Hieromonk Damascene and Wilber

An interesting post over at the Ken Wilber Forum regarding Wilber and evolutionary spirituality - it is from a book by Fr. Seraphim Rose called Genesis, Creation, and Early Man: The Orthodox Christian Vision, which Hieromonk Damascene edited and contributed an intro and epilogue to as well.

I think his view helps me to see the various takes on creation and evolution these days. On the one hand you have the orthodox creationists, another view is the naturalistic Neo-Darwinian (Gould, Flanagan) and then a third view is the synthetic spiritual evolution such as panentheism (Teilhard de Chardin, Marcus Borg, Wilber). Of course these are rough generalizations but it helps me to wrap my brain around the various perspectives. I definitely need to read over this chapter again.

While checking out other material by Damascene Christensen, I came across this interview and an interesting quote:

Even if Darwinistic evolution becomes outdated, there is still the danger, coming from those who do not believe in the Christian God, of a rejection of the purely Darwinian concept of evolution—that everything came from natural causes—and the embracing of a pseudo-spiritual evolution: the kind of spiritual evolution that we find in the Theosophy of Madame Blavatsky and Alice Bailey, the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, the Kaballah, the New Age movement, etc. According to this teaching of spiritual evolution, God is identified with the creation, and the creation is seen as evolving to Divinity. This is a heretical, pagan idea that could replace, in the minds of many, the purely Darwinian concept of evolution. Proponents of the New Age in America, such as Ken Wilber, say that “evolutionary spirituality” is the “cutting edge” of the new religious consciousness. This is the spirituality of Antichrist. In the epilogue to Fr. Seraphim’s book [Genesis, Creation, and Early Man] there is a lengthy discussion of how this evolutionary spirituality is deeply anti-Christian.

The Chapter posted by Chiron titled Hieromonk Damascene's Criticism of Ken Wilber:

A New Evolutionary Synthesis

Having discussed all these points of Teilhardism in our attempt to identify the metaphysical foundation of the "religion of the future," we should once more emphasize that Teilhard's ideas did not ultimately come from him. As Fr. Seraphim said, "There really is a 'spirit of the time' " --and Teilhard tapped into it.

When Teilhard died in 1955, the neo-Darwinist theory of evolutionary gradualism was nearing the peak of its prestige. The synthesis he devised between evolution and spirituality fit the intellectual milieu of his times. This is reflected in his idea of "psychic selection": a spiritualized view of neo-Darwinian natural selection.

But, as we have seen, the intellectual milieu has changed considerably since Teilhard's times. Now that the neo-Darwinist edifice has begun to crumble, a new synthesis of evolution and spirituality is emerging -- one that retains the metaphysical foundation laid down by Teilhardism but which takes into account the new developments.

One of the main architects of this new synthesis is the contemporary American writer Ken Wilber. As the most influential thinker in the movement known as Transpersonal Psychology, Wilber is now enjoying a growing vogue among spiritually oriented intellectuals. Both President Bill Clinton and Vice-President Al Gore have read his writings and publicly called attention to them. With sixteen books translated into over twenty languages, he is now the most translated academic author in the United States. We are not in a position to ascertain whether he will be a figure of continuing importance, as Teilhard de Chardin has been. What concerns us now is that he, at least as much as any other thinker now writing, seems to be on the cutting edge of the spirit of the time. [As a sign of this -- or rather as a result of it -- Ann Godoff, the current head of the largest publishing conglomerate in the world, Random House, has said: "There is no living writer I would rather publish more than Ken Wilber."]

Wilber does not attempt to be an original thinker. The task he has chosen for himself, he says, is to gather "orienting generalizations": that is, to take what he regards as the "best" from everything and everywhere, and organize it into one philosophical synthesis. In his work, one sees a confirmation of what Fr. Seraphim wrote two decades ago:

Quote:
A characteristic of modern currents of thought is "universalism" -- the attempt to make a synthesis that will include all "partial" views: Masonry: ecumenism, Hegelianism, Bahai, Unitarianism, unity of all religions. This is what "evolutionary" philosophy is -- a "universal" theory to explain everything, and to justify everything the way it is -- universal salvation, a cosmic view of everything entering into the universal harmony of things as they are.

Wilber, in drawing together his synthesis of everything (one of his most popular titles is called A Brief History of Everything), draws from the "wisdom traditions" (i.e., traditional religions and philosophies, East and West), from Western philosophers, and from modern psychologists and scientists; and at the same time he closely follows contemporary popular culture and fashions in order, as he says, "to spot the zeitgeist." Among his readers and colleagues he is respected for his apparent ability to integrate literally thousands of intellectual sources at once. For many, his aura of brilliance is intensified by the fact that he writes about having reached advanced levels of Tibetan Buddhist meditation and having had an experience of merging with the Transpersonal Absolute, which he calls (deliberately using a generalized term) "Spirit."

Although Wilber quotes from Teilhard de Chardin, uses some of his terminology, and offers praise for him, he cannot, strictly speaking, be called Teilhard's follower. Teilhard's writings represent only a small fraction of the thousands of sources which Wilber has integrated into his system. However, it is of deep significance that Wilber, as a transmitter of the core of modern philosophy, has come up with an integral vision of the spirit of the times; and it is, in all its major components, Teilhardian!

The framework of Wilber's synthesis of universal wisdom is the idea of Evolution within what he calls the "Great Nest of Being." He rightly observes: "If there is one idea that dominates the modern and postmodern mind at large, it is evolution." Like Teilhard, he is very much interested in science, having done graduate research in biochemistry until his interest in philosophy/spirituality caused him to redirect his energies. Like Teilhard also, he aims through his writings to help combine science and religion, and has recently written a book on the subject, The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion (1998) [this is the book in which President Clinton and Vice-President Gore have shown special interest]. He readily accepts the latest theories by which scientific materialism has attempted to explain the universe without God -- from a Big Bang of fifteen billion years ago to the evolution of man "from simple insentient and lifeless atoms" -- and then he endeavors to inject spirituality into these theories.

Wilber refers to his philosophy as "evolutionary panentheism." In his formulation, evolution is preceded by "involution": Spirit manifesting itself in the universe, and then forgetting that it is Spirit. He writes:

Quote:
Spirit manifests a universe by "throwing itself out" or "emptying itself" to create soul, which condenses into mind, which condenses into body, which condenses into matter, the densest form of all. Each of those levels is still a level of Spirit, but each is a reduced or "stepped down" version of Spirit. At the end of that process of involution, all of the higher dimensions are enfolded, as potential, in the lowest material realm. And once the material world blows into existence (with, say, the Big Bang), then the reverse process -- or evolution -- can occur, moving from matter to living bodies to symbolic minds to luminous souls to pure Spirit itself. In this development or evolutionary unfolding, each successive level does not jettison or deny the previous level, but rather includes or embraces it, just as atoms are included in molecules, which are included in cells, which are included in organisms. Each level is a whole that is also part of a larger whole. . . . In other words, each evolutionary unfolding transcends but includes its predecess(s), with Spirit transcending and including absolutely everything.

Wilber says that this spiritual view of evolution must replace the materialistic view, and notes that scientific materialism is now, ironically, paving the way for an "evolution beyond rationality." In a chilling inversion of Fr. Seraphism's prognosis, Wilber says that rationalism/materialism (which he calls the "flatland" mentality) is but a step in man's evolutionary development: a step away from old religious conceptions, so that man can arrive at a higher concept of the Divine. Thus, in Wilber's view, materialism provides a positive function, even thought it must pass away in order to make the way for the new religious consciousness.

Observing the widening fissures in the neo-Darwinist establishment which have appeared since Teilhard's death, Wilber correctly observes that the Darwinian theory of "evolution by natural selection ... can't explain macroevolution at all!" He writes:

Quote:
The standard, glib, neo-Darwinian explanation of natural selection -- absolutely nobody believes this anymore [Wilber is writing in the form of dialogue here, and so is speaking hyperbolically. In actual fact, there are many who still hold tenaciously to the standard neo-Darwinist explanation, in spite of the growing contingent of evolutionists who oppose it. The chief apologist of old-school neo-Darwinism is Richard Dawkins]. Evolution clearly operates in part by Darwinian natural selection, but this process simply selects those transformations that have already occurred by mechanisms that absolutely nobody understands.

He goes on to point out that random mutations "cannot even begin to explain" the production of a wing or an eye, and that there is "no evidence whatsoever of intermediate forms." But elsewhere, retaining the idea of the evolutionary process itself, Wilber says, "The orthodox scientific theory of evolution seems correct on the what of evolution, but it is profoundly reductionist and/or contradictory on the (and why) of evolution." As a panentheist, he sees the Spirit which has manifested as the cosmos (i.e., which is the cosmos) as the driving force behind evolution, and as evolution itself.

Quote:
Spirit is ... fully present at each and every stage as the evolutionary process itself: Spirit is the process of its own self-actualization and unfolding: its being is its own becoming; its Goal is the Path itself.

In step with current developments, Wilber infuses this impersonal "Spirit" into the "punctuated equilibrium" model of evolution that has been devised by the materlialist-evolutionists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Edgredge to account for the lack of intermediate forms in the fossil record. According to Wilber, Spirit manifests itself in new forms which come into existence not gradually (as in standard neo-Darwinism) but in "a huge leap, in a quantum-like fashion." He refers to this as "emergent evolution" and even as "creative emergence." Along with Teilhard, he speaks of the production of new organisms not as an effortless creative act by a transcendent God, but as a laborious process:

Quote:
Evolution is not a statistical accident -- it is a laboring toward Spirit, driven, not by happy-go-lucky chance, however comforting that notion is to those who deny reality to any level higher than insentient matter, but by Spirit itself.

In an introduction to the teachings of the Hindu evolutionist Sri Aurobindo, Wilber writes:

Quote:
As Aurobindo saw -- probably more clearly than anybody before or since -- the scientific account of evolution, which relies on nothing but frisky dirt, dynamic matter, and process systems (e.g., chaos theories, far-from-equilibrium dissipative structures, autopoiesis, etc.) cannot even begin to explain the extraordinary series of transformations that brought forth life from matter and mind from life, and that is destined to bring forth, in just the same way, higher mind and overmind and supermind: Spirit alone can account for the astonishment that is the glory of evolution.

Wilber acknowledges the fact that almost all premodern cultures viewed the history of the world not as an evolutionary unfolding from a lower state, but rather as a devolution from a higher state. "But," he writes,

Quote:
sometime in the modern era -- it is almost impossible to pinpoint exactly -- the idea of history as devolution (or a fall from God) was slowly replaced by the idea of history as evolution (or a growth toward God). We see it explicitly in Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854); Georg Hegel (1770-1831) propounded the doctrine with a genius rarely equaled; Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) made evolution a universal law; and his friend Charles Darwin (1809-1882) applied it to biology. We then find it appearing in Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), who gave perhaps its most accurate and most profound spiritual context, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), who made it famous in the West.

Suddenly, within a span of a mere century or so, serious minds were entertaining a notion that premodern cultures, for the most part, had never even once considered, namely that -- like all other living systems -- we humans are in the process of growing toward our own highest potential, and if that highest potential is God, then we are growing toward our own Godhead.

And, this extraordinary view continued, evolution in general is nothing but the growth and development toward that consummate potential, that summum bonum, that ens perfectimmus, that highest Ground and Goal of our own deepest nature. Evolution is simply Spirit-in-action, God in the making, and that making is destined to carry all of us straight to the Divine.

Like Teilhard, Wilber speaks of the "universal organism ... growing toward its own highest potentials, namely, the ever-unfolding realization and actualization of Spirit." But as a transpersonal psychologist, he also focuses on individual growth and evolution. Since we, like everything else in the cosmos, are manifestations of Spirit, as we further our evolution we merely remember that, after all, we are the very God -- I AM -- that has started the universe rolling:

Quote:
You are the Kosmos, literally. But you tend to understand this ultimate fact in increasing glimpses of the infinity that you are, and you realize exactly why you started this wonderful, horrible Game of Life. But it is absolutely not a cruel Game, not ultimately, because you, and you alone, instigated this Drama.... If we engage all the levels of our own potential ... won't that better help us to remember the Source of the great Game of Life, which is not other than our own deepest Self? If Spirit is the Ground and Goal of all of these levels, and if we are Spirit in truth, won't the wholehearted engagement of all of these levels help us remember who and what we really are?...

Now, echoing Nietzsche, Wilber calls our deepest Self our "Superman Self." In realizing that you are God, he says, "You will awaken to a world where the Kosmos is your soul, the clouds in your lungs, the rain-drops in the beat of your heart.... You will look at the moon as part of your body and bow to the sun as part of your heart, and all of it is just so."

In order to expedite this remembering, he recommends what he calls "integral practice" for all levels of our being, saying that we should "mix and match" physical and spiritual practices ranging from jogging to tantric sexuality to deity yoga to centering prayer to Advaita Vedanta to "Christian formless meditation."

The Minimum Requirements for Christians to be Accepted within the New Synthesis

In The Marriage of Sense and Soul, Wilber outlines the agenda that the world must follow in order to combine science with religion, as well as to establish a "universal theology" which all religions can embrace without losing their outward differences. He tells the mainstream scientific establishment that, in order to integrate with religion, modern science must renounce its allegiance to uncompromising materialism. Science must "do nothing more than expand from narrow empiricism (sensory experience only) to broad empiricism (direct experience in general)"; that is, it must also include psycho-spiritual experience.

Wilber then tells religion what it must do in order to fit within the broadest parameters of the new religio-scientific paradigm. First of all, he says, "Religions the world over will have to bracket their mythic beliefs," and he cites as examples Moses parting the Red Sea, Christ being born of a Virgin, and the creation occurring in six days. He concedes that proponents of a religion can keep any mythic beliefs they want, "as long as they do not expect any form of science or any other religion to acknowledge them":

Quote:
This does not mean that we will lose all religious differences and local color and fall into a uniform mush of homogenized New-Age spirituality.... Most religions will continue to offer sacraments, solace, and myths (and other translative or horizontal consolations), in addition to the genuinely transformative practices of vertical contemplation. None of that necessarily needs to change dramatically for any religion, although it will be set in a larger context that no longer demands that its myths be the only myths in the world.

The second change that Wilber says religion must make concerns its attitude toward evolution. "Religion will also have to adjust its attitude toward evolution in general"; he says, and "any religion that attempts to reject evolution seals its own fate in the modern world." By way of persuasion, he adds:

Quote:
To the extent religions bracket their mythic beliefs and focus on their esoteric core ... an acceptance of evolution is a modest adjustment indeed. In fact, Aurobindo has already brought Vedanta (and the entire sweep of Indian philosophy) into an evolutionary accord. Abraham Isaac Kook has already pointed out that "The theory of evolution accords with the secrets of Kabbalah better than any other theory." The great Idealists have already cleared the way for an evolutionary spirituality. And has not the Pope himself finally declared that "evolution is more than a hypothesis"?

A little later, Wilber brings out a notable exception to his concession that religions can keep their "myths" and still participate in the new synthesis:

Quote:
To the extent that a religion pledges allegiance to a mythic Eden in any actual sense, it will have insuperable difficulty participating in the integration of modern science and philosophy.

Lastly, he praises Teilhard de Chardin for helping Christians to overcome this insuperable obstacle:

Quote:
[Teilhard's] notion of the Omega point (of Christ consciousness) as a future attractor for present evolution -- a notion borrowed from Schelling and Hegel -- freed many Christians from the impossible mythic belief in a literal Garden of Eden and a morbid fixation (a Romantic death wish) to the long-deceased past.

The "God" of the New Synthesis

Applying his teachings on the evolution of consciousness to the political sphere, Wilber writes:

Quote:
Spiritual or transrational awareness is transliberal awareness, not preliberal awareness. It is not reactionary and regressive, it is evolutionary and progressive ("progressive" being one of the common terms for "liberal").

Thus, genuine spiritual experience (or spiritual Enlightenment) as it displays itself in the political arena is not prerational mythic belief ... but rather transrational awareness, which, building on the gains of liberal rationality and political liberalism, extends those freedoms from the political to the spiritual sphere.... The result, we might say, is a liberal Spirit, a liberal God, a liberal Goddess.

Echoing Teilhard, Wilber calls this liberal Spirit the "World Soul" and speaks in chiliastic terms about how science and spirituality will together open mankind up to the new God:

Quote:
And so there we stand now, at rationality, poised on the edge of transrational perception, a scientia visionis that is bringing here and there, but ever and ever more clearly, to all sorts of people in all sorts of places, powerful glimmers of a true Descent of the all-pervading World Soul.

All this, Wilber says, is bringing about a "worldcentric" awareness, based in "universal pluralism":

Quote:
And we are seeing signs of this new, integral understanding across the board -- in psychology, philosophy, business, economics....

At the end of this process lies what Wilber, borrowing terminology from Teilhard and other writers, calls "the centauric evolutionary epoch," "the integration of the noosphere and biosphere, the supranational organization of planetary consciousness."

Of course, Wilber's "liberal God" of the emerging global religious consciousness is just the kind of "vague idea" that Fr. Seraphim says makes one susceptible to demonic influence. In the context of the vague religious feeling that characterizes the new religious consciousness, this "God" may seem like a Creator of sorts. A clear theological evaluation, however, reveals this concept of deity as a revival of pagan ideas which are far removed from the true Creator-God of the Bible, the Holy Fathers, and Orthodox Christianity.

Ken Wilber himself affirms that his idea of "creative emergence," by which he attempts to combine spirituality with the recent evolutionary concept of "punctuated" evolution, is rooted in ancient pagan philosophy. It was given its most detailed expression in neo-Platonism, which issued the last major challenge of pagan philosophy to Christian theology at the dawn of Orthodox Christian civilization in the fourth century A.D. [Wilber claims that Plotinus (A.D. 205-270), the main thinker of the neo-Platonic school, was "arguably the greatest philosopher-mystic the world has ever known" (The Marriage of Sense and Soul, p. 19. He sees the Indian philosopher Nagarjuna (second-third century A.D.), who taught that Absolute Emptiness manifests itself as all form, as Plotinus' contemporary counterpart in the East (Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, pp. 638-69, 692-97).] In one form or another, it has been found in virtually every strain of false mysticism (theosophy, kabbalah, etc.) since that time. It is perhaps the highest idea that humanly devised metaphysics can arrive at when the fallen mind of man is not submitted to -- and raised up by -- Divinely revealed theology.

According to the pagan philosophical notion, the deity does not create ex nihilo in the classical Christian sense, but rather diffuses or emanates itself onto creation. Forms and beings appear suddenly, but this is an "emergence" out of an impersonal Godhead rather than a creation by a Personal God Who is in essence wholly "other" than His creation.

As against the pagan view, the Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky elucidates the true meaning of creation according to the Scriptural-Patristic Christian doctrine:

Quote:
Creation ex nihilo does mean just such an act of producing something which is "outside of God" -- the production of an entirely new subject, with no origin of any kind either in the Divine Nature or in any matter or potentially of being external to God. We might say that by creation ex nihilo God "makes room" for something which is wholly outside of Himself; that, indeed, He sets up the "outside" or nothingness alongside His plenitude. The result is a subject which is entirely "other," infinitely removed from Him, "not by place but by nature," as it is expressed by St. John Damascene [St. Gregory Palamas writes that "every created nature is far removed from and completely foreign to the Divine Nature" (The Philokalia, vol. 4, p. 382), even though God creates and sustains the creation through His Divine grace (energies).]

The creation is not a kind of spreading out or infinite diffusion of the Godhead.... "The Good diffusing itself by itself" of neo-Platonism is not the God of St. Paul, Who "calleth those things which be not as though they were" (Rom. 4:17).

According to the neo-Platonic idea, since Absolute Being is ultimately impersonal, it has no Personal will. Therefore, the production of beings cannot be an act of free will, but is rather a natural diffusion that occurs by virtue of some necessity of the Divine Nature. In other words, it is the nature of the Godhead to diffuse itself into the realm of form and appearance; there is no "choice" involved.

In the Christian revelation, on the other hand, since God is Personal, he creates by a free act of will, Vladimir Lossky writes:

Quote:
The creation is a work of will and not of nature.... In the act of creation God was under no necessity of any kind whatever. There is, in fact, nothing in the Divine Nature which could be the necessary cause of the production of creatures: creation might just as well not exist. God could equally well not have created; creation is a free act of His will, and this free act is the sole foundation of the existence of all beings....

Creation, which is thus a free act of the will, and not (like the shining forth of the Divine energies) a natural outpouring, is an act proper to a God Who is Personal, to the Trinity Whose common will belongs to the Divine Nature.

In the Orthodox Christian vision, then, God creates not out of necessity but out of love. He loves us, His creatures who are in essence external to Him, and He wishes us to meet Him in a personal relationship of love, so that we may participate in Him through His grace. Vladimir Lossky writes that, in the Christian vision,

Quote:
the created universe is thus not seen, as in Platonic or Platonizing thought, under the pale and attenuated aspect of a poor replica of the Godhead; rather it appears as an entirely new being, as creation fresh from the hands of the God of Genesis "Who saw that it was good," a created universe willed by God and the joy of His Wisdom, "a harmonious ordinance," "a marvellously composed hymn to the power of the Almighty," as St. Gregory of Nyssa says.

Thus, the impersonal God of the pagan (and neo-pagan) conception is shown to be vastly "weaker" than the God of Orthodox Christianity. It cannot volitionally create ex nihilo in the true sense, but can only of necessity manifest forms out of its own nature.

While this view of "God" and "creation" is indeed nothing new, we have seen how it has been given a new evolutioanry frameowrk in modern times by thinkers like Teilhard and Wilber. In Wilber's words, the ancient pagan teaching of a series of diffusions of the Divine Nature has now been "temporalized" by the modern theory of evolution.

The pagan idea of "creative emergence" appears to fill in all the gaping holes which exist in the currently competing models of naturalistic evolution. Integrated with the "punctuated equilibrium" model devised by atheist/agnostic evolutionists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Edgredge, it provides a vague "Spirit" to explain both the lack of intermediate forms and the lack of a purely naturalistic mechanism of evolution. Once the evolutionist admits a vague concept of deity, the idea that Wilber has synthesized makes absolute sense, fitting in perfectly with the evolutionary framework of billions of years of earth history. According to this view, God has "emerged" into the world over billions of years in successively higher forms. It is still evolution -- as Wilber affirms at every turn -- but it is far removed form the old naturalistic paradigm.

It is interesting to note that Stephen Jay Gould is a Marxist, and has himself commented on the connection between his "punctuated equilibrium" theory of evolutionary leaps and the Marxist idea of social evolution through successive, rapid changes (revolution). This connection sheds further light on Fr. Seraphim's prediction that spirituality will be added to communism to form the religion of the future.

In discussing the "God" of the new religio-scientific synthesis, we should comment here on an apparent contradiction in Fr. Seraphim's prognosis. In one place Fr. Seraphim says that the new God will be that of the deism of Freemasonry and the Enlightenment, and elsewhere he says that Teilhard is the predecessor of the New Religion -- and Teilhard, as we have shown, was a panentheist.

Upon close examination, however, the difference between deism and panentheism is seen to be more one of degree than of substance. In his Survival Course, Fr. Seraphim pointed out that, "in terms of religion, deism was perhaps the most typical movement" of the Enlightenment, but at the same time the deistic philosophers of that time replaced God with "Nature" as their central concept, and some called God "the soul of the world." Fr. Seraphim described the Enlightenment ideal as follows: "Nature ruling over everything, the mysteries of Nature being discovered, God still being in His heaven although not doing very much, and scientific knowledge progressing over the whole world." The Enlightenment thinkers were fully in the tradition of modern science, which arose during the Renaissance out of a kind of "natural mysticism" -- and even, as in the case of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), out of the marriage of science and total pantheism.

In his book The Making of the Modern Mind, J. H. Randall, Jr., writes that, in the Enlightenment, the ideal of the Natural was "that which men wanted to realize themselves; and it easily passed over into the Divine. Nature was God's model for man; nay, it was the very face of God himself." In this way, Enlightenment deism passed over not into pure pantheism, but into a kind of deism/panentheism. Enlightenment thinkers kept their impersonal deistic God "in heaven, not doing much,," but their religious interest became directed toward the "face" of God which they identified with impersonal Nature.

If Teilhard de Chardin is indeed the prophet of the future combination of science and religion, then for the most part this combination will be not purely pantheistic, but rather deistic/panentheistic. It will be remembered that Fr. Seraphim called the famous evolutionary scientist Theodosius Dobzhansky a "deist" after reading Dobzhansky's "theological" statements -- and Dobhzaansky was an admirer of the panentheist Teilhard de Chardin.

But it is a secondary point just how far the future combination of science and religion will go on the scale from deism to pure pantheism. The main point is that, unlike the scientific materialism of today, the religio-scientific synthesis of tomorrow will have a "God," and it will not be He Whom Teilhard disparagingly called "the Father-God of two thousand years ago." It's "God" will be vague, and it will not be Personal.

The same can be said of the "Christ" of the New Religion. Already we can see within the mainstream culture a concerted effort to reinterpret Christ so that He is no longer threatening to the fallen human nature and to the devil -- so that He is no longer a Saviour.

If, according to the neo-pagan view, both we ourselves and Christ (together with everything else) are but diffusions of the Divine Nature, then there is nothing for Christ to do but guide us back to gnosis of what we already are. This idea, of course, is precisely the idea that is now being promoted under the guise of being the authentic, esoteric teaching of Christ. In actual fact, it is but a revival of the ancient gnostic heresy, based on pagan philosophy, that was rightly condemned by the early Fathers.

Ken Wilber speaks of the teachings which are being "rediscovered" in the gnostic texts:

Quote:
It is obvious from these texts that Jesus' primary religious activity was to incarnate in and as his followers, in the manner, not of the only historical Son of God (a monstrous notion), but of a true Spiritual Guide helping all to become sons and daughters of God.... Elaine Pagels points out that there are three essential strands to the esoteric message of Christ, as revealed in the Gnostic Gospels: (1) "Self-knowledge is knowledge of God; the [highest] self and the divine are identical." (2) "The 'living Jesus' of these texts speaks of illusion and enlightenment, not of sin and repentance." (3) "Jesus is presented not as Lord but as spiritual guide." Let us simply note that those are precisely tenets of Dharmakaya religion.

Here is a clear example of the denatured Christianity of which we spoke earlier. Christ is seen as a vague concept of ultimate Good, the belief in Him as the only begotten Son of God is rejected as a monstrous notion, and the idea is put forth that we ourselves can be just like Him. This is a crucial element in the "religion of the future," for by it the Antichrist will actually be convinced that he is another incarnate Son of God.

In an outward way, the imitator of Christ will appear as a kind of saviour, solving man's economic and political problems and offering to satisfy his spiritual aspirations through what Fr. Seraphim called a "melting pot" of science and world religions. On a deeper level, however, the real saviour will be seen as evolution itself, moving forward in a natural development of this world into the Kingdom of God. The last great deceiver, who in the end will pretend to be Christ, will be seen as but another magnificent product of evolution.

Rose, Fr. Seraphim (2000). Genesis, Creation, and Early Man: The Orthodox Christian Vision. Platina: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2000, pp. 557-567.

Comments

[John]

Hi, Im from Melbourne. I no nobody appreciates him much but these 2 related essays provide a unique understanding of "creation" stories and how the process of human evolution really works.
1. www.dabase.net/creamyth.htm

Also check out The Divine Physics of Evolution by the same author.