Evolutionize Your Life: Heaven Is Coming Home to Reality

share this  Print This Post

June 13, 2010, by Michael Dowd

Rev. Dowd delivered his sermon extemporaneously. The following material reflects the content of his talk but is not an actual transcript.

See the following websites for more on Rev. Dowd and his and his wife Connie Barlow’s itinerant ministry: http://MichaelDowd.org, http://ThankGodforEvolution.com, and http://TheGreatStory.org.

“The most profound insight in the history of humankind is that we should seek to live in accord with reality. Indeed, living in harmony with reality may be accepted as a formal definition of wisdom. If we live at odds with reality (foolishly), then we will be doomed, but if live in proper relationship with reality (wisely), then we shall be saved. Humans everywhere, and at all times, have had at least a tacit understanding of this fundamental principle. What we are less in agreement about is how we should think about reality and what we should do to bring ourselves into harmony with it.” — Loyal Rue

Reality is my God and integrity is my religion. By this, I mean that what is real is my ultimate commitment and being in right relationship with reality, and assisting humanity in this process, is my calling and deepest inspiration.

In last week’s sermon Ian generously referred to me as a free-spirit, independent of any tradition. While I’m certainly comfortable with the label “free-spirit”, being free of tradition is not quite an accurate description of my message and ministry. I emerge out of and still deeply value and indeed cherish the Christian tradition. And I have drunk deeply at the well of Earth-honoring spirituality and Buddhism as well. But the tradition I am grounded in most is no longer any belief-based tradition, but, rather, the worldwide, self-correcting knowledge-based tradition of science. I see science, not the Bible or any other ancient written document, as revealing “God’s Word” for humanity today. Indeed, I would argue that nothing is driving young people away from a meaningful relationship with Reality (to use religious language: nothing is driving young people away from God further and faster) than the Bible.

To be clear: I am neither a theist nor atheist; I’m a post-theist, an emergentist—a religious naturalist. The concepts of theism and atheism came into use long before we had an evidential (reality-based) understanding of how the world, in fact, came into being and before we learned that the Universe itself is creative. Given what we now know about big history, I no longer find the theist-atheist dichotomy useful. Both presuppose a trivial, unnatural God and a mechanistic Cosmos that is not itself divinely creative.

Coming into right relationship to reality is truly what it’s all about in human affairs. How to most effectively do this has been the great work of every age and culture. At each stage in human evolution our understanding of how things are and which things matter—what is real and what is important—must be answered anew. Reality is, of course, experienced differently around the world and at different times in history. Life in a rainforest is different from life in the desert, tundra, or city. Life in a tribe differs from life in a chiefdom, theocracy, or empire. Not surprisingly, reality has been personified, or relationalized, differently throughout the world. Gods and goddesses in lush, tropical regions have very different personalities than those in harsh, difficult regions. Theology is a child of geography and sociology. A culture’s cosmology (how things are/what’s real) and values (which things matter/what’s important) are both derived from their core narrative or creation myth, which includes their various personifications.

All religions facilitate personal wholeness and social coherence. These two, the therapeutic and political functions of religion, together with the need to live in ecological integrity, are the three essential components of right relationship with reality.

As humanity has progressed from clans, to tribes, to chieftains and kingdoms, to theocracies and early nations, to nation states, to social democracies, each advance in complexity required a fresh understanding of what’s real and what’s important, and a new mythic story emerged to expand the in-group and provide mechanisms to ensure trust and cooperation at a wider level than before.

Until the last few hundred years, many important factually accurate understandings of how things are would have been impossible. Because much of the real world operates at scales and at speeds that are primate-hominid brains cannot possibly grasp unaided by technology, virtually all of life’s biggest question could only be answered in practically useful ways until very recently. As noted evolutionist David Sloan Wilson reminds us, “The mind has evolved to adopt beliefs on the basis of practical, not factual realism.”

Our species is now facing a series of crises of epic proportion. Overpopulation, species extinction, climate change, peak oil, collapse of the world’s fisheries, loss of topsoil, desertification, the growing gap between rich and the poor, these are but some of the more obvious challenges we and our children face today and in the near future. In each case, the cause is identical. As individuals, groups, corporations, nations, and as a species, the vast majority of us are being guided by outdated and woefully inadequate maps of reality. Most hold practically inspiring but factually inaccurate understandings of how things are and which things matter. And nowhere has this been the case more so than with respect to our understanding of God, or ultimate reality. How has this situation arisen? The main culprit, as I see it, is idolatry of the written word, which has created a mismatch between our past needs and current reality. Trying to answer questions of value and meaning while being guided by an outdated map of reality is a prescription for disaster.

Now that our species has global powers of creation and destruction, without an understanding of the divine (ultimate meaning and value) that is in alignment with our best evidential understanding of reality, we will self-destruct.

The New Atheists As God’s Prophets

Religions have traditionally offered people a sense of how things are, which things matter, and how to be in right relationship with reality, personally and socially. However today, reality is radically different than it was millennia ago. But because religions are operating with outdated maps of reality and are wedded to archaic, outmoded ways of speaking about reality, they have become, paradoxically, one of the greatest hindrances to humanity as a whole coming into right relationship with reality. The New Atheists, because they have an evidentially-formed view of the world (as opposed to one given by authority or tradition), and because they are not tied to any particular way of thinking or speaking about reality, are better able to see how things are and which things matter today, and thus facilitate humanity coming into right relationship with reality. They are also calling religion on the absurdity of continuing to take inspirational metaphorical language literally.

Few things are more important at this time in history than for religious people to listen to the New Atheists as if these unbelievers were speaking with God’s voice, because they are! The word “God” used to be identified with reality—indeed, ultimate reality. In all cultures and at all times, the divine was no mere person, but was a personification of reality. To have faith in God was to accept or trust in what was undeniably real. Understanding the human mind’s innate tendency to personify makes sense of religious differences around the world. Failing to appreciate this simple fact makes it difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile contradictory religious claims.

With the advent of the mechanistic worldview in Europe 500 years ago, Westerners began thinking of the universe as a gigantic clock and God as a clockmaker, thereby divorcing God from reality. Scientific discoveries were not granted the status of divine revelation—of reality revealing its nature and ways—as was in fact the case. In the intervening centuries, largely because of the printing press and widespread idolatry of the written word, religious people increasingly made an idol of traditional images and language for God, while science helped humanity as a whole learn ever more about the real world, further distancing God and reality. As St. Thomas Aquinas, one of Christianity’s most celebrated theologians warned 750 years ago, “A mistake about creation will result in a mistake about God.” If this is true, what it means (among other things) is that the more we learn about the nature of the Universe, if we’re not also updating what we mean when we use the word “God”, we may have understandings of the divine that are so out of touch with reality as to no longer be lifegiving. And that’s precisely what has happened.

Charles Darwin didn’t kill off God; to the contrary, he and Alfred Russel Wallace gave us the first glimpse of the real creator behind and beyond all the world’s mythic portrayals of the divine. They freed us from the vision of God as an unnatural cosmic terrorist. By mocking traditional mythic understandings of the divine and attacking religious dogma and theology, the New Atheists are thus calling religious people back to reality. In so doing, they are paradoxically functioning as prophets, those who boldly warn the people, “Get right with reality, or else.” So in a strange but very real way, the New Atheists are God’s prophets.

Supernatural Is Unnatural Is Uninspiring (When You Think About It)

In the 14-billion-year ‘big history’ of the Universe, and 4.5-billion-year history of Earth, evidence suggest that the only place that the supernatural realm has ever existed is in the minds and hearts (and speech) of human beings, and actually only quite recently.

As Benson Salem compellingly showed in his 1977 American Anthropological Association Ethos paper, “Supernatural as a Western Category”, the ‘supernatural realm’ only came into being as a thought form after we began to understand things in natural, scientific way. Only after the concept of “natural” emerged was it deemed necessary by some to speak of the “super-natural”: that which was imagined to be above or outside of nature. As I point out in the preface to the paperback edition of my book, Thank God for Evolution,

How was the world made? Why do earthquakes, tornados, and other bad things happen? Why must we die? And why do different peoples answer these questions in different ways? The big questions that children have always asked and will continue to ask cannot be answered by the powers of human perception alone. Ancient cultures gave so-called supernatural answers to these questions, but those answers were not truly supernatural—they were prenatural. Prior to advances in technology and scientific ways of testing truth claims, factual answers were simply unavailable. It was not just difficult to understand infection before microscopes brought bacteria into focus; it was impossible. Without an evolutionary worldview, it is similarly impossible to understand ourselves, our world, and what is required for humanity to survive. For religious leaders today to rely on prenatural answers puts them at odds not only with science but with one another—dangerously so. Their resistance, however, does make sense. Until scientific discoveries are fleshed into the life-giving forms of beauty and goodness (as well as truth and utility), scriptural literalism will command power and influence.

As we have learned more and more about the natural, the so-called supernatural has become less and less attractive. After all, supernatural and unnatural are synonyms. Anything supposedly supernatural is, by definition, unnatural. And most people find unnatural relatively uninspiring when they really stop and think about it. I mean, does this sound like “good news” to you?…

An unnatural king who occasionally engages in unnatural acts sends his unnatural son to Earth in an unnatural way. He’s born an unnatural birth, lives an unnatural life, performs unnatural deeds, and is killed and unnaturally rises from the dead in order to redeem humanity from an unnatural curse brought about by an unnaturally talking snake. After 40 days of unnatural appearances he unnaturally zooms off to heaven to return to his unnatural father, sit on an unnatural throne, and unnaturally judge the living and the dead. If you profess to believe in all this unnatural activity, you and your fellow believers get to spend an unnaturally long time in an unnaturally boring paradise while everyone else suffers an unnatural, torturous hell forever.

If this is supposedly “the gospel”, God’s great news for humanity, it any wonder that young people are turning their backs on religion and that the New Atheists are riding bestseller lists?

God Is a Divine Personification, Not a Person

God is not a person; God is a sacred personification of one or more deeply significant dimensions of reality. If we miss this we miss everything!

Poseidon was not the god of the oceans, as if a supernatural entity separate from water was looking down from on high. Poseidon was the personification of the seas! Sol was not the spirit of the sun, as if there was a separation between the two, Sol was a sacred, proper name for our primary sustenance: that seemingly eternal, life-giving source of generous heat and light. By saying “Sol” when we looked up, we experienced that reality as a “Thou” to be related to. Today most of us have a different subjective experience. We look up and say “the sun” and think of “it” in a depersonalized way. As Joseph Campbell, Houston Smith, Paul Tillich, and other scholars of mythology and world religions remind us, we simply cannot understand religion if we don’t understand how the human mind instinctually relationalizes, or personifies, reality. Think of the movie “Castaway” with Tom Hanks. The personified soccer ball, Wilson, was perhaps the only thing that kept Hank’s character sane.

Rudolf Bultmann, one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century, wrote an important essay in 1931 titled, “The Crisis of Faith”. In it, he moves discussion of God beyond beliefs to universal experience, which he claims was the case for peoples everywhere before modern times. I have summarized Bultmann’s argument in a recent blog post, but the essence of it is that faith has virtually nothing to do with beliefs. Beliefs are, in fact, the antithesis of faith. Beliefs tend to be attachment of the mind to something being a certain way. Faith is synonymous with trust. Faith in God, trusting the universe, accepting what’s so, loving what is, cherishing what’s real—each of these is a different way of saying the same thing. Faith is an open hearted, open-handed stance toward life, toward whatever is real, and a commitment to an ever-deepening intimacy with reality and for the good of the whole. Such trust and passion for life gives meaning to our lives. For me to look into the awe-filling fullness of life and pronounce the name “God” means a commitment of my life to reality-based living. That’s why I say, Reality is my God and integrity (living in right relationship with reality) is my religion.

I foresee the concept of a “personal God”, imagined as companionship with an unnatural entity, being replaced (for millions of people, but not everyone) by a reality-based view of God within a few generations, thanks in large part to the New Atheists. Despite how it appears in the Bible, reality does not have the deranged personality and character flaws of a Bronze Age warlord. Indeed, evidence suggests that reality has no character traits or personality at all, other than what we embody and/or project. God is a personification, not a person. This fundamental shift in the ‘root metaphor’ of the Abrahamic traditions will, I predict, be seen historically as one of the greatest theological transformation in millennia. This shift, and what follows naturally from it, will also go a long way toward reconciling science and religion. It will do this not by accommodating science to religion, but by naturalizing, REALizing, religion—upgrading our maps of reality. It opens the door for millions to think about God the way Einstein and Spinoza did, and to ponder “God ways” and “God’s guidance” via science rather than ancient texts. In the words of Frank Lloyd Wright, “I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.”