Spirituality and evolution both make claims, in their way, to embrace all of life. But can they co-habit? Apparently so, according to more than one of the speakers in our Bible and Spirituality lecture series. Mark Vernon argued that evolution might have explanatory power in relation to human beings’ ‘higher flourishing’. And a similar line was taken by Ursula King in the preceding lecture on 1 December 2011. Professor King showed that ‘spirituality’ (though variously defined) represented a self-aware life that aspired beyond the merely bodily and material, and that such awareness characterized all human societies. Humans were therefore united in such aspirations, which were not limited to the individual’s life, but embraced all human endeavour, including science, technology, the arts and the human relationship with nature. The ‘deep spiritual oneness of the human species’, beyond culture and history, called for a ‘world-ethic’ (Küng) aimed at overcoming divisions among humans. This last had come to the fore in recent times in a new ‘earth-consciousness’.
This unity, she argued, was inseparable from an evolutionary account of reality. She pointed in particular to the work of Teilhard de Chardin, and his belief in the evolutionary progress towards greater human unity, or as she put it: ‘the rise of the noosphere, taking shape in a globally interdependent web of interaction and interthinking, a global human sphere that covers the entire planet and includes a spiritual membrane of extraordinary strength and energies.’ The spiritual challenges facing the world demand further human evolution in order fulfil the human dream of a flourishing, life-loving humanity, capable of sharing equally and unselfishly in the world’s resources.
It is a strikingly positive take on evolution in relation to a spiritual or religious account of the world. Others take the rather different view that evolution has great explanatory power in the realm of biology, but is highly dangerous when it becomes an explanation of reality in general. I don’t think we have heard the end of this in our series, and I look forward to seeing how it plays out from here.
Ursula King’s latest book is Teilhard de Chardin and Eastern Religions: Spirituality and Mysticism in an Evolutionary World (Mahwah: NJ, Paulist Press, 2011). Among her other books may be mentioned The Search for Spirituality: our Global Quest for Meaning and Fulfilment (Canterbury Press, 2009).
Gordon McConville
Theoglos 