Evolutionary Reality of the Relational Whole
Think of yourself right now. Think of who you are … of who you were … yesterday, a year ago, high school age, further back, elementary age … think of yourself as a toddler, as a baby. What are you? Where do you come from?
Who are you?
At a cellular level, each cell traces back to a cell in an earlier version of you. So, from you as a baby to you as a fetus to a fertilized egg, the union of two different people! Consider the maternal line… the egg is a part of your mother’s body and her mother’s body. And grandmother. Great, great grandmother. Generations. On and on.
Three hundred thousand years of homo sapiens and before that, homo erectus. Less a family tree and more a family bush of homo neanderthaleneis, homo habilis … back we go, back through the evolutionary bush to earlier prehistoric mammals, amphibians, tetrapod creatures, fish, larvae, sea worms, multi-cell, back to single-cell organisms. What in the world? This is crazy.
And all that? Well, it emerged from the oldest rock on earth around 3.8 billion years ago, that came from a meteorite shower, that interacted with water, which had appeared some 4 billion years ago. Further back, another 500 million years, the earth was formed, emerging from the accretion disc orbiting around the sun. Before that, dust, hydrogen, helium, and all of that stemming from something called the cosmic microwave background, back to 13.8 billion years ago… a singularity we reference as the Big Bang.
We’ve skipped a few things, but you get the idea. What … where … who are you?
Good grief. In a very real way, you are the leading age of evolution, 13.8 billion years (at least). You are a part of everything. At one level, you are, of course, a human that has some separation, but it all depends on what scale. At a certain scale, you are the relational whole.
The implications are endless …
1-Healthy religion keeps us connected to the evolutionary reality of the relational whole.*
For Rene’ Girard, everyone’s favorite French anthropologist, religion was an elaborate scapegoating mechanism; that thing we sequence in order to offload our problems onto the other.
In other words, a sacralized way to rebel against the relational whole.
Healthy religion keeps us tapped into the evolutionary wholeness, the relationally of all things; that salvation is for all of us or it's for none of us. We are not separate from nature. We are nature.
2-Healthy religion help us embrace evolution while seeing the possibility of the divine.
I'll set this up by saying that while I'm not proposing a theistic God that would disprove evolution, I’m certainly not proposing an atheistic science that would disprove God!
RE: the former, I've already made my commitment to the evolutionary reality of the relational whole. God must be entangled within everything; therefore, I'm uninterested in an outside sky-deity reaching in from time to time to do his thing, variously described as vanquishing, ordering, overpowering, inseminating, or otherwise fixing our broken and sterile world.
RE: the latter, what seems obvious, is to recognize that science has not disproven God, for evolution is more than natural selection and survival of the fittest. It's really more than one part dominating another part in a machine-like, binary fashion.
It’s more … what’s the word? Diffuse. Yes, things are less dominated and more subsumed—the subsumer being changed by the subsumee at the time of subsuming. Haha, what a weird sentence. An amoeba doesn't attack and kill another amoeba as much as it subsumes the other. An expanding galaxy doesn't dominate a planet and discard its parts as much as it subsumes the other. At a certain scale of observation, the entire universe is an undulating movement of the one subsuming the other. Yes, some are coming out "on top," but even in their winning, they are constantly being affected and changed by those "on the bottom."
It's not just one part being switched out for another part. It's more. It's adaptation. It's something novel emerging. Natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but as Hugo de Vries says, "it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest."
What's going on here? Why is this happening? Honestly, science has no answer as to why this is happening. But a religion attached to the evolutionary reality of relational wholeness might. :)
Something or someone is acting as a catalyzing agent. Yes, someone is encouraging the whole thing, inviting or luring it forward. What seems reasonable (ha, as if any of this is reasonable) is that all this adaptation is steeped in an erotic, procreative kind of energy. This energy might be anything, but I don't think anything describes it better than love.
And given that my tradition taught me that God is love, well, yes, I'm predisposed to think this, but I also think it's a reasonable direction to go. It's not proof, but it's reasonable to think that the evolutionary reality of the relational whole is love.
Despite entropy, love is co-creating.
Despite chaos, love is coming up with new ideas.
Despite time going on forever, love is patient.
Love doesn't come from somewhere else. Love comes from within. Maybe in the same way that the momma's reproductive cells come from her momma, and hers before that … on and on ... you might see that Jesus comes from within Mary. And you might see that love comes from within you as well. My friend Heather Hamilton says, "The seed of Christ has been within you from the beginning."
New arrangmenet of an old story
Remember that one story? You know, the one where Jesus has the gracious Father talking to the indignant older brother? He says, "You've always been with me. Everything I’ve always had has been yours."
Suppose scripture was being written today in light of what we know about the evolutionary reality of the relational whole. In that case, Jesus might have ended his story by having the Father tell his oldest … "Hey, bro, we're all connected here. You're not losing by someone else winning. It's an abundance mindset, not a scarcity mindset." He'd hug him, and they'd walk to the party together, and he'd say, "The divine entanglement is real. Lean into it."
Haha, I imagine so.
*It goes beyond my time to get into definitions of religion here, but loosely, I’m defining it as that thing that keeps us attached (as in a ligament) to something that brings us meaning.
Resources for all of this stuff are many, but check out Notes on Complexity (Neil Theise) and the way it lines up with The Not Yet God: Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin and the Relational Whole (Ilia Delio).
I’ve also been hearing the vibrations of all this in other stuff I’ve been reading lately … Gravity and Grace (Simone Weil), Evolution and Conversion (Rene Girard), The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence (Thomas Jay Oord), and John Phol’s dissertation work as well as Shaleen Kendrick.
