rad Fregger: This morning I said that Ed Lindaman was the gentleman who lit the match to this particular firecracker. I guess I could say very honestly that John Turpin was the person who put the firecracker in here to begin with, at a symposium a number of years ago now. John is a great person, he’s thought much about helping people to deal with this world as it is, the relevancy of it, and the ways we are going and can go. John.

Rev. John Turpin

“ENCOURAGING SIGNS ABOUT THE FUTURE”

I would like to commend to you the thought of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. His work is immensely useful in this discussion about science and religion and the human future. My remarks are much influenced by him.

We can get a definition of religion in many ways. Let’s approach it through language. Language must not only refer to something actual—but must be useful in working with the phenomena being described. To be useful language must deal with the particular level of organization and complexity we are addressing.

A man can be discussed on the level of the electrons and atomic nuclei in this body, on the level of his living cellular life, on the level of major body organs—heart, lungs, etc., on the level of his systematic maintenance, on the level of his conscious intentions as a self-aware person.

The language of nuclear physics will unravel the mystery of the sub-atomic particles in a man’s body—but is not directly useful in treating a heart attack victim. For that we need language on the organ and system level. The question is what level of organization is religion on? I think religion has to do with the whole organism and as part of the network of human consciousness in this universe. Already we can note some things about religion.

The matter of how the whole organism in the network of consciousness can enrich and fulfill the quality of life is a valid and necessary concern. Views about this will differ—but the question is compelling and real—whether you call it religion or not.
That question cannot be answered reductively—you can’t deal with life-quality questions by reference only to conditioned reflex, father complexes or chemistry.

Religion does have a reality reference to which it is accountable—the whole organism in its whole social-political, physical environment.

Religion cannot be in a single watertight compartment—a special world. Its function is to link all of the life of man into conscious meaning. Religion must take account of science, sociology, history, politics—or it is not dealing with real life.
Religion’s problem is that it awaits more exact findings from all fields of knowledge. Its additional problems are that it necessarily must talk about large-scale relationships and it deals with the human mind which can distort or transform meaning almost as quickly as it started.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin points out how the trend of scientific study leads to taking the human seriously. Up through the 1950s there was an anti-man bias in the study of biology and the field of evolution. The idea was that man was inconsequential in the scope of geologic time so let’s study the lower animals and not be confused by man’s subjectivity.
Teilhard de Chardin from his lifelong field of study (in thick books and in complex arguments) makes the point—if anyone from another galaxy were to come to this earth he would find man to be the most interesting phenomena. After all, the computers which create the computers have to be somewhat interesting.

The dinosaurs are not that interesting because they didn’t survive. But man has learned to shape his environment. In some ways we live in a man-made world more than a natural world. The animal that has done all this is man.
Teilhard says that evolution has had a bias toward consciousness. Evolution has a shape and direction. Its process may have been random but it yields ever greater complexity and moves toward ever greater consciousness and interrelationship.

He talks about the cerebralisation of organic life on the earth. He means that as forms become more complex and more inter-related, they become more interior in their awareness of what goes on outside them. The rock doesn’t know what is going on three feet from it. The robin does. Man has the capacity to interiorize what is going on 100 or even millions of miles away. Now that is a remarkable capacity.

Teilhard de Chardin looks at this as a phenomenon (not making any supernatural assumptions whatsoever)—this development of consciousness. He sees the development of a network of human brains as the new tide in evolution. No new physical form has appeared in the last 2,000,000 years. The human brain has developed not by its size but by the way it relates to other brains. This is the new sap rising in the tree of evolution.

Chardin proposes the idea of the noosphere. Let’s try to visualize the noosphere. As we have participated in this symposium it is not too important that we are in Foothill College with all due respect to John Williamson and his fine hospitality. We have been talking about Aristotle, Einstein, the rise of technology, Galileo. We have been relating in a community of brains, your mother’s brain, your grandfather’s brain, the professor who taught you biology in high school, your minister, television, what you heard this morning, all of these communications form part of the noosphere. The noosphere is the total intellectual community of the globe in its interaction.

Teilhard de Chardin suggests that this network of brains is thickening. In the last 200 years with the doubling and redoubling of knowledge and with the modern methods of communication so widely in use—satellites, computer recall. The noosphere is thickening and complexifing and building up pressure.

This concept casts light on Christianity’s picture of humanity. The body of Christ is the traditional picture of humanity. It is an organic model of humanity and it talks about interior participation. This is not a mechanical model where you draw boxes or show gears. It is an interior kind of connectedness.

I would suggest that in some ways individualism is a fiction, a useful fiction but many times a very misleading fiction. 95 percent of the things I think, I didn’t think up by myself. I am a ganglion in the nervous system of humanity. I have responsibility. I have freedom, but on the other hand I am part of an organism. Maybe we need to re-understand the covenantal community—the body of Christ, as a world-wide organism.

You may have thought that the fewer connections you had with anybody the more individual and unique you are. But Teilhard de Chardin points out that the whole thrust of evolution is toward more interconnections with other brains. The more interconnections you have, the more individual and unique you are and the more you have to contribute. Moving into an increasingly complex, organized, interrelated society can mean an increase and intensification of individuality rather than the opposite.

Perhaps the reason we fear interrelationships is that we were not tooled up for the 1970s. At least I wasn’t, being born in a small town. Teilhard de Chardin says that the bee society is socialized by the exterior of the bee—their society is instinctual. But man is radially related in the interior of his awareness he is related to another, so that when my wife and I are functioning well, about 2 days out of 3, I do not find that relationship a burden, in fact I find it just the other way around. I find that that enhances my ability to be a truly free individual. I think that is the kind of model we are talking about—radial, interior relationship. This has implications for participatory planning and decision making.

I believe that improving our human systems is the most crucial issue ahead of us. We are going to need all of the sophisticated technology we can get developed. We need a great deal more information about human group and institutional behavior and communication process. How can large scale human systems take decisions that are participative and life enhancing for the globe? I think the participation of the public in decision making is part of the present intensification of pressure in the noosphere. We need some real changes in our ways of organizing life if all are to participate in the decisions being made by U. S. Steel, and Washington D.C. for us.

On the other hand, I think religion needs to say that interiority doesn’t take you everywhere. There isn’t an infinitely expanding consciousness. I don’t believe you can look at reality and think of it any way you wish. I think water still freezes at a certain temperature. I think there is a certain voltage necessary to enter the nucleus. We are not free to imagine any reality we would like and live in it. I think there is a given to the universe we really have to face up to. I personally don’t think that any individual man is going to live forever. I think there is a real universe that cannot be altered simply by man deciding to think of it in a different way. I think we need to listen to religion when it warns against the destructive consequences of taking the inner personal subjective world as the only world.

There is a story about that. When chloroform was first being used, a man took chloroform for dental surgery. When he woke, he said, “I had an insight into the meaning of the universe.”

His friend said, “What is it?”

He replied, “I have forgotten it.”

His friend said, “I’ll tell you what we will do. You go under the chloroform again and we will have a stenographer write down anything you say. When you wake, we can interpret this together.”

So they put him under chloroform again. The stenographer was there to write.

Finally he came out of the drug, work up and asked, “What did I say?”

His friend replied, “You said, ‘The whole universe is permeated with the faint odor or turpentine!’”

Now the problem with a lot of religious experience, mystical experience, charismatic experience, speaking in tongues and etc., etc., is that it has been subject to wish fulfillment and many times very destructive. I have to side with Bronowski as I understand him in the final chapter of his book, The Ascent of Man. There he pleads with us to stick with the empirical—the responsibility to cross check our data with one another. That doesn’t mean that we should not go into extrasensory perception and other fields. But we must maintain a healthy empiricism, a healthy skepticism. I think the future is going to be about as sinful as the past. I hope not quite as much.

Finally some insights about our humanity from Jesus. I think that Jesus is to be understood by the impact that he had on world history. The historical yield of Jesus is fantastic. That as Ernst Troeltsch said, is his transcendence.

I am aware that people have been persecuted and burned in his name. In the recent civil rights movement, the people who opposed it and the people who led it were largely nurtured by the church. I am willing to add the good results and subtract the bad results to come out with a net. I believe one can say realistically that Jesus has had tremendous net impact on human becoming in this brief 6,000 years that we humans have been at civilization.

Jesus talked about the enemy-neighbor. Jesus kept these two together with a hyphen between the word enemy and the word neighbor. Jesus said, “Love your enemy as yourself. He will still be your enemy, but at least you won’t destroy each other.”
He was asked who is my neighbor? To answer, Jesus told the story of the Samaritan who picked up the Jew. The Jew and the Samaritan hated each other. This parable puts the enemy-neighbor as an indissoluble combination.

We are all enemy-neighbors, even in the family. We all breathe one another’s air, step on one another’s toes. We must define our co-existence in terms of a covenant in which we work out what we need to give life the quality it can have. I think Jesus treated his enemies that way. Any idea of total sacrifice of the self or total winning is mistaken. Jesus taught us about co-existing with enemy-neighbors in the family and around the globe. We need that insight to be translated into operational and system terms.

I think Jesus taught us a lot that we have not yet fully understood. In this symposium today a woman named Shirley spoke of the transformation of pain. Jesus dealt with this in the story of the Prodigal Son. The Prodigal was one of those not-achieving human beings. Like you and me he had trouble getting himself together. He caused a lot of pain to his father. He spent one-third of the family wealth, dragged the family name in the mud. Finally, he came to the end of his rope and asked to move back home.

You would have expected his dad to come at him with the logic of addition—struggling for years to get our family solvent again—but somehow the father managed to incorporate the pain of the Prodigal as his own pain. He says, “Bring the robe, the ring and kill the fatted calf. This my son is alive!”

There is a fantastic explosion of human energy and joy when the pain of the father and the pain of the son merged. Creativity which allowed the past to be transcended by a new future. It is the logic of transformation. I believe Jesus is giving us the possibility of a human inter-relatedness which is real, not based on closing one’s eyes to problems, but opening the way to transcending the things that divide our globe.

Jesus’ insight is that the noosphere relationship based on love, forgiveness, a common humanity, a common future—an organic covenant—such relationships do not enslave but set free; do not make a mass but a participative democracy of persons; do not drain of energy but create a chain reaction of energy.

Such understanding of relationship needs translation into the political, economic, social decision-making processes. Such relationships do not live in a make-believe world but see deeper into the organic interrelationship of man’s three million years of becoming. Such relationships do not do away with selfishness and sin but transcend them in a higher self-concern for mankind.

The encouraging signs about the human future are the places where this yeast is already growing.