Religion, Consciousness, and Evolution
(this is a revised version of an earlier post)

The Traditional Perspective: Evolution as the Enemy of Religion
Traditionally, religion and evolution seem to have been locked in a perpetual battle. From the early years of Darwin’s Origin of Species, to the infamous and nationally covered Scopes monkey trial, right up to the current “Creation Science” movement, believers (mostly, although not exclusively, Christian evangelical fundamentalists) have characterized belief in evolution as incompatible with belief in God, and especially with belief in God as understood by evangelicals.  Often this battle is situated in the larger context of a literalist interpretation of the Bible: Since the theory of evolution offers an account of the origin of the human (and other) species that is different from the Genesis account of direct creation by an act of a transcendent God, to accept the truth of evolution necessarily implies the rejection of the infallible authority of the Bible, and for many Christians that is unacceptable.
Of course, not all Christians are fundamentalists or Biblical literalists, and there are many who identify as Christian and accept the theory of evolution (of particular note is the French priest/paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose work attempted to present a complete reconciliation of religion and evolution). Nonetheless, it’s fair to say that the dominant factor in the religion-evolution relationship over the past century and longer, has been the evangelical/fundamentalist interpretation of that relationship, according to which Christian faith requires a literal interpretation of the Bible which necessarily leads to a rejection of evolution.
But there is a much different way to think about the relationship between religion and evolution once one steps outside the constraints of fundamentalism and textual literalism.

An Alternative Perspective: Evolution as the Source of Religion
Many religions understand the origin of their tradition to be the result of a divine act of top-down revelation, where a transcendent divine being (God) communicates a revelation to humanity, with that revelation (Torah, Bible, Qur’an, Veda, etc.) functioning as the origin and foundation of religious truth.
But let’s consider another account of how religion might have emerged, doing so from an evolutionary perspective that does not in any way deny the reality of a spiritual dimension but at the same time completely eliminates the conflict between religion and evolution.
To begin, let’s look at the big picture of evolution – the really big picture, sometimes referred to as “Big History”:
The Universe originated approximately 14 billion years ago with a singularity in which space/time/energy first came into existence – the Big Bang. The subsequent development of the Universe was one in which entities of increasing complexity evolved: from the primal energy to elementary particles to protons and neutrons to simple atoms to stars to galaxies. Collapsing stars, or supernova, in these early galaxies led to explosions which resulted in solar systems, in which even more complex bodies composed of various elements orbited around a central star. In one such galaxy, this included the planet on which we reside, Earth. Over millions of years, the evolution of increasingly complex structures continued on Earth, which was positioned in just the right location for the eventual emergence of life in the form of uni-cellular organisms, then multi-cellular organisms, then complex living species (fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals), eventually leading to humans.
And here is where things get really interesting. Humans continued to evolve, as individuals and groups, and in a variety of ways: socially, culturally, psychologically, economically, politically, etc.
For our purposes, though, the most important element of the ongoing evolution of humans was the evolution of human consciousness, or the capacity to perceive and be aware of increasingly fuller aspects of reality.
Early humans, like the mammals which they evolved from, had the capacity for sensory experience: sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, etc. But over time, human consciousness developed to a point which exceeded that of previous species, in that humans developed the capacity to perceive or sense (however dimly) the existence of what we might call super-sensory or transcendent aspects of reality. At some point, probably more than 40,000 years ago, humans acquired a sense that there was something more than that which they could perceive through the ordinary five senses, something that (to use a word that makes sense to us today but of course would have been meaningless at the time) transcended the more common everyday dimension of material stuff. From this point in our evolution, humans differed from all other living creatures in the sense that, in addition to sensory experience of stuff, humans had the capacity to experience or sense (again, however dimly), the presence of “something more” which could not be directly seen, touched, etc., but which was nonetheless part of what is real.
In some ways, this unique human characteristic was a matter of recognizing abstractions: concepts such as number, time, space, direction, etc. In other words, the capacity of the human mind clearly evolved or grew over time: the earliest humans could not use written and oral symbols to communicate, which is to say that early human consciousness did not include abstract thinking; eventually, of course, humans not only developed this capacity but enlarged and refined it into complex languages capable of communicating subtle internal mental and emotional perceptions and states.
But for our purposes, the most unique aspect of this evolving human capacity to perceive an increasingly fuller and more expansive  perception of reality was the recognition of something that existed that was qualitatively different from anything that was experienced in the realm of time, space, matter, form, etc. While early humans had the capacity to perceive and experience that aspect of reality that was available through sensory experience (that which could be seen, touched, smelled, etc.), at some point in the evolution of human consciousness, our species acquired the capacity to sense that there was, so to speak, a supersensory aspect of reality, something which really existed but was not directly perceived in the same manner as most aspects of the sensory realm. Humans acquired, however dimly and however poorly and variously articulated, a sense of a spiritual dimension, or the presence of the sacred as a part of reality. So again, using language that makes sense to us today, we could say that human consciousness evolved to the point that humans acquired the ability to sense the presence of Spirit: humans were the first species (on this planet) to acquire the capacity to sense the existence of a spiritual dimension of the Cosmos, and hence, we have the birth of religion, or the attempt to articulate, make sense of, and respond to, the intuitive awareness of the spiritual dimension of the Cosmos.
Of course, how and when this happened will remain a mystery. Sceptics are fond of offering simplistic reductionist explanations of the origin of religion (sociological necessity to maintain order in increasingly large settlements, psychological defense mechanisms against the fear of death, confusing dream reality with external reality, and so on), but even those reductionist explanations assume the existence of a human capacity to posit the presence of something that is not present to ordinary sensory experience. Yes, it clearly is the case that in human communities with a belief in supernatural beings, that religious belief system was used to encourage pro-social behavior and discourage anti-social behavior, but that constitutes a use of religion, not its origin. It does not account for the origin of the idea – apparently not found in any other living organism on Earth – that there exists a dimension of reality that is different from the space/time/matter/energy dimension that constitutes the physical universe and can be perceived through sensory experience.
Where did that human awareness of Spirit come from? At what point in the evolution of the species and the ongoing development of the brain did the awareness of Spirit become possible? How did early humans deal with that budding spiritual awareness, an awareness that would have preceded the subsequent explosion of religious ideas and practices that claimed to explain that primal awareness of Spirit?
Unfortunately, the answer to such questions is lost to history, but we can, in a very general sense, trace the emergence and development of the human awareness of Spirit, as over time it is manifested in the various forms of religious belief and practice: animism, polytheism, monotheism, non-dualism, pantheism, panentheism, deism, etc., each of which gets expressed and elaborated on in multiple forms in different cultures over different time periods.
But back to larger point: in this account of the origin or religion, there is no conflict between religion and evolution. Quite to the contrary, evolution is seen as the process through which this Universe develops an entity (humans) with the capacity to intuit the presence of Spirit. If there is no evolutionary emergence of the human species and no evolution of human consciousness, there is no mergence of the sense of Spirit, and hence there is no religion: from that point of view, religion is indebted to, rather than in conflict with, evolution.
This interpretation of the origin of religion sees religion not as the product of a discrete top-down divine revelation but rather as the product of a natural process occurring in the Universe that has led to the emergence of an entity (homo sapiens) that has the evolved capacity to sense the presence of Spirit, the presence of a very real non-material dimension of the Cosmos.
Of course, this evolutionary model of religion (which we will simply refer to as evolutionary religion) will not likely be embraced by traditional fundamentalist theists who wish to interpret ancient sacred texts in an infallible, literalist style. But for those who are open to other possibilities, evolutionary religion provides an opportunity for the contemporary human to be a believer without sacrificing their intellectual integrity. One can accept all that scientific knowledge has to offer, including the evolution of the Cosmos, and still assert the reality of Spirit.
 
And the Future Evolution of Religion?
At the present time in the early 21st century, we appear to be in the midst of a major transitional period from the religions of the past 2500 years to something new. All of the major existing world religions emerged during a period known as the Axial Age, and they have flourished and developed in various expressions across the globe for over two millennia. But there is good reason to believe that their influence is waning: the traditional Axial Age religions simply do not resonate with humans who are fully informed by a 21st century historical, scientific, and multi-cultural sensibility, and we see the consequences of this in the closing of churches, the rise of secularism, the growth of the “spiritual but not religious” identification, and just a widespread general disinterest in religion.
Of course, new spiritual traditions will eventually emerge to replace the declining Axial Age religions, but here in the early 21st century we are in the awkward moment where the old religions have lost much of their credibility and influence to a substantial part of the population, but the new post-Axial, evolutionary spirituality has not yet evolved into something recognizable and workable.  Something new will emerge, but the details of what the “religions of the future” will look like are difficult to foresee, especially in light of the likely transformation of the human species itself, as technology leads to the transition from human to post-human. But whatever the post-human world turns out to be like, it certainly will include religion and spirituality, and in a manner that is fully reconciled with science and evolution.
 
 
 

​Too Many Words?
A citizen of the early 21st century who approaches the “Big Questions” (Is  there a God/Spirit? Does existence have meaning? How do we know Goodness, and does it even matter if we attempt to follow it? What is the nature of consciousness/soul/individualized spirit, and can it exist independent of a material substrate such as the human body, and if so, what is that post-embodied existence like?) is confronted with both an infinite number of explanations of “what it’s all about” and an infinite amount of data/information (religious, philosophical, literary ideas; scientific and social scientific theories; sacred texts, religious doctrines, dogma, creeds, theologies, etc.) from cultures across the world, from at least 10,000 years ago to the present, which are used to support various answers to those big questions. Brilliant minds on all sides offer equally erudite and, in varying degrees, rational defenses of their preferred position, yet no one can really sort this out! Perhaps an AI will do better than humans have (just (mostly) kidding, of course).
 
Faith by Argument and Faith by Experience
So, in the context of this overwhelming array of various answers to the big questions, what do we do? Philosophers and theologians, academics and intellectuals, and even everyday folks who have been infected with what might be called a case of gross overvaluation of reason, operate as if we just need to think it through more thoroughly: new ideas, new symbols, new concepts, new arguments strung together with varying degrees of logical precision, new articles, new books, new blogs, and so on.
 
But what if our awareness and understanding of Spirit is not something that is acquired through objective observation and rational analysis? What if, however vague, imperfect, and variable it might be, our awareness of Spirit is more like simply a sense of something, an intuitive awareness, a taste of Spirit, so to speak?
 
Kierkegaard wrote at length about the misunderstanding that faith is the product of objectivity, claiming instead that religious faith is a subjective state of the heart and mind that can never be reduced to mere propositions, and is forever elusive and hence resistant to being neatly organized and categorized as can knowledge acquired through objective reason. Kierkegaard, of course, applied this subjective understanding of the nature of faith specifically to Christianity, but there is no reason to confine his subjective/experiential perspective to a single religion: one can similarly say that any religious belief is ultimately the product not of a chain of reasoning but rather the result of an experiential sense of, or taste, of Something More, namely the Spiritual dimension of the Cosmos.
 
We choose that which seems to be true based on our intuitive sense of meaning and goodness. That’s not to ignore objective “data” and logical reasoning, but rather to recognize that data and rationality alone do not lead to a firm conclusion. So we rely on something that the human species has developed over the long evolution of our consciousness: a sense of something, a dim perception, a feeling of rightness and truth, however vague and objectively and rationally unsupported it might be.
 
Religious faith thus becomes more of a moral and spiritual act than a strictly rational/cognitive one, although it is not therefore an irrational act in any sense. We believe because we accurately, though vaguely, sense Something More, but not because we first have been convinced of a Something More through rational argument. Experience and reason are not necessarily antagonistic: that which we know intuitively can and must be articulated, clarified, and defended through words. But the starting point is the ineffable awareness, not the words that are used to clumsily describe that awareness.

​Before All of the Words
For readers not familiar with David Bentley Hart, he is one of the most prominent figures in contemporary philosophy, religious studies, literary writing, and cultural analysis. Few contemporary writers possess his depth of knowledge across multiple fields, his capacity to meticulously construct lengthy arguments which incorporate a remarkable treasure of historical and cross-cultural perspectives, his uncanny vocabulary, and his sometimes biting sense of humor. And yet, even this brilliant figure who has few if any peers in the use of language and construction of logical arguments, clearly recognizes that when dealing with Spirit, the primacy of the ineffable must be acknowledged.
 
In a review of a book on Zen, for example, Hart states with reference to religion that “knowing how to comport oneself towards reality is already the experience of truth” (Dreamchild’s Progress, 198). In other words, how we experience the world, rather than how we articulate abstract arguments about the world, is the path to truth (which is, of course, a very Zen sort of perspective).

He follows this up with a stronger acknowledgment of the limitations of philosophy (and, by implication, all verbal efforts to capture the essence of Spirit, including creeds, dogma, and theology) when referring to: “the classical notion of what philosophy is: an attempt to give imperfect verbal expression to a knowledge that both precedes and surpasses all words; a passage through language from a pre-conceptual wonder at existence to a post-conceptual Theoria of unconditioned reality” (Dreamchild’s Progress, 199 – my parentheses).
​
Elsewhere he touches on this same theme of Spirit as something which cannot be adequately known and described through words when he refers to “those regions of human experience that cannot really be accounted for within the framework of philosophical naturalism,” and affirms that there are “essential and perennial mysteries” which “point beyond themselves to what is ‘more than nature…they are, to adopt the mediaeval term, transcendental”(The Experience of God, 44-45).
 
The point here is that, contrary to what has perhaps become the cultural norm of understanding religion in the context of belief in a set of propositional statements, the essence of religion is an experiential awareness of the real existence of a spiritual quality of the Cosmos – a sense of Something More, a taste of the Transcendent, a dim awareness that there exists a Supreme Good, the basis of Goodness and Meaning, in spite of the often brutal suffering, pain, and waste of life that we perceive in everyday existence. The propositions that attempt to describe in more precise terms the nature of that Spirit follow from the experience, and hence it is the experience rather than rational propositional linguistic elaborations that are the essence of religion/spirituality. 

​Implications for Post-Traditional Religion
This suggests that the religion and spirituality of the future may well move in the direction of a faith that is rooted in an experiential dimension more so than in the realm of creeds, doctrines, theologies, etc., all of which function as attempts to rationally articulate that which precedes and eludes all efforts to be reduced to and captured by the limited capacities of language. Twenty-first century awareness includes a recognition of the historical, cultural and related circumstances that produced what eventually came to be seen as sacred texts, along with the creeds and theologies which were created from the myths, stories, concepts, ideas, etc. found in those texts. We now recognize, for instance, that the Christian New Testament is a human product which, while sometimes wise and inspiring, is subject to the same cultural biases and error as any human attempt to talk about Spirit. Similarly, we now recognize that such a fundamental Christian document as the Nicene Creed is not the product of a divine act or divinely inspired church fathers, but rather is the product of socio-political influences and contentious wrangling over attempts to reach agreement on what constitutes being a Christian. The more that one studies the history of these and other religious texts, however ancient and in whatever religion, the more we realize that they are fallible human creations, sometimes expressing wisdom and sometimes expressing the biases and errors of their time. Hence, faith based on ancient texts (and their derivative doctrines) alone is no longer credible in light of a fully informed 21st century consciousness.
​
But faith remains a viable and credible option if it is based not on ancient texts (or even contemporary ones) but on the same experiential awareness of Spirit that was the inspirational source of those ancient texts. Contemporary humans have access to that direct sense of Something More, that intuitive sense that in addition to the material dimension of time, space, matter, and energy, there is a dimension of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty (and other spiritual realities) that eludes rational articulation in carefully crafted propositions, but nonetheless provides a firm certainty of the presence of Spirit. In a spirit of epistemological humility which will necessarily be part of religion of the future, we will learn to confidently rest in that awareness of Spirit, even if it must remain free from the intrusion of the words, propositions, arguments, etc., that have been attached to all traditional religions. A spirituality rooted in direct awareness of Spirit rather than a spirituality rooted in the secondary propositions of doctrines and theologies, is what that future sense of Something More is likely to grounded in.  

                                     One, Many, or Both:
                           Theism and Non-dualism, part 3:
                                     Toward a Resolution
 
In a variety of different ways, advocates of non-dualism/advaita assert that all reality is One, and diversity and otherness are illusory perceptions at a lower level of reality and consciousness, ultimately to be superseded by the enlightened experience of pure Oneness.
 
By contrast, theists assert that the difference between God and the Cosmos is real and eternal: to assert otherwise would commit the dual errors of associating God with the imperfections of the world and denying the reality and precious value of individual beings, especially human ones.
 
How to reconcile these very different, seemingly intractably contradictory, positions?
 
Perhaps we should be less interested in identifying which party has it right or in constructing a compromise, than in recognizing that both parties, non-dualists and theists alike, are guilty of the same mistake: epistemological arrogance.
 
On what grounds do we assume that understanding the ultimate nature of reality, including Spirit/God, can be achieved by a species that 1) has only recently appeared on the scene (around 200,000 years ago), 2) even more recently (perhaps only 40,000 years ago) has developed the conscious capacity to sense the spiritual quality of reality, 3) exists on one small planet which, aside from being quite young, is less than a tiny grain of sand in the vastness of a Universe whose size, as humanity only recently discovered during the 20th century, utterly overwhelms the smallness of Earth, and 4) has a physical structure (brain, central nervous system, and various sense organs) which generates epistemological capabilities which, by definition, allow access to only those dimensions of reality that are accessible through those epistemological capabilities (dogs, bats, and dolphins, to name a few species, perceive aspects of reality that humans don’t – imagine what perceptions might be available to conscious entities elsewhere in the universe which have evolved more sophisticated epistemological abilities)?
 
In short, it is an act of extraordinary epistemological hubris for our infantile and limited human species to believe that it has the capacity to understand and experience not only the ultimate nature of the physical dimension of existence, but also the true and full nature of the spiritual dimension, of which we appear to have had no awareness of at all until a mere 40,000 years ago. Human philosophers and theologians can no more fully grasp and articulate the nature of Spirit than ants can do calculus.
 
Carrying this a step further, why should we assume that the ultimate nature of anything needs to correspond to our binary categories of this or that, true or false, logical or illogical? Confining our speculations about Spirit to the binary categories of human reasoning reflects a sorely unimaginative approach to Ultimacy, rooted in a lack of epistemological humility, which should recognize that there is no apparent reason for believing that the ultimate nature of reality should be confined to what is capable of  being captured by categories of human thought.
 
Approaching the apparent conflict between non-dualism and theism with a healthy dose of epistemological humility should lead us to a recognition that whatever we say about Ultimacy is necessarily, at most, a best guess. Some such guesses might be a bit more accurate than others, but guesses they remain.
 
So perhaps the conflict is really not a conflict at all. Perhaps once liberated from the confines of the over-estimation of the role of human epistemological abilities, we can recognize that Spirit is ultimately beyond comprehensive description through human categories of thought and language. Perhaps a nuanced and epistemologically humble sense of spiritual “Oneness” can embrace  both the unity of all being and the precious value of individual beings, without a sense of contradiction. Perhaps theism, which asserts the transcendent Otherness of God, can simultaneously and without contradiction recognize the immanent presence of God in all things and, as such, the Unity or Oneness of the Cosmos. God and world, Creator and created, Transcendent and Immanent. One and Many. Nirvana and Samsara. 
 
Certainly, this was recognized by the several schools of ancient Hindu Vedanta (schools largely ignored by contemporary advocates of non-dualism) which saw no contradiction in asserting both unity and difference (bhedabheda). Most notably, this is found in the school of Ramanuja, known as vishishtadvaita, or qualified non-dualism. Ramanuja articulates what today we might characterize as an expression of panentheism, in which the Universe is literally the body of a personal God, which is also the impersonal Brahman. God/Brahman, as the All, both constitutes the element of the non-dual (advaita), but also, having emanated itself and created and entered into individual ensouled beings which retain a sense of individual identity eternally, establishes an element of Difference which is as real as, but in no sense contradictory to, the element of Oneness. Unfortunately, contemporary advocates of non-dualism tend to write as if the pure non-dualism of Shankara is the only version of Vedantic non-dualism that exists, largely ignoring the bhedabheda model of Ramanuja, whose school is both philosophically sophisticated and enormously popular with theistic devotees of Vishnu/Krishna.
 
Perhaps part of the challenge of reconciling the One and the Many is rooted in the fact that spiritual understanding begins with experience, not with rationally constructed philosophical propositions. But that spiritual experience is so subtle and elusive that when we try to articulate it through the limited medium of human language, we almost inevitably run into contradictions which simply do not exist in the awareness found in the experience itself. Perhaps the need for humility begins with a recognition that human language is necessarily limited, and we should always recognize it as what it is and no more, namely, a pointer to a reality, but not the reality to which it points. The pointer is rooted in contrast, contradiction, restrictions of logic and reason, binaries, yes/no and true/false alternatives, and all of the various limiting factors that necessarily are part of language. The actual spiritual experience, encompassing both the One and Many without contradiction,  precedes and transcends the attempt at rational, linguistic, philosophical description of that experience, and in the transition from experience to description of experience, so much is lost. The ineffable nature of Spirit as One and Many can be experientially known with confidence, clarity, and certainty, but the transference of the experience to abstract rational propositions necessarily loses much in translation. Perhaps by always remembering that point and retaining a constant sense of epistemological humility, we can move beyond the supposed conflict between non-dualism and theism, and recognize that in the full reality of Spirit, both are always present.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

​                                                  One, Many, or Both:
                        Theism and Non-dualism, part 2:
                         The Problem with Non-Dualism

In our previous post we explored the growing popularity of non-dualism in Western thought, including its appeal beyond the world of scholars and academics to a population that increasingly finds the old gods of the dualistic monotheistic traditions lacking in credibility, and inadequate as a source of spiritual fulfillment. In light of our 21st century awareness of an expanding, evolving, unimaginably vast Cosmos, non-dualism increasingly seems to provide an alternative spiritual starting point for credible contemporary religious belief, experience, and morality.
 
But contemporary non-dualism is not free from criticisms, which we will explore in this post.
 
Contemporary Non-Dualism: What It Gets Wrong
Leaving aside the more specifically spiritual and ethical challenges, let’s first clarify that non-dualism as articulated by various contemporary spiritual writers is often not even an accurate description of non-dualism as it is found in the Asian traditions which Western authors identify as the primary source of Advaitic spirituality.
 
Taking the most well-known non-dualist tradition, Hindu Vedanta, as an example, it is simply not the case, as affirmed or implied by most Western advocates of Advaita, that Hindu Advaita is a fairly monolithic tradition which is found in the teachings of Shankara, and clearly affirms that the ultimate nature of reality is the non-dual Brahman, free from personality or any qualities, since the possession of qualities of any sort would introduce an element of multiplicity into Brahman, thereby negating its non-dual, unitary essence.
 
This interpretation of Advaita is a more or less accurate account of the Hindu philosopher Shankara, but Shankara’s school of non-dualism is only one of many, and those other schools interpret Advaita in a way that makes room for the personal quality of Brahman, as well as an element of transcendence, such that Brahman (about which, of course, any words are ultimately inadequate) is understood and experienced in the sense of bhedabheda, or both difference and non-difference/identity. Ramanuja, Nimbarka, and even Vallabha all adopt this sense of modified non-dualism, in which the unity of the All in Brahman is preserved, but not at the cost of denying the reality of multiplicity – of precious individual beings- which exists in and through Brahman.
 
This modified non-dualism has significant spiritual and moral implications which are largely ignored by contemporary spiritual writers, whose flawed scholarship has them presenting only one interpretation of non-dualism (Shankara’s), when in reality there are multiple expressions of non-dualism, all supported by varying degrees of sophisticated philosophical argument, devout spiritual practice, and an element of personalism which is consistent with Western theism.
 
 
Contemporary Non-Dualism: A Moral and Spiritual Critique
 Moving beyond the flawed scholarship, from a spiritual perspective, there are potential ethical implications that follow from a strict interpretation of non-dualism. This is not to suggest that non-dualism explicitly sanctions behavior that is not moral. Rather, it suggests that the affirmation of Oneness at the expense of the preservation of multiplicity must inevitably devalue individual entities, and as such also devalues the realm of moral goodness which is based on interactions between those entities.
 
By asserting that the ultimate nature of reality is a oneness without difference, there is an unavoidable diminution of the significance of the individual beings which comprise the realm of multiplicity. The unique and precious nature of individual beings existing, at least in some sense, as autonomous self-conscious beings at a specific and limited point in time and space, becomes subordinated to the undifferentiated One in many contemporary expressions of non-dualism, with little recognition of the ethical implications of losing that sense of the precious and valued nature of each temporally and spatially situated entity, whether inanimate, plant, animal, human, or anything else that exists as a concrete being in time and space.
 
Such a criticism of non-dualism is nothing new. Neo-Confucians such as Zhang Zai and Wang Yang-ming were expressing similar concerns (inspired by their criticisms of non-dualist Chinese Buddhist schools) over 500 years ago. More recently, American philosopher William James did the same in A Pluralistic Universe, an important philosophical work which unfortunately has not received the recognition that has been achieved by his classic work, The Varieties of Religious Experience.
 
Perhaps the most articulate modern critic of this aspect of non-dualism was the Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber. Beginning his scholarly career with an interest in mysticism and monism, including the publication of an anthology of mystical monistic writings (Ecstatic Confessions,1909), Buber came to view a preoccupation with non-dual religious experience as a misguided path which leads one away from both a sense of the transcendent nature of God and the spiritual quality of our moral relationship with and duty toward other beings in the world of multiplicity. His criticism of non-dualism is also found in his short essay, “With a Monist”(1914), and his poetic plea for the heartfelt moral awareness of and sensitivity to the other as found in his classic book, I and Thou.
 
In the Monist essay, Buber states, “But I am enormously concerned with just this world, this painful and precious fullness of all that I see, hear, taste. I cannot wish away any part of its reality” (With a Monist, 28).
 
In I and Thou, after acknowledging the reality of mystical experience and its strong sense of Oneness, he adds the cautionary note that, “But what is greater for us than all enigmatic webs at the margins of being is the central actuality of an everyday hour on earth, with a streak of sunshine on a maple twig and an intimation of the eternal Thou” (I and Thou, 136). Similarly, in his moving, poetic description of encountering the spiritual uniqueness of a tree he states, “In every sphere, through everything that becomes present to us, we gaze toward the train of the eternal Thou; in each we perceive a breath of it; in every Thou we address the eternal Thou, in every sphere according to its manner…. It can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree, I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. The power of exclusiveness has seized me” (I and Thou, 57-58).
 
To clarify, however, Buber does not deny the reality and value of the experience of Oneness, or the unitive spiritual/mystical experience, which he knew first-hand and was deeply influenced by for the first half of his life. The experience of a sense of Cosmic Unity is something which he acknowledged as an essential element of spirituality. However, Buber also believed that a non-dual experience and/or philosophy includes a dangerous moral temptation, unless balanced by a recognition that such ultimate Oneness is not a pure Oneness in which individuality dissolves and consequently diminishes our full appreciation of separate entities existing in the confusing multiplicity of everyday existence in the spatio-temporal realm, but rather a unity-in-diversity, in which there is simultaneous experience of both the spiritual goodness of the One and the spiritual goodness of the Many.
 
But this would seem to be contradictory: How can spiritual Ultimacy simultaneously be characterized by both the One and the Many?
 
Exploring that apparent contradiction will be the topic of our next post.

​​                                               One, Many, or Both:
                      Theism and Non-dualism, part 1:
                          The Appeal of Non-Dualism
 
The idea of non-dualism (Sanskrit advaita), or the belief that there is fundamentally only one reality, stands in contrast to the dualistic theism of the Abrahamic faiths which all assert difference in a variety of metaphysical and spiritual ways: between God and the world, God and soul, creator and creation, spirit and matter, transcendence and immanence, etc. But for over 2,000 years, non-dualism has been commonplace in Asian philosophical/spiritual thought. Specifically, we see expressions of advaita in various schools of Hindu Vedanta, certain branches of Mahayana Buddhism, in the spiritual implications of Daoism (where the reluctance to engage in rational speculation finds non-dualism expressed more in poetic and literary than philosophical terms), and in Neo-Confucianism (where a modified model of non-dualism supports a beautiful vision of cosmic moral responsibility).
 
In the West, however, non-dualism tended to be relegated to a role as an unorthodox if not heretical perspective, seen as conflicting with the orthodox position of a dualist model in which, to borrow Kierkegaard’s phrase, there is an “infinite qualitative distinction” between God and the world, and hence by implication between God and humanity. Non-dualism in the West could only be found in mystical and esoteric schools which were often labeled as misguided, wrong, and heretical by both the Catholic and Protestant churches.
 
Within the past three decades, however, as the Christian West has witnessed shrinking church membership and the decline of the Biblical worldview as the de facto “truth” adopted throughout Western culture, we have seen a remarkable emergence of advaita in the West. This westernized non-dualism is seen in various formats: general recognition and approval of the insights of Asian non-dualism, popular non-dualist contemporary spiritual writers, attempts to re-interpret Christianity in non-dualist terms, and arguments suggesting that certain contemporary scientific insights support a non-dual worldview.
 
A key aspect of the appeal of non-dualism in the contemporary West is that it offers an alternative to what many see as the no longer credible anthropomorphic and anthropocentric concept of God which has dominated Western spirituality and religion for over two millennia. God as a being who displays not just human characteristics, but human flaws as well, is seen as a projection which might have been believable in previous centuries, but is no longer so in light of a 21st  century sensibility. A supreme being which is angry, jealous, capricious, and prejudiciously favors one group of humans over another simply isn’t credible to contemporary citizens who have achieved a level of moral awareness that identifies such characteristics as undesirable for humans, to say nothing of their fittingness to be characteristics of a God.
 
Similarly, the 20th century discovery of the immensity and evolving nature of the Universe seems to make the static human-like deity of the Bible and supporting Western texts appear to be rather small in comparison. The sense of vastness and expansion which has entered into human consciousness on a wider scale (but arguably has been present since the emergence of the human capacity for what is labeled "mystical" consciousness) has led to a sense that the theistic and dualist God of the Bible is no longer a credible way to think about and experience Ultimacy (see previous blog post from 8/1/25: Thinking Bigger About God).
 
Into this spiritual gap has entered non-dualism, long-established in Asian traditions and always a part of the esoteric and mystical traditions of Western spirituality. Advocates of non-dualism argue that a non-dual spirituality offers a concept of the Divine or Ultimacy that is expansive (in some sense, God is the entire Cosmos), free from anthropomorphism (God is not a “person” as much as an energy or ineffable essence), and free from partiality (there is no favored human group, since the One equally encompasses all entities, human and otherwise).
 
The contemporary appeal of non-dualism also is frequently rooted in the perceived compatibility of non-dualism with a scientific understanding of reality, often with reference (however misguided and inaccurate) to aspects of quantum physics such as wave-particle duality and quantum entanglement.
 
But perhaps even more significantly, non-dualism fills, in a way that traditional dualistic theism struggles to do today, the human need to feel connected with something larger than oneself. Finding spiritual gratification through connection with a being who is all too human and limited in its possession of multiple human flaws, inconsistencies, and prejudices is no longer as appealing as it once was in the world of pre-scientific belief in a smaller, static Cosmos. But a sense of connection with the Cosmos itself, perceived as not just an entity of evolving physical particles but as evolving Spirit itself (an vision of non-dualism found, for instance, in Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin), is a type of spirituality that just seems to have a stronger intuitive validity than traditional theism. Religion is rooted in that fundamental human need to find meaning in connection beyond one’s existence as an isolated, transient, finite entity, and in a population that already has a sense of existing in a vast, mysterious, evolving Cosmos, connection with such a Cosmic Ultimate, rather than with an isolated deity, is more spiritually credible and meaningful.
 
And yet, non-dualism (traditional as well as contemporary) is not without its problematic issues, and we will explore these issues in the next post.
 
 
 
         
 
 

​Spiritual Minimalism:
Knowing More, Saying Less
 
The major world religions which are with us today emerged during an historical period known as the Axial Age, extending back from roughly 2500 to 2000 years ago, at a time when the human species was developing a sense of epistemological confidence: humanity as the pinnacle of creation, the center of the Universe, and perhaps most significantly, the holder of the key to all knowledge: Reason. And from this confident sense of human epistemological abilities there emerged detailed, complex, confident dogma, doctrines, theologies, and philosophies. Indeed, one could argue that over the millennia that have passed since the emergence of Axial Age religions, our sense of epistemological confidence, derived from the legitimate role of reason in helping us understand aspects of reality, devolved into a sense of epistemological hubris, where reason was seen as an infallible key to explaining and controlling all things, including our knowledge of and relationship to Spirit.
 
But over the past century or so, all that has changed. An honest, informed 21st century sensibility includes a radically altered sense of the context of the human presence in the vastness of space and time. We now recognize humanity as a species which, relative to the 14-billion-year history of the Universe, has only recently appeared, and, relative to the immensity of the Universe, exists on a tiny speck of a planet. Such recognition of the human presence in the vastness of space and time is a profoundly humbling experience. When humanity is spatially and temporally contextualized like this, the notion that a recently evolved creature using a three-pound organ (brain) on one tiny planet should be able to make detailed and definitive statements about the Ultimate nature of existence becomes glaringly arrogant and preposterous.
 
Recognizing the place of the human species in the broader context of the Universe produces what might be characterized as a profound sense of Epistemological Humility, or a sense of the limits of human knowledge, and Epistemological Humility in turn should lead to what we will refer to as Spiritual Minimalism, or a constant awareness of the need to avoid saying too much about the nature of Spirit/Ultimate Reality, which will always exceed the capacity of humans to understand and describe in a comprehensive manner. These concepts of Epistemological Humility and Spiritual Minimalism are important considerations for the nature of religion and spirituality as they evolve farther away from the declining traditional religions and into an as-yet-undeveloped 21st century transformation.  
 
Predictions that the religion of the 21st century will be theologically minimalist are shared by many who are exploring the possible contours of the future of religion. As Sean Kelly has put it, the spirituality of the future is likely to be characterized by a “renunciation of certainty” that stands in marked contrast to the detailed doctrinal positions of existing religions.1 Similarly, Ervin Laszlo, in exploring the religious implications for the evolving global character of human consciousness, suggests that we should attempt no more than a “minimally speculative theology.”2 And J.L. Schellenberg argues that with reference to religion, “We simply need to start thinking more generally than we are accustomed to doing,”  generating religious beliefs that can best be characterized as “thin,” in contrast to the “thick” collections of detailed ideas found in the theologies, doctrines, and philosophies that are associated with traditional religion.3
 
Similarly, we need to recognize that we are only at the beginning of the emergence of a post-traditional, post-Axial spirituality, and hence there will likely be a similar period of creative theologizing in which new words, symbols, concepts, etc. are offered up as the best ways to express the Sacred, and over time, as in the case of Christianity and every other major religion, new preferred expressions will emerge, some acquiring a revered status with which they will function in a doctrinal and theological manner. Even then, however, we are suggesting that Spiritual Minimalism will always be present, given that 21st century humanity has acquired an Epistemological Humility and a historical consciousness which, once attained, will not go away. New insights into the nature of Spirit, both philosophical and empirical, will continue to be sought and achieved, perhaps leading to religious/spiritual landscapes that would be unrecognizable to today’s believers, but whatever form that evolved sense of Spirit takes, it will be rooted in a sense of cosmically contextualized humility that (with a few notable exceptions) the religions of the past 2500 years have lacked.
 
Knowing and intuiting more, while saying less – perhaps this will be the foundation of the religion of the future.
 
 
1See Sean Kelly’s Coming Home: The Birth and Transformation of the Planetary Era and Becoming Gaia: On the Threshold of Planetary Initiation.
2 See Ervin Laszlo, Quantum Shift in the Global Brain.
3 Canadian philosopher J.L. Schellenberg is perhaps the best known “mainstream” figure to write extensively and in great depth and detail about the temporal contextualization of religious thought and exploring the radical implications of the future evolution of religion. Schellenberg proposes “Ultimism” as a replacement for theism, and his concept of Ultimism shares many characteristics of the 21st century spirituality which are explored on the Religion Evolving website.
For non-philosophers, his accessible Evolutionary Religion is an excellent starting point.
 
 
 
 

Evolutionary Religion: Some Clarifications
 
Describing various aspects of life as “evolutionary” has become quite popular these days, with evolution being applied as an explanatory scheme to such diverse areas as psychology, aesthetics, political systems, entertainment, and countless other fields that extend the notion of evolutionary development far beyond its origin as an explanation of the development of life. Observing this proliferation of the application of the evolutionary process rooted in natural selection being applied to areas far beyond its original intent, philosopher Raymond Tallis has coined the term “Darwinitis” to describe what sometimes seems to be an over-reaching misapplication of Darwin’s model.
 
Lest we be accused of suffering from a case of this Darwinitis, in this post we would like to offer some clarification regarding our use of the term “evolutionary religion,” especially in light of the rather recent appearance of this concept and the consequent lack of a shared definition among those who use “evolutionary religion” as a category of thought.
 
Specifically, to clarify what we mean by evolutionary religion:
 
1.Evolutionary religion means that religion changes over time.
To describe religion as evolutionary simply means that religion changes over time, in a generally progressive direction of a fuller understanding of spiritual reality. Over time, human spiritual awareness appears to have moved in the direction of a more expansive sense of Ultimacy and an accompanying morality that reflects that evolved sense of Spirit. Human sacrifices are no longer commonly practiced. Moral obligations are less likely to be understood as applicable only to our kin/tribe/species. Spirit is less likely to be understood in terms which reflect parochial prejudices and the projection of flawed human traits such as rage, jealousy, capriciousness, etc.
Obviously, we are only describing trends here, and (unfortunately) it’s still quite easy to find expressions of contemporary religious belief and practice that do not reflect such progressive development. But in the big picture, human spiritual awareness clearly has changed in a positive direction over time.
 
2. Evolutionary religion is not an assertion of religion as the product of natural selection or “survival of the fittest.”
To say that religion has evolved is not meant to imply that it has done so in accordance with the same process of natural selection that has occurred in biological development. This is an important and easily misunderstood point. The multiple expressions of “evolutionary” development in various fields as referenced above typically do argue that such and such aspect of human culture has acquired its current form as the result of its successful adaptations, such that it has been “selected” over other alternatives for its survival value.
One could analyze religion in such a manner, but that is not what we are doing here. Our purpose is simply to explore how religion has changed in a progressive direction, without speculating on the process through which this has happened.
 
3. Evolutionary religion recognizes that, in the short term, the evolution of religion is not one-directional and resistant to regression.
As evidenced by current political developments in certain pockets of the human population, there can be periods of retreat to tribalism and its various cultural expressions, including a type of religion that tends to return to exclusivism, anthropomorphism, literalist fundamentalism, etc. But as with biological evolution, short term regressions must be viewed in the context of long-term progressive development: exclusivist tribalistic religious fundamentalisms might currently be increasing in tandem with comparable political developments, but such regression will be temporary.
 
4. Evolutionary religion is not naïve.
Some argue that an evolutionary understanding of religion is naïve, in the sense that its model of progressively fuller consciousness of Spirit fails to recognize the everyday reality of human suffering as well as the ever-present possibility of a catastrophic and sudden end of the human species. To the extent that an evolutionary religion model is sometimes embraced by New Age thought and popular philosophers such as Ken Wilber, that criticism is not without some merit, and even among more sophisticated philosophical expressions of evolutionary spirituality the problem of suffering tends to be downplayed.
 
However, it would be inaccurate to suggest that an evolutionary model of religion is incompatible with recognition of not only the everyday suffering of the present moment but also the brutality and wastefulness of the evolutionary process itself. Teilhard and Aurobindo, for example, both acknowledge that the presence of profound pain and suffering throughout all living species tends to dampen the otherwise enthusiastically hopeful perspective that both of their evolutionary models express. Unfortunately, neither Teilhard nor Aurobindo provide even a remotely adequate account of how to reconcile this presence of suffering and evil with an evolutionary view of spirituality, but then again neither do traditional theistic theodicies provide an adequate reconciliation of the simultaneous existence of an omnipotent/omnibenevolent deity with a cosmos, created by that deity, which is rampant with crushing pain, suffering, and evil. The problem of theodicy, in other words, remains a thorn in the side of traditional theism as well as evolutionary religion, but it does not follow that either traditional theists or adherents of the evolutionary model do not recognize the presence of suffering and evil and the challenge that it presents, both existentially and cognitively.
 
5. Evolutionary religion does not deny transcendence.
This is a somewhat more subtle philosophical and theological point which we will unpack in more detail in a subsequent post. Criticisms of some of the most popular models of evolutionary religion have argued that divine transcendence is denied by describing Spirit as the on-going product of the evolutionary process of Spirit becoming more manifest in the Cosmos, in effect reflecting a process of the progressive spiritualization of the Cosmos through the progressive self-awareness of Spirit.
 
This is a criticism that applies to what we have previously labelled as “strong” evolutionary religion, which sees evolution as a process in which Spirit itself is becoming more and more present in the Cosmos through the evolution from energy to matter to living entities to conscious beings to self-reflective conscious beings with an awareness of the evolutionary process itself. As often expressed, evolution is the process of Spirit becoming aware of itself through the evolution of matter that is becoming more and more conscious.
 
By contrast, “weak” evolutionary religion adopts a more modest descriptive/phenomenological approach, rather than the philosophical/spiritual approach of the hard model. Hence, the weak model of evolutionary religion simply affirms that an objective observation of the evolutionary development of the Universe reveals an evolving awareness of the nature of Spirit, as evidenced in the progressive development of human spiritual consciousness and its cultural expressions in religion. Whether or not this includes an actual development of Spirit in the Cosmos itself is not the primary concern of this approach, which focuses on human awareness of Spirit rather than changes in Spirit itself.
 
However, even in the most prominent systems of strong evolutionary religion, (Teilhard de Chardin, Aurobindo, and the popularized version of Aurobindo found in Ken Wilber), there is recognition that Spirit exists in its fullness already, or, in a sense, Spirit is simultaneously fully Transcendent while evolving increased Immanence. In Teilhard, for example, the end point of the evolutionary process, which he calls Omega, is also understood as the origin and continued support of the Cosmos. Spirit, in other words, is both transcendent and immanent, with divine immanence expanding in the Cosmos as it evolves. This is sometimes a difficult concept for the more rationally inclined Western philosophers and theologians to buy into, since it asserts the simultaneous reality of what in a sense are opposing qualities of Spirit: If Spirit is Transcendent it can’t be Immanent, and if Spirit is Immanent it can’t be fully Transcendent. But the union of opposites, of course, has an ancient pedigree and is found in both ancient and modern mystical traditions, which set aside the contemporary epistemological bias of positing that the nature of Spirit must correspond to the categories that human thought is capable of grasping. Setting aside that sort of human epistemological hubris, the existence of a spiritual ultimate which is simultaneously Transcendent and Immanent becomes perfectly credible.
 
6. Understanding the evolutionary model of religion requires an appropriately vast temporal perspective. 
All of the above, however, must in turn be understood in the context of what might be considered one of the fundamental assumptions of an evolutionary perspective: the vastness of time and the (relatively) slow pace of the evolutionary process.
 
Appreciating an evolutionary perspective of religion requires an appropriately expansive temporal framework. Perhaps no  contemporary philosopher consistently acknowledges the need for such a perspective as does J.L. Schellenberg, whose work always contextualizes human religious awareness in the context of deep time, not only with reference to the depth of past time during which human spiritual consciousness has slowly developed to its present state, but also the equally deep future time during which human awareness of Spirit might develop in ways that are, to minds still operating with “only” a  21st century awareness, quite inconceivable.
 
         
 
 
         
 
 
 

​Thinking Bigger about God (but with Humility)
 
A basic assumption of the evolutionary model of religion posits that as humanity evolves, consciousness evolves; as consciousness evolves, our perception or sense of Spirit evolves; and as human awareness of Spirit evolves, religion, or the specific expressions of our understanding of Spirit, also evolves.
 
The evolution of religion necessarily takes many forms, including spiritual practices, ritual and worship, ethical guidelines, new sacred texts, new models of religious authority, etc. But these and many other evolving aspects of religion are all rooted in the starting point of how we understand or perceive the nature of the Ultimate Reality upon which everything else is based, or in simple terms, how we conceive of Spirit.
 
Many suggest that, at the beginning of the 21st century, we have reached a point where, for a growing segment of humanity, the traditional understanding of Spirit, or “God,” is no longer adequate or credible. While our general knowledge of the Universe has expanded over the course of the past 3000 years in such a way that we now recognize that we exist in a Cosmos that is unimaginably more vast than that which was conceived by our ancestors, as a culture we have tended to cling to a sense of God that has not changed significantly over the past three millennia. Addressing that issue calls for setting aside the concept of a “small” God and thinking bigger about the nature of Spirit, in such a way that religion and spirituality can again become credible to 21st century humans who are fully informed by a scientific, historical, and critical sensibility.
 
We necessarily use aspects of our experience of the sensory world to construct our understanding of the transcendent realm: the language derived from our empirical experiences is all that we have to use, and to the extent that we have a direct sense of Spirit, it’s indescribable, leading us to resort to that everyday experience for language to describe that which transcends everydayness.
 
But our everyday experience has evolved over the centuries, and yet we hang on to God-language from an earlier time. So what  do we need to change?
 
Setting Aside the Small Concept God
 
To suggest that we need to modify the traditional understanding of Spirit is not to suggest that past ways of understanding Ultimacy were “wrong,” nor is it meant to imply that contemporary humanity has achieved some sort of final enlightened understanding of the Sacred. Rather, we are merely operating according to the fairly obvious fact that any human attempt to perceive, understand, and describe Spirit is necessarily the product of the epistemologically-limited capacities of humans in a given cultural time and place. The indigenous sense of Spirit as something found in nature, or the Abrahamic notion of the one personal God, are not wrong per se, but rather limited to their particular cultural circumstances. Those circumstances have changed for much of humanity, and hence our concept of Spirit should be revised accordingly, along the lines of the “transcend and include” model of Ken Wilber, which retains previous perceptions of Spirit but expands them according to our current mode of consciousness.
 
In what sense, then, does the traditional notion of God that has been dominant for at least the past 2000 years need to be modified?

    1. A less anthropomorphic concept of Spirit
Certainly the emergence of the theistic concept of Spirit as a God who has personal qualities similar to those of humans makes sense as an effort to recognize that certain qualities found only in the human species (moral goodness, justice, love, freedom) should be attributed to an Ultimate Being. Trying to make sense of Spirit by projecting qualities and characteristics of “worldly” phenomena is both understandable and inevitable.
But the theistic God as found in the Abrahamic religions and elsewhere is one which also includes many unappealing, and even revolting, human qualities. Jealousy, capriciousness, vengefulness, partiality, anger, and other human flaws are common characteristics of God as found in the Abrahamic texts, and it is time to simply acknowledge and reject such characterizations (rather than ignoring, rationalizing, or dancing around them, as often is done by theistic believers and theologians). Many contemporary humans recognize that such characteristics are flaws, and hence we should stop accepting them as qualities of what is supposed to be a perfect being.

    2. A less parochial concept of Spirit
Given that we now possess the ability to have a global, trans-cultural view of the world, it no longer makes sense to conceive of Spirit as the God of one specific group of people, one culture, one historical time period, or one geographic area of the planet. One could even argue that conceiving of Spirit in terms of one species on one planet is an absurdly restrictive way of thinking about a transcendent Being who is unlimited by space and time.
 
Eliminating such parochial elements of our notion of Spirit would also mean setting aside the attribution of limiting socio-political labels such as King and Lord, and biological labels such as Father and similar gendered references. We now have a fuller sense of Spirit as so much more than all of that.

    3. A concept of Spirit that is compatible with a modern Cosmology
Conceiving of Spirit in terms of a God of one culture, one species, or even one planet is equivalent to reducing Spirit to a limited demi-urge. We now have an understanding of the physical Universe as something whose existence as a temporal and spatial entity is so vast as to be inconceivable to the human mind. As such, we should not be retreating to limited human notions of space and time in how we think about God:  if Spirit is an entity which is both immanent in every particle of the Universe while at the same time paradoxically transcending the entirety of spatiotemporal reality, our representations of Spirit should not fall back on the notion of a smaller God who rules over one planet in a one-galaxy Universe. Our awareness of a vast Cosmos should be accompanied by a sense of Spirit which is even more vast.

    4. A concept of Spirit that recognizes the role of evolution
If we live in an ever-changing, evolving Cosmos rather than a static completed Cosmos, our sense of the Sacred should be liberated to embrace this sense of constant movement. This entails accepting the notion of a God which is manifesting itself in the Cosmos in ever-fuller expressions, rather than a static deity whose essential nature should be restricted to how it appeared to humanity 2500 years ago.
No recent figures have expressed this notion of an ever-expanding sense of the Divine with the confidence and clarity as the French paleontologist/priest Teilhard de Chardin and the Hindu philosopher Aurobindo Ghose (see earlier blog posts from March and April 2024). Both Teilhard and Aurobindo present an evolutionary spirituality which recognizes the presence of a paradoxical deity which, while already existent in its pure form, is also progressively manifesting itself in the process of cosmic evolution, producing the opportunity for an increasingly fuller, expansive, and more complete perception of itself by humans whose consciousness is developing expanded capacity for perceiving the Sacred.
 
In one sense, the small, limited concept of God/Spirit that still dominates human religious awareness can be seen as the product of epistemological parochialism, or the assumption that the nature of reality must correspond to the epistemological capacities of a single (rather young) species on a single (tiny) planet. Of course, this is an untenable position. We should always retain a deep sense of epistemological humility, rooted in recognition of the absurdity of the notion that the Ultimate Nature of all reality could be adequately understood and articulated by a relatively new species using a gooey three pound organ, or brain. Ants can’t do algebra, and similarly, it’s not likely that humans, while blessed with an intuitive capacity to sense that there is a Something More or Spiritual quality to reality, can comprehensively perceive, understand, and describe that which is infinitely beyond the limited capacity of human perception and knowledge.
 
But if we set aside the anthropomorphic, parochial, and outdated characterizations of Spirit, what does that leave us? How will humans conceive of the “God/Spirit” of the future?
 
In a spirit of humility as referenced above, we are reluctant to speculate on this issue, other than to assert that the “God-concept” of the future will be one which reflects the four criteria described above. To attempt anything beyond that would be ill-advised and irresponsible, and for two reasons:

    1. A period of transition  
We clearly are in the early stages of a transition period from one mode of spirituality to something new, and the way in which Spirit will be conceived in that new spirituality has not yet coalesced into anything even remotely specific. Certainly, this post-traditional concept of Spirit will be less anthropomorphic, parochial, and static, and more full, expansive, and evolving, but what it is beyond that will have to wait for the coming years, decades, and perhaps centuries.

    2. Spiritual Minimalism
We have reached a stage in our understanding of the Cosmos, humanity and its place within the Cosmos, and a sense (admittedly vague) of Spirit which is likely to preclude the future development of the kinds of detailed theological and philosophical propositions about the nature of God that have been characteristic of thinking about Spirit in the 2500 years since the beginning of such speculation in the Axial Age. An honest account of our awareness of the nature of Spirit is more likely to be characterized by a sense of Spiritual Minimalism (which, of course, has been found for centuries in mystical and apophatic traditions in both Eastern and Western thought). The reality of Spirit will be affirmed without the addition of speculative and often divisive detailed affirmations about that Spirit. We are less likely than our predecessors to pretend to be ants doing algebra.
 
 And then we wait…..

 So perhaps we need to be content, for now, with just taking the first step of confidently and clearly recognizing that certain aspects of the traditional understanding of Spirit/God can be set aside. The understanding of God that evolved prior to the emergence of modern consciousness and the contemporary epistemological sensibility which incorporates scientific, historical, and cross-cultural awareness, will hopefully be gradually modified and replaced (in the “transcend but include” mode which we described above) by a concept of Spirit that is credible to a contemporary consciousness, leading to what J.L. Schellenberg has referred to as a badly needed “religion appropriate to our time.” 
Some might be dissatisfied with the absence of a clear account of such a  “new God-concept” which is likely to develop, but for now, just recognizing that we can set aside traditional ways of thinking about Spirit can be an incredibly liberating experience, one that breaks the spiritual tethers to the past and opens the door to new ways of experiencing, understanding, and, eventually, making sense of Spirit in a way that is credible and meaningful to 21st consciousness.

​ Everyday Religious Experience
 
William James and Mysticism
 
The recognition of religious experience as a legitimate subject for serious academic study is usually traced back to William James’ classic 1902 work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, in which he famously stated, “Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”           
     
Using this recognition of multiple modes of consciousness, James then proceeded to categorize and describe several types of religious experience, resulting in the first scholarly attempt to give serious consideration to religious experience as a real psychological phenomenon. But the chapter in Varieties which attracted the most attention, and continues to do so today, was the chapter on mysticism, which James does not hesitate to identify as the most basic and valid type of religious experience, and that which mostly closely approximates the fundamental human awareness of a spiritual dimension to the Cosmos. In this chapter, James presents multiple first-person accounts of mystical experiences, all characterized by a sense of unity, ineffability, and a sense of deep wisdom about the ultimate spiritual nature of reality.
 
Although James examined both common and exceptional types of religious experience, the impact of his chapter on mysticism had the effect of the academic fields of both religion and philosophy gravitating toward the study of non-ordinary experiences as the primary, if not sole, expression of religious experience. Since the publication of James’ book, mysticism has acquired a privileged position in the study of religion in general, and religious experience in particular, and rightfully so. Although the very word “mysticism” is difficult to define, its basic characteristics, as articulated by James and his many successors, constitute one of the few universal elements of religion, found in various forms in all of the contemporary world religions. At the same time, mysticism is not constrained by association with the beliefs and doctrines of any single religion: while present in all, it is restricted to none. Mysticism provides empirical evidence that there is a mode of consciousness which humans can attain, quite different from our everyday consciousness, in which one can experience empirical verification of the existence of Something More than the material realm.  
 
The Privileged Status of Mysticism
 
And yet, as a type of non-ordinary experience associated with a temporary altered state of consciousness, mysticism can be characterized as rare and exclusivist. For those who have such an experience, the impact can be lasting and life-changing (as attested in the Varieties). But as James acknowledged, mystical religious experience is usually brief, transient, and rare.
 
This raises a somewhat troubling question which derives from this portrayal of mysticism as something that is a rather exclusive and privileged type of experience: what about the many who don’t have such a non-ordinary, altered state of consciousness type of experience? If mysticism provides the fullest and most meaningful direct access to Spirit, but mystical experiences are quite rare, where does that leave the many who never have such an experience?
 
The Alternative: Everyday Religious Experience
 
We would like to suggest (without in any way diminishing the value of mysticism) that there actually is an alternative mode of spiritual awareness, one that is not only available to everyday consciousness, but also is regularly experienced as an ordinary part of everyday life, even though those having the experience might not recognize its spiritual significance.
 
For lack of a better term, we will refer to this type of experience as “everyday religious experience,” which can be found in four complementary varieties:
 
1. The Experience of Spiritual Expansiveness
 
The consciousness of contemporary humans makes it possible to experience the vastness of the Cosmos in a sense that previous generations lacked. Ironically, scientific knowledge (tracing the history of the Universe and the complexity of its evolution, especially from a Big History perspective as presented by the likes of David Christian, Brian Swimme, and many others) and technological advances (the Hubble and Webb telescopes, particle accelerators such the Large Hadron Collider) have resulted in a conscious awareness of the vast, grand, majestic nature of the Cosmos in a manner that often evokes a sense of sacred awe, wonder, and mystery. This scientifically-rooted “spirituality” is represented by the proponents of what has been labeled as “Religious Naturalism,” and is expressed beautifully in the work of Ursula Goodenough and others.
 
Religious Naturalism is certainly not a “religion” in the traditional sense, and many religious naturalists see no need to affirm belief in any sort of supernatural entity. But it’s difficult to read the words of religious naturalists without sensing that they are talking about an experience of reality that sounds more like ancient Vedanta and Neo-Confucian spirituality than it does objective scientific description. Indeed, words such as awe, wonder, mystery, and even sacred are commonly used by Religious Naturalists to describe their experience of the Cosmos, which is an experience that is available to everyone, regardless of scientific knowledge. Simply gazing at images of galaxies, contemplating the vast complexity of the 14 billion year evolutionary process, and marveling at the images generated by particle collisions provokes our consciousness to recognize a quality to the Universe that can legitimately be designated as Sacred.
 
2. The Experience of Moral Goodness
 
Leaving aside and quite independent from the feeling of spiritual expansion that derives from our awareness of the vastness of the Cosmos, there is another source of everyday experience that confirms the reality of Spirit: our experience of moral goodness.
 
By moral goodness we don’t mean knowledge of and obedience to a specific set of moral laws, principles, or traditions. Rather, we are referring to the deeper sense of the very nature of moral goodness that we encounter at more of an experiential than cognitive level: the very notion that we should act in certain ways, and that through such actions we establish a right relationship with a transcendent reality. Certainly moral laws are important, and sociologically speaking, they became an evolutionary necessity as human groupings developed beyond the size of the clan or tribe, where the personal authority of a leader was no longer effective in a growing population. But the notion that we should obey such moral laws is the function of a deeper sense that there really is such a thing as Goodness. The sense of “shouldness” of everyday human existence cannot be fully accounted for as merely a sociological necessity, a desire to fit in, or blind obedience to others. And the sense of shouldness cannot be derived from a purely materialist model of reality. Rather, the existence of a deep sense of moral shouldness is a rather peculiar human quality which, even though we aren’t usually aware of it, points to the presence of something beyond the material realm and beyond our individual existence, to the presence of a transcendent spiritual reality, or the Good in the sense that it was recognized as far back as Greek thought in the characterization of the transcendent realm as the locus of the ontologically real Truth, Goodness, and Beauty (an idea that was further developed in Christian theologizing on the existence of Transcendentals, and also found in varying expressions in Buddhism, Neo-Confucianism, and Hinduism).
 
But this experience of moral goodness, full of spiritual significance, is not an extraordinary experience made possible by an altered state of consciousness. Unlike mystical experience, the experience of moral goodness is something that happens in small, ordinary, everyday moments.
 
And unlike the experience of spiritual expansiveness which we described above, the spiritual sense of moral goodness is something that is encountered in the preciousness of ordinary beings, human and otherwise, as we simply recognize the beauty and sacredness of the limited present, the poignant beauty and goodness of a very transient and restricted miraculous moment in space and time where we recognize the sacred quality of another being, our sense of responsibility to that other being, the consequent establishment (however brief and outwardly insignificant) of a relationship with that being, and, in the establishment of that relation with a single transient being, the concurrent establishment of a relationship or connection with Spirit.
 
So every time that we generate an act of moral goodness, we implicitly recognize that there is more to reality than matter and energy. We recognize, or more precisely, intuitively experience, a qualitative aspect of the Cosmos, a transcendent ontological reality, namely moral goodness.
 
In countless gestures of everyday moral goodness (not just in saintly or heroic acts, but in a simple gesture, a glance, a patient pause, a kind word, and in countless ordinary ways) we are actually affirming the experiential presence of Spirit – even when we don’t recognize what we’re doing or the immense significance of it. As evolved conscious entities that know and act according to moral goodness, we affirm/experience a transcendent spiritual reality. Subtle, quiet, everyday acts of moral goodness are nothing less than unrecognized affirmations of Spirit.
 
3. The Experience of Meaning: What We Do Matters
 
With the experience of moral goodness, there simultaneously occurs, in a similarly intuitive, dim, and often unconscious manner, an experiential sense of the meaningfulness of existence. The experience of moral goodness goes hand in hand with the experiential affirmation that things matter: what exists, what we do, how we (and other beings) think and feel.
 
Precisely how things matter might remain elusive, mysterious, and beyond our ability to articulate in precise statements. But in such moments there is a confident, intuitive, experiential sense that, in some mysterious way, they really do matter. Of course, we’re not talking about meaning in the sense of propositional statements which articulate a complex philosophical account of the meaning of the Cosmos. Philosophers and theologians produce such accounts, but all are inadequate as essentially nothing more than well-intentioned guess-work, produced by creatures who are attempting to employ quite limited epistemological capacities to express comprehensive affirmations about the ultimate meaning of existence. That never works. But what does work is the simple acceptance of what our capacity for spiritual perception tells us in a very quiet, direct, and confident sense. We know that there is meaning, in the sense that things really do matter, even though we cannot articulate the nature of that meaning, especially in the context of an honest 21st century sensibility where the use of mythological narratives is no longer credible. Not to reduce something so profoundly important to the level of triviality, but like the Chipotle restaurant commercials that are popular as I write this, one can also say of the experienced meaningfulness of existence, “When you know, you know.”
 
Moreover, the affirmation of meaning does not derive from the experience of some sort of exceptional event. As with moral goodness, we are talking about experiences that occur as part of everyday, ordinary human life. Sometimes these meaning-affirming experiences are experiences of great joy (the birth of a child, the experience of beauty), some are experiences of deep sorrow (suffering and death), and some are, superficially at least, just ordinary moments of sensing the precious meaningfulness that saturates each moment of existence in space and time, however transitory that might be. But they are not experiences which necessitate entering into the non-ordinary, altered mode of consciousness associated with mystical experience. Ordinary people, operating in an everyday mode of consciousness, have the capacity to experience meaning in the same sense that they have the capacity to experience moral goodness.
 
4. The Experience of Consciousness
 
We’ve covered the spiritual significance of the experience of consciousness, and especially the uniquely human capacity for consciousness of consciousness, elsewhere on this site (see blog posts from June, August, October, and November 2024) and in the book, Thinking About Religion in the 21st Century: A New Guide for the Perplexed, so we will limit our comments here and refer readers to those earlier remarks.
 
The key point is simply that consciousness itself is another aspect of everyday experience which offers a window to the presence of the spiritual dimension. In fact, the three areas of everyday religious experience identified above (spiritual expansiveness, moral goodness, and meaning) are only made possible through the presence of consciousness. In a sense, consciousness, especially in its evolved human expression, is the starting point for all things spiritual. Consciousness provides immediate, experiential confirmation that there is Something More than the physical dimension of the Cosmos, and consciousness makes it possible to fill in the content of that Something More with the kinds of experiences described above.
 
 
Religious Experience in Everyday Life
 
The above account of the nature of everyday religious experience is not intended to in any way deny or diminish the significance of mysticism and exceptional, non-ordinary states of consciousness. Such experiences occur, and as James emphasized, for those who have had such experiences, they impart an ineffable sense of meaning and wisdom (what James referred to as the “noetic” quality of mystical experience) which can be life-altering, even when such an experience occurs only once and for just a few minutes or even seconds.
 
But we are suggesting that, aside from the rare and exceptional mystical experience which is encountered by only a fortunate few, aspects of everyday experience which are available to everyone also provide experiential access to the presence of a spiritual dimension of reality, even though these everyday experiences are so commonplace that we typically take them for granted and do not fully appreciate the spiritual import that they carry. Furthermore, there obviously is no contradiction between mystical religious experience and everyday religious experience. One can have both or either: occasional intense experiences in a non-ordinary mode of awareness might be more intense and produce a stronger sense of immediacy, but even in the absence of such special experiences, awareness of Spirit is available to those who dwell in the ordinariness of the everyday – which, in reality, is not ordinary at all.

​Henry David Thoreau:
Prophet of Evolved….Eating?
 
At various times, Thoreau wrote as a philosopher, a scientist, a nature writer, an economist, a moralist, a social activist, a natural theologian, and in a few places, a commentator on, of all things, eating. In this latter role, he perhaps serves as an unintentional prophet of where we are headed as spirituality evolves and the circle of human moral concern continues to expand, even beyond the human species. Of course in doing so, Thoreau, as is sometimes the case, embodies blatant and unresolved contradictions, but that’s part of his charm: he never intended to write as a systematic philosopher who claimed to explain everything in a vast system in which all topics are rationally connected in a comprehensive synthesis. Thoreau just wrote (with beauty and simplicity) what he thought, felt, and experienced, including the contradictions.
 
Higher Laws is one of the chapters in Walden where Thoreau attempts to articulate some of his spiritual ideals and how they are carried out in daily life. But the beginning of this spiritually-oriented chapter begins rather strangely, with an account of a walk in the woods at night, during which he spotted a woodchuck and experienced a “savage delight” at the thought of killing and devouring the animal raw, even though he wasn’t even hungry. This passage is followed by his famous declaration that, “I love the wild not less than the good”(202 ).***
 
And yet, only a few pages later, Thoreau confesses that, “I have found repeatedly, of late years, that I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect,” and later in the same paragraph, “I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind…..Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal?”(206-207).
 
So in the short span of three to four pages, Thoreau has gone from sharing his desire to kill and eat a groundhog raw to declaring that meat-eating is a shameful human form of eating!
 
But his exploration of eating gets even more interesting shortly thereafter, when Thoreau not only offers a reconciliatory interpretation of such contradictions but, quite remarkably, does so in the context of evolving human spirituality:
 
“Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals” (207).
 
Could it be that, without realizing it, Thoreau here serves as a prophet of ethical eating in the spirituality of the 21st century? Of course, refraining from eating meat for ethico-spiritual reasons preceded Thoreau by many centuries, as seen for instance in certain schools of ancient Hinduism and Buddhism and the Greek Neo-Platonist tradition inspired by Plotinus (3rd c.). But hearing Thoreau advocate a vegetarian diet for ethical purposes is different, since even in spite of his quirks and self-declared desire for solitude and simplicity, he is a fully “modern” writer and thinker, and as such, his words have the potential to influence today’s readers in a more meaningful way than do the words from ancient sacred texts.
 
Thoreau doesn’t attempt to present an argument to establish the moral wrongness of killing animals for food, but rather suggests that it’s more like an intuitive moral sense that develops as one matures spiritually.
 
 If Thoreau had been familiar with the concept of evolutionary spirituality that has developed in the past century, I suspect that he might have put it this way: As human consciousness has evolved over the centuries, to the point where that consciousness includes the capacity to intuitively recognize the inter-connectedness of all beings, including the human connection to the animal realm and, indeed, all sentient beings, our sense of moral responsibility has widened to include a wider moral circle that is no longer restricted to the human (see the work of Peter Singer on the expanding moral circle).
 
If Thoreau was living today, he probably would be pleased to see the extent to which vegetarianism and veganism have permeated our culture, with even mainstream capitalist fast-food business enterprises offering plant-based alternatives (e.g., the “Impossible Whopper”) and meat-free restaurant chains popping up across the country – a trend that is likely to increase as we develop protein rich synthesized foods that are not only nutritious but also tasty and aesthetically appealing.
 
 
***All Thoreau quotes are from Jeffery S. Cramer’s Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition, a wonderful edition of Thoreau’s classic text in which Cramer’s annotations provide invaluable insights into the book and Thoreau’s life. All italics, including those within the Thoreau quotes, are mine.