kept all of the heavenly bodies in their interactions with one another. And slowly a new paradigm for the nature and huge extent or our cosmos began to take shape.

The next major blow to the role of religious truth came from the Philosophes of France in the eighteenth century who simply dismissed the established Christian claim to be the ultimate source of real truth. “God” was reduced to a vague deistic principle. Then a century or so later, Darwin and his notion of evolution based on “the survival of the fittest” seemed to most scientists to have ended the reign of religious claims to be the ultimate source of truth. Religion became the equivalent of either violent repression of real truth or stodgy if well-meaning lack of real concern to keep up with the march of science. All but a few theologians, bishops or leaders of the various Christian traditions (and other traditions as well), simply could not get beyond the old notion that their sacred scriptures told the truth in a completely literal fashion.

The remarkable thing is that this old enmity between scientific and religious notions of truth has been completely healed in the eyes and minds of leading theologians and scientists—even the latest popes have declared that the evolution of humans from lower forms of life was “more that mere theory.” Many scientists too, have also undergone a radical change of perspective as the new paradigm of reality initiated by the likes of Einstein and Heisenberg slowly began to sink in. More recently science and religion have come once again to be friends in the eyes of many of our best scientists. Great physicist-cosmologists from Einstein to Hawking helped the process along. Not yet ready to become formally committed to any of the old-time religions, they nevertheless often spoke in religious terms of the universe.

More recently cosmologists like Brian Swimme and others have brought matters to a full circle by explicitly uniting once again religious and scientific truth. Even though most “hard” empirical scientists may not still refuse to see religion as a legitimate source or form of truth (just as many “hard-nosed” theologians and preachers are not ready to give up “intelligent design” based on literalist interpretations of the Bible) these new scientists’ present new ways of seeing religious and scientific truth as in no way incompatible. There certainly is now in progress a paradigm shift in this whole area. This can be seen most clearly in the intense discussion of the “Anthropic Principle” in which leading physicists (Susskind of Stanford for example) argue that our cosmos is very finely tuned in such a way as to allow the evolution of human life on our speck of a planet. If the Big Bang had been a fraction of a second slower or faster the cosmos would have never developed the carbon and other elements necessary for human life.

This is but the tip an iceberg. One needs only to type “Anthropic Principle” into Google to see that this notion conjures up arguments for and against by physicists and mathematicians, and the same kind of polarization among theologians of every religion and denomination arguing for every point on the spectrum of belief and non-belief. Their opinions range from the ridiculous notion that the Anthropic Principle proves the existence of God (Even though believers within all religions agree that only faith can help reason into religious commitment), to the idea that it is an evil falsehood that subverts the “truth” that God created the universe in six days as Genesis tells us.

We members of the Cosmos Club tend to feel that the Anthropic Principle may be something like the warmth of the sun, the coming of spring, or the birth of new life: it points to the love and wisdom of the Mystery Within the cosmos, but it “proves” nothing about God’s or the Buddha’s existence or non-existence, since both by definition thoroughly transcend the puny human mind.

What the arguments and insights of modern physics—from Einstein, to Heisenberg, to Hubble, to the Hubble Telescope, to Super-string theory, to the anthropic principle—do in fact prove is that the new paradigm of reality evinced in them does indeed make it possible (not inevitable) for individuals committed to a spiritual or religious way of seeing reality to enthusiastically embrace the wonders of scientific truth concerning our incredibly beautiful cosmos.

b) How the Religious Paradigm Shift Took Form: How exactly did the religious half of this paradigm shift take place? Only yesterday the famous “monkey trial” in Tennessee declared war on science as the real source of truth. What happened? As is the case with all paradigm shifts, it happened slowly. Already back in the fifties and before, H. Richard Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, James Fouler, Peter Berger and many other theologians of the Protestant tradition, as well as Karl Rahner, Hans Kung and many other Catholic theologians—and Martin Buber and others of the Jewish tradition, and many Buddhist, Islamic and Hindu thinkers began a slow adjustment to what they saw as simply a part of reality that demanded adjustments in their religious view of life. Let’s take a closer look at how this happened.

It actually began a century before. Hindu thinkers like Sri Aurobindo and his followers created a Vedanta Philosophy that recognized the legitimacy of other religions. D.T. Suzuki recognized the legitimacy of other religions as a young man, and attended the first Congress of Religions in 1893. Isolated thinkers in all the other religions were thinking along similar lines.

Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest who carried stretchers in the trenches of World War I and went on to become a first class scientist himself. As a respected paleontologist he helped discover the Pekin Man in China in the thirties, and early forties begin his writings on religion and science that eventually were published, beginning in the sixties, as The Divine Milieu, The Phenomenon of Man, Hymn of the Universe, The Future of Man, and others. Unfortunately, prophets are not appreciated in their own land, and so the Catholic Church refused to allow him to publish these. It was only after his death that they came to light—and immediately took the religious world by storm. In Teilhard, not just other religions but the whole universe is a hymn of praise to the divine.

At the very same time that de Chardin’s ideas were incubating, parallel thinkers were—each in isolation from the other—helping him to put together what was slowly to become a new religious paradigm of reality. In Germany Paul Tillich, Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr and other Protestant theologians and ministers were incubating their own theological revolution. Even in his early, multi-volume Systematic Theology, Tillich broadened out the notion of “God” into a philosophy that saw the creator as the “Ground of Being,” thus bringing Christian theology within shouting distant of the current atheistic thought of thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. It was only as an old man, however, after a revolutionizing visit to Japan where, in “our” Kyoto in the late sixties Tillich engaged in in-depth discussions with key Buddhist thinkers and came back to Chicago to write the last and most marvelous book of his life, The Future of Religion. He admits that in the light of his new insights his Systematic Theology would have to be re-written to make room for the validity not only of Buddhism but of all the major and time-tested religious traditions.

During the same period, another great German theologian was doing very analogous things for Catholic theology. The Jesuit Karl Rahner was brought as a “peritus” or theological expert to take part in the Second Vatican Council in Rome by his Archbishop. He soon took the lead among the progressive theologians there, and as a result of his work and that of other theologians like Hans Kung, the Council made its revolutionizing, “Declaration on Non-Christian Religions.” For the first time in history the Catholic Church not only publicly admitted the immense amount of religious and ethical truth in other religions, it went on to declare that these religions must be given the respect and recognition due them. This was the beginning of a new era of mutual dialogue between the Catholic Church and other religious traditions. A similar step had already been taken a short time earlier by the Protestant Churches in their World Council of Religions.

Rahner also, like Tillich, began the long task of “aggiornamento” or “bringing up to date” Christian doctrine by dismantling the old pre-Conciliar presumption that God had created the cosmos in the biblical, “six days.” With the Protestant theologian Rudolph Bultman, he and others were able to slowly bring the notion that the creation story of Genesis need not be literal truth. This story and many other presumptions about the nature of the world found in both the Hebrew and the New Testaments had to be “demythologized,” or at least seen for the symbolic truths they were.

Two of Rahner’s works are outstanding in this regard. Nature and Grace and Hominization.[1] In the first Rahner argues that “Grace” need not be conceived as above and separate from nature, like water and oil; they exist rather together like wine and oil in a good salad. The universe is and was from the beginning brimming over with God’s “Grace,” gratia, or caris: His Loving Kindness, that becomes the new Life in Christian belief.

In Hominization, Rahner went much further. He knew that just as for the biblical authors of Genesis and for early Christians the notion that the sun revolved around the earth was not revelation but a simple statement of the obvious, just so Rahner also knew that for Plato and the Greek, Jewish and Christian thinkers for centuries the notion that the soul was the seat of human knowledge of eternal truths, and that this soul was quite distinct from the corruptible body. Rahner took the bold step of speculating that, once the fact of human evolution from previous forms of life slowly became a certainty, the notion that the source of human knowledge of truth had to be a separate and non-corruptible soul was no longer an essential part of Christian truth. Rahner argues as follow,

In connection with the question of the evolutionary origins of man, the Church’s teaching emphasizes that spirit and matter are not the same, that spirit cannot be derived from matter, and that man, because spiritual, has a metaphysically irreducible position in the cosmos, so that his origin, as far as his spiritual nature is concerned, cannot be found in matter. . . .[but] We must know what spirit is . . . . What “spiritual” means is an immediate non-empirical datum of human knowledge, though it needs, of course, to be articulated and interpreted by reflection. It is only on the basis of that knowledge that it is possible to determine the actual metaphysical meaning of “material”. It is an unmetaphysical and ultimately materialistic prejudice common among scientists to suppose that men primarily deal with matter and know precisely what matter is, and then subsequently and laboriously and very problematically have to “discover” spirit in addition, and can never properly know whether what it signifies cannot after all be reduced to matter in the end.[2]

Rahner knew well what was happening in the scientific world in the sixties and before. He not only felt certain of the fact of human evolution, he also saw this evolution as being part and parcel with the evolution of the cosmos, and that “matter” was not the ultimate constituent of the cosmos. He goes on to say,

Nothing at all is settled in the Christian view of the world about a “dialectical” unity of spirit and matter . . . for God, as Christian metaphysic views him, is not a part of the world but its comprehensive ground. . . . But if it is possible to give a dialectical answer affirming that man is “original” and “underivitive”, and yet that he is also a component in a cosmic history [Emphasis added] and consequently has an origin with the world as a whole, then spirit and matter cannot be envisaged merely as disparate entities and seen as purely and simple different [!] . . . From a Christian point of view, therefore, spirit, at least finite spirit, can never be thought of in such a way that in order to attain perfection it must move away from material reality, or that its perfection increases in proportion to its distance from matter. [Emphasis added] [3]

Rahner does not attempt to solve all the problems that these assertions raise. He is simply doing what every thinker in every religious system has done in every age: attempting to bring his faith and his natural knowledge into a complementary system of understanding. He concludes, however with a rather startling assertion, “{I}t is possible to say . . .that parents are the cause of the one entire human being and so also of its soul. . .”

Many theologians and religious thinkers in many religious traditions have been and are continuing to take into consideration not just evolution but the whole fabric of the cosmos when they talk about their religious faith. For instance, many of the best current theologians, both Protestant and Catholic, see Jesus as one revealer of the one Divine Source, among others in other religious traditions. One such example is Roger Haight, former President of the Catholic Theological Society, who recently published a book entitled Jesus Symbol of God[4] It should be surprising that Haight’s book, like the many similar ones by the Protestant theologians whom he liberally cites and quotes, brought down on his head the severe criticism by more conservative church authorities. A large number of both Catholic and Protestant theologians and thinkers writing today agree in large part with Haight’s point of view. Thinkers like John Hick, Paul Knitter, John B. Cobb, and many others see the religions which have survived for centuries and have won the hearts of whole peoples as in one way or another as all cut from the same human clothe, as containing temporally and culturally very diverse views, teachings and practices while containing a core of very similar ethical principles and arising from the same transcendent source.

Notes

1. Nature and Grace: Dilemmas in the Modern Church (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964)
and
Hominization: The Evolutionary Origin of Man as a Theological Problem (New York: Herder and Herder, 1965).

2. Hominizaton, pp. 46-47.

3. Ibid., pp. 50-52.

4. Roger Haight, S.J., Jesus Symbol of God (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1999).