Traditional religion has declared a goal to life that is not much related to material life or evolution but related mainly to the involutionary opposite: a nonmaterial God Within. Few science-oriented people have had the courage to claim some sort of internal direction to life, or even a development toward complexity in evolution. Francis Heylighen and Ken Wilber are two modern thinkers who have shown courage in discussing a direction in evolution. Philosopher Wilber said, evolution is “the opposite of chance or randomness in the universe. It's evidence of a force that is pursuing against randomness in the universe... Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory holds that all of these transformations upward were just the result of chance and randomness. But there is no way in hell that the universe went from atoms to Shakespeare out of random stabs. This is an extraordinary driven process.” (Conversation in Enlightenment, Issue 47, 2011 -p-48 ) The astrophysicist Erich Jantsch referred to evolution as “self-organizing through transcendence,” which is a good way to think about it. Francis Heylighen wrote, “ it is assumed that evolution is largely unpredictable and contingent on a host of uncontrollable factors, which may steer its course in any of an infinite number of directions. However, it is noted that directions in which complexity increases are generally preferred...” "The Growth of Structural and Functional Complexity during Evolution.”
Even recent thinkers in evolutionary religion still retain the non-material inward goal of the God or Father Within as the supreme goal of the "evolution" of consciousness, which is really an involutionary non-material convergence and is not divergently evolutionary. Science and evolutionary religion have still not come close to admitting that the goal of life and evolution is to evolve in the material and supermaterial world to Godhood. The inward activation of life is like a Super-Id of the instincts, defined here as the Spirit-Will-To-Godhood. The fear of claiming a vital direction to life or evolution has paralyzed the science-oriented from finding real meaning in the world, and traditional religion is trapped in the Great Spiritual Blockade of real material evolution. It is simply not enough to declare inward human enlightenment, or how something scientifically works, we need to know why, and where real life is going. To my mind, science discovers how things work, philosophy discovers the truth, and religion includes the art of living along with the discovery of how things work and finding the truth. We will not be satisfied with less.
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