Immortal, Invisible, TICM Only Wise

My last post affirmed that religion is a human creation, the result of millennia of human myth-and symbol-making and ritual-crafting.  That unqualified claim left me open to the misunderstanding that I regard religion as merely a human creation.

According to medieval scholastic theology, God is not a being, but the source of all being. What we call God is prior to distinct beings. God is uncreated being itself, from which all separate and distinct beings derive. The limitations of language force those who would speak of God into strange, strained forms as, for example, Transcendent-Immanent Cosmic Mover, the origin of all space, time and matter.  In other words, a reality for which human thought and language have no adequate categories.

Rather than using the word God, with its heavy accumulation of emotional and intellectual baggage, it might be more useful to use another symbol like TICM.

Scientists like Robert Sapolsky and Richard Dawkins will not entertain the hypothesis that TICM could have impelled human evolution toward the development of a religious sensibility.  They won’t entertain it because it is not subject to scientific – that is to say, experimental – proof.  And they are right.  It isn’t.

And yet, as twentieth-century French Roman Catholic theologian Teilhard de Chardin and others have claimed, TICM could have acted – could be acting – through countless agencies, including the neurobiological capacities of the human brain, to impel us over hundreds of thousands of years to evolve a collective urge, an itch, an ever more refined erotic aspiration toward something that would come to be called divinity, gods, God.  Understood in this way, religion is a mirror TICM prompted and is prompting humans to create to reflect divinity.  Religion is the response in a divine-human antiphonal conversation TICM initiated and continues to initiate.

Whether evolution is purposeful in that sense would seem to be the only real issue in the argument between contemporary scientific atheism and religion.  It is a question that will never be settled.  Belief, on the one hand, and scientific atheism, on the other, are, in the end, personal commitments made without compelling rational proof or demonstrability.  Just as I cannot prove the reality of TICM, a scientific atheist cannot disprove the reality of TICM.

A life based on religious faith is therefore a series of choices, taken over a lifetime, to believe in the reality of a transcendent-immanent purpose mysteriously at work at both macro (beyond) and micro (within) levels. Faith is a decision to affirm a “something more” or a “something behind” the kaleidoscope of what we can apprehend with our senses in time, and to tailor our actions in the world to reflect that belief.  

I choose to believe in that sense, even as I sympathize with those whose commitments are otherwise.