Dr. Freeman

One of the more significant contentions of Integral theory is that evolution is going somewhere, i.e. the 13 billion year process that led to the relatively recent emergence of the human species on this planet has a direction or teleology – what might be called a self-transcending current of increasing Eros/Love or successively higher levels of interior consciousness/exterior complexity. From the primordial chaos that followed the Big Bang, to the relatively rapid formation of stars and galaxies, to the stunning complexity and diversity of self-replicating life here on Earth, we are all part and parcel of this tremendous sweep of creative activity, a “creative advance into novelty” (Whitehead) that has become conscious of itself for the first time in humans and looks to all intents and purposes like it will eventually culminate with the self-realization of God, by whatever name…

Of course, the fanciful suggestion that there are purposes “other than” merely human purposes is widely held to be a useful fiction by philosophers of science like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. And so while this view that evolution is headed toward some kind of far-off Omega point where “God will be All in all” may well just be a useful hallucination, a motivational strategy to help one cope with the crippling lack of hope in the post-Enlightenment West, there is also a spiritual basis for skepticism and suspicion of this teleological view that sees the hand of God in the evolutionary trajectory from atoms to amoebas to humans…

For not only did two world wars and the atrocities of the 20th century decisively puncture the bubble of historical optimism, the very attempt to offer some sort of over-arching explanation for such evil by fitting it into some larger account of God’s Providential design in which such abysmal barbarity is but a necessary moment in an overall evolutionary trajectory, is an obscenity that defiles the very names of each of its victims, of each one, taken singly, one by one… There is something callous and inhuman in an evolutionary world-view that sees in “teleological” history a good news/bad news story in which the countless deaths were cost accounted as a good investment in the progress of the World Soul, the high but affordable toll the Spirit must pay for advancing from one historical epoch to the next.

As theologian Emmanuel Levinas denounced in the preface to “Totality and Infinity” teleological history is one in which many an innocent flower is tread on the way to the Promised Land, so we would do well not to project deeper and more sweeping patterns of redemptive meaning onto occurrences such as the Holocaust which are unambiguously evil. The death of 8 million Jews in the Final Solution is not a sacrifice in exchange for something higher, rather we may do well to turn to the New Testament and take heed of the innocent flowers, the tender shoots that are trampled under the boots of teleology and the secrets of the heart that are unknown to the “judgments of history”.

A more compassionate and inclusive perspective would be to oppose such teleological obscenities, which rear their ugly head today in the pyrotechnic vision of the Christian Right in the USA that gleefully anticipates how a thermo-nuclear war would wondrously fulfill Scripture’s promises of God’s final judgment and usher in the return of Christ, the Lord and Giver of life!

Instead of such world-historical triumphalism we might want to re-contextualize the innate capacity of the world-historical process “to go beyond what went before it” in an inexorable development from chaos to order and from darkness into the light. Such teleological views domesticate both the unspeakable horrors and the unexpected wonders of the world-historical process and falsely renders predictable and necessary an unforeseeable passage through accident, contingency and unpredictability that has no guarantee of a positive outcome and is likely to disrupt every overarching law of nature and pattern of history if it does… In other words, the ability of a thing to be reinvented and to surpass itself goes hand in hand with its vulnerability to destruction, which is all part and parcel of the beautiful risk of creation. To illustrate this point, I will end this with an often quoted passage on human origins from the Talmud

“Twenty six attempts preceded the present genesis, all of which were destined to fail. The world of man has arisen out of the chaotic heart of the preceding debris; he too is exposed to the risk of failure, and the return to nothing. ‘Let us hope it works’ exclaimed God as he created the world, and this hope, which has accompanied the subsequent history of the world and mankind, has emphasized right from the outset that this history is branded with the mark of radical uncertainty.” Talmud

This quote is cited by André Neher, “Visions du temps et l’histoire dans la culture juive,” Les Cultures et le temps , ed. by UNESCO, Introduction by Paul Ricoeur (Paris: Les presses de l’UNESCO, 1975), p. 179. This text is itself cited by Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 193-94, who is herself citing Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos, (Boulder: New Science Library, 1984), p. 313, whose translation (from the French) we are using.