Evolution Is Not A Nightmare

In his book “A Brief History Of Everything,” (no hubris there) Ken Wilber makes a statement that reveals the involutionary reductionism of his world view. “There in the Heart, where the couple finally unite, the entire game is undone, this nightmare of evolution, and you are exactly where you where prior to the beginning of the whole show.”

First of all “the couple” do not unite in the Heart, one “only” sees into the Soul in the Heart. Seeing the Soul, blissful as that is, may help us identify the goal of the Spirit, which is Godhood, but Godhood can be reached only through material evolution all the way to the materiaspiritual, and ultimately to God. Thus evolution is not a “nightmare,” it is seen as a nightmare when the involutionary, internal methods of religion reduce Godhood to the Soul-Within.

We require both the involutionary methods of religion and the evolutionary methods of nature and science, first to see God, and then, with God's Grace, to reach God. Both methods are applied in the Evolutionary Christian Church.

The Fall and the Rise

For the Theoevolutionary Church the sin of the Fall which supposedly made men subject to death, even as the Spirit of man is naturally immortal, is related to ignorance as well as to The Great Spiritual Blockade. Knowing the Spirit-Within is only half the required wisdom. Evolving the material, the bio-spiritual body, to Godhood is the Forgotten Half of God's law. This great forgetting, or ignorance helps define the Fall.

The pagan idea of perfectibility through virtue, is still affirmed, as it was in the West via the “Gentleman” ethos, and this is attached to Christian Love, which was missing from the classical virtues. Unlike Classicism, Divine Grace may also be needed to reorient us from love of self to love of God, God reached secondarily by the traditional involutionary path to the Soul-Within, as well as the primary, natural, evolutionary way to Godhood, for the few.

For the West, Jesus Christ sacrificed Himself to reveal the Soul to save all men. We work in this tradition, being conservative. Yet we add the Evolutionary Outward Path to attain true Godhood.

Nonduality Not An Emptying

Nonduality is not accomplished by emptying all the material elements, as so many mystics advocate, although this is the blockading method to see the blissful Soul-Within. When the Spirit-Will is discerned one sees that the Seeing-Spirit must not become Blockaded.

The inner suggests the outer and the outer suggests the inner regarding the evolution and involution to God. Godhood seems to be the only true Nonduality.

Our task is to evolve to God. We can first identify the inner God of the Soul, which can help guide our way to seeing the Spirit-Will at the zenith of the Soul and seeing our material evolution to Godhood, where the Spirit-Will reaches Its goal.

"Youth Without Youth"

Can love and the quest for knowledge work in harmony? This question suggests a deeper question: can the spiritual work in harmony with the material? These were the main themes of Francis Ford Coppola's beautiful 2007 film version of Mircea Eliade's novella,"Youth Without Youth." Did Eliade resolve this conflict? He seems to have painfully chosen love over all in this story, yet he had to sacrifice knowledge. Or perhaps he arrived at a final knowledge that love is the most important knowledge. Still, he only implicitly, almost reluctantly chooses love.

That is the right choice, it seems to us, but it need not have been such a painful conflict. The Theovolutionary Church (EC) resolves this age old philosophical and theological difficulty with the knowledge that love does not conflict with the evolution of the material to the spiritual, which is really the supermaterial, indeed, love is the sacred means by which the material evolves to the supermaterial. The involutionary God of Jesus Christ is the God we evolve to in the cosmos.

However, there is a sacred and profane love, defined in evolutionary terms. That which evolves toward God, toward higher consciousness, toward Absolute Knowledge, is sacred love, that which does not is profane love. The Traditional Conservative perspective of EC does not dictate these values, the virtues and social philosophy move men, educate men, in this upward path. With this perspective the hero of “Youth For Youth” might have resolved his conflict over how to use his knowledge during World War Two. Here is where there could be a real dramatic conflict. But that is another story.

Redeeming Materialism In Spiritualism, And Spiritualism In Materialism

“Idealism failed to explain matter, which it defined as 'all-but-nothing.' " Charles Norris Cochrane

Materialism failed to do justice to the problem of Spirit, saying there is no spirit. Classicism found no escape, it was either upwards by way of transcending materialism, or rejecting spiritualism downward into positivism.

Theological materialism and the Evolutionary Christian Church says the material evolves to the spiritual-material, all the way to God, thus overcoming the problems between Idealism, Spiritualism and Materialism.

Christianity saw the Divine Nature as a Trinity, thus it explained the logos of Being in motion, the Holy Spirit. ECC explains this motion as the Will to Godhood, or the Spirit-Will to Godhood, defined as evolution, thus redeeming materialism in spiritualism, and spiritualism in materialism.

The Unique Offering of the Theoevolutionary Church

Science makes sacred the biosphere, religion makes sacred the noosphere, the Theoevolutionary Church makes sacred both, but does so not by trying to integrate the biosphere into the noosphere, or the noosphere into the biosphere, (which is really done through the blocking of either world) but by affirming the inner world of the Soul, seen by the great sages, as the blissful hint of the evolutionary goal of the outer world of biospiritual forms evolving all the way to the Form of Forms, Godhood. This is the unique, integrating offering of the Theoevolutionary Church.

Sixth Veda Comparison

Speaking more in Perennial religious terms, the Theoevolutionary Church could be likened to an additional  Veda in the sense that it integrates the sensory with the spiritual, it brings the finite to the infinite by way of evolution.

The TC takes the whole person with his/her worldly desires into account, whereas most spiritual traditions teach that the material and the spiritual are mutually exclusive. The evolution of material life to Godhood reconciles the two desires.

Would the Theoevolutionary Church be better described as a Sixth Veda, an advancement in the Fivefold Christian Ministry?

Science Joins Religion In Polonyi's Work

We implicitly accept Michael Polonyi's definition of science, truth and reality, which is, that both scientists and theologians can be guided by implicit knowledge, not merely the Enlightenment way of knowing through strictly logical and methodologically provable facts. (Modern Age Summer 2007 )

Polonyi defines truth and reality in terms of an idea or theory's potential for future manifestations, its capacity for revealing future awareness, or deeper meaning.

“We know things that we cannot tell.” Knowing must include our awareness of truths we may not be able to state explicitly. Of course, doing serious work in this way of knowing should not be exploited subjectively, it is implicit knowledge based on a trained capacity, after years in fields of study.

E8plane

Here is an intro to the E8plane model, from the Telegraph uk.



Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything.

Inevitable Decentralization

The decentralization movement we see growing in the world is not radical, and need not be, although at first it may seem to be so. The present industrial complex, with its depleting energy sources, will mean the end of globalism and national giantism, because they will be unsustainable, they will fall apart. All the old dynamics given for why Empires fall, of course, still exist, eg. growing cultural and biological differences from the founders, leading to separations, etc.

Therefore, decentralization is not an abstract ideal prepared for with revolutionary zeal, it is a movement basically preparing for the decentralization that will inevitably come. This movement includes the American conservative ethos of limited government against the ever-expanding state. Examples would be the Swiss system of multicultural federalism from communes and cantons, or the corresponding unit of the state in the United States, or Jefferson's "little republics."

The Evolutionary Christian Church (ECC) emphatically resists the totalitarian temptation to mobilize the masses for a mytho-ideological or religious cause. The principles of decentralized federalism and Catholic subsidiarity harmonize with the evolutionary goals of ECC.

In the future, the all too human march back to centralized power will have to be prevented again.

(An excellent essay on this subject can be found in the Summer 2007 issue of Modern Age--”Secession and American Federalism,” by Arthur Versluis)

Implicit/Explicit Psychology

There is an interesting relationship to Michael Polanyi's views, mentioned below, and the views of controversial psychologist Kevin MacDonald, who applies an implicit/explicit dynamic regarding truth to the psychology between modern races. MacDonald's essay can be found in pdf form here.

Polanyi's Truth

The dreams of the communists and Nazi's were not, it seems to me, mainly the result of the mistaken hopes of the Enlightenment ideal of trying to solve all problems with reason, science and technology, which was suggested by the great modern epistemologist Michael Polanyi. It was more the “tacit intimation,” the implicit knowing that took the dictators on their paths of radical change. It seems to me that the dictators defined truth more in Polanyi's terms, that is, something is true if it reveals deeper meaning, if it has potential for future discoveries or manifestations, and not merely because something could be true because it could be proven exactly with scientific methodology.

We generally affirm Polanyi's preference for implicit truth, but we do not then blame Enlightenment science for the political philosophies of the twentieth century. We might instead turn the standard dynamic around and begin with science, the way intuition is often used first, and use implicit knowledge as the final or deeper meaning of truth. This way science, and implicit knowledge that comes from religion, can work in harmony, without having to disparage either side.

Gerhart Niemeyer's Ideology

Professor Niemeyer, of course, brilliantly argued against ideology on the grounds that the dreamlands which ideologies try to create have been most dangerous in the world, eg. Marxism, Nazism.

But then Niemeyer proceeds to develop his own dreamland, his own cosmic totality of transcendence and spirit, which he admits are beyond our immediate, sensory experience, received through faith--- a faith, however, held in balance and in natural tension with reason.

We think this is not the way to include religion in reason or science any more than were the total ideologies of the early 20th century. We can remain within both the hypothetical or theoretical realm of science, and within the faith of religion, when God can be reached through both the Involutionary Spirit within and through the bio-spiritual evolution to God, as is done in the Evolutionary Christian Church. The balance between reason and faith this way is brought into harmony without unreasonable dreamlands, while including both science and religion.

Perhaps we could mention another of Niemeyer's thoughts suggesting that religious dogmas need to be moistened and kneaded anew if they are to serve as guides to faith.

Uniting the Christian, the Enlightenment and the Romantic

An excellent essay from the Summer 2007 issue of Kirk's old journal “Modern Age,” by Andreas Kinneging, points out the differences between Conservatism, the classical pagan, the Enlightenment and the Romantic, which for Professor Kinneging are not united accept for the “Christian gentleman” who is, or was, a combination of the classical pagan man of virtues and the Christian man of love.

The Theoevolutionary Church unites these philosophies. We unite the reason of the Enlightenment and modern science but with the divine natural law of evolution to Godhood. We unite the feelings and emotions of Romanticism, and the Enlightenment conception that desires motivate man, with the drives of material, superbiological evolution, which leads to Godhood for the virtuous, therefore we add to the pagan-Christian virtues the higher, sacred, material evolution of life to supermaterial Godhood.

Conservative Perspective On Evolution And Change

Edmund Burke said in “Thoughts on French Affairs (1791)... “If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will grow that way. Every fear, every hope will forward it; and they who persist in opposing this mighty current in human affairs will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself than the mere designs of men. They will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate.”

Burke said this without abandoning his criticism of ideology, of abstract theory. As Jeffrey Hart put it, “Burke now understood the irresistible character of social forces when they move toward institutional and cultural change.” (Modern Age, Summer 2007).

We believe that Evolution is an irresistible force and it will one day be included in traditional Catholicism. But we affirm this change while still very much affirming the religion and cultural traditions of the West, of Christendom.

It really is arrogant, as Conservatives well know, to think that we understand all the intricacies of human society and nature enough to form a guiding ideology. We must accept what reality shows us, and intricate reality fits no ideology, as yet.

Three In One Conservatism

Unifying Religion

Unlike the the elegant Christopher Olaf Blum (Modern Age, Summer 2007) we do not believe we have to choose between the two (we would say three) kinds of Conservatism, that is, those that defend the Enlightenment of a century ago, those that defend the older traditions of the ancients, including the Christian, and those of the Traditionalist School who defend pagan “myth” and its connection with Perennial religion.

We transmute these three versions of Conservatism in the Theoevolutionary Church(TC), and we add to the science of the Enlightenment the modern element of bio-spiritual evolution. The Traditionalist School is affirmed in acceptance of cycles and hierarchies, both spiritual and biological.

The Conservatives and the Liberals (classical or modern) overestimated the flexibility of human nature in regard to social behavior, whereas TC is more in accord with sociobiology. Man has primarily seen God through the involutionary Spirit-Within, which has been the activity of traditional religion. TC has at last included in traditional religion the biological and spiritual evolution to God, which deepens the natural law. Past versions of Conservatism were not wrong, they were an incomplete part of the whole.