In my early adulthood I believed in a Creator God and that godless evolution was impossible. As my Christian faith began to wane, I took a fresh look at the theory of evolution. I was becoming open to other perspectives, beginning with other Christian perspectives.
I looked into Evolution and the Catholic Church.
Pope Pius XII's encyclical of 1950, Humani generis, was the first encyclical to specifically refer to evolution and took up a neutral position…
The current position of the Catholic Church minimizes the conflict between religion and science.
On October 27, 2014, Pope Francis issued a statement at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences that "Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation," warning against thinking of God's act of creation as "God [being] a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything."
The Pope also expressed in the same statement the view that scientific explanations such as the Big Bang and evolution in fact require God's creation…
I do not remember when I first became aware of the BioLogos website. I like its tone and its spirit. Unlike the fundamentalist Christian nationalists who support MAGA, BioLogos Christians seem to be the kind of people that I could get along with.
What is Evolutionary Creation?
God is the creator and sustainer of all things, and evolution is the best scientific explanation for the relatedness of life on Earth.
As a very interesting aside, BioLogos was founded by Francis Collins, better know as Tony Fauci’s boss.
On June 6, 2017, President Donald Trump announced his selection of Collins to continue to serve as the NIH Director.
To the best of my knowledge, Francis Collins was the only Obama appointee to serve for the whole of the Trump Administration.
In my essay About a Story, I noted that the word story is used 298 times in the book First Principles and First Value. The word evolution is used 153 times. The story of evolution has grown considerably since it was first conceived by Charles Darwin.
This positions us to revisit the considerations about conscious evolution raised in the Introduction. CosmoErotic Humanism hinges on the fact that humans have become conscious of ourselves as personally implicated in the evolutionary story.
I will come back to First Principles and First Value but first I want to add other territory that I have explored.
I read and wrote a book report on THE EVOLUTIONARY MANIFESTO: Our Role in the Future Evolution of Life by John Stewart. I wrote, In my opinion, it is one of the better grand narratives that I have discovered. And I wrote, the work of John Stewart is worth paying attention to, but I have not found the time to do so, although I have visited the CONSCIOUS EVOLUTION - The new evolutionary paradigm website a few times.
I have also tried to follow the work of David Sloan Wilson and The Evolution Institute, but I lack the time to go deep.
A third initiative that I have some awareness of is the Institute for Cultural Evolution led by Steve McIntosh.
The point I want to make is that the theme of conscious evolution is a big story that is currently growing in popularity and, fortunately, a hyperobject that no one person or organization can capture.
First Principles and First Value, to which I will now return, is building on the work of many other contributors.
We realize we have the capacity, for the first time in history, to see the narrative arc of the evolutionary story, from matter to life to mind. We realize that we are this evolutionary story in personal form. We realize that it is an unfinished story. We realize that it falls to us to write the next chapter in the story.
The story of cosmic evolution begins with the Big Bang.
Contemporary science presents an image of cosmological evolution that can be read according to several deep-time epochs, each marked by an abrupt discontinuity in the structure of reality itself.
The claim of this book is that…
To see what evolution yearns for, what it desires, and what it values, we need only identify the trajectories of evolution, the plotlines that give it meaning.
Proposition 14 - The Plotlines of the Cosmos Become Self-Aware in the Human, Creating the Conditions for Conscious Evolution
A key point of the book is that…
CosmoErotic Humanism suggests that the evolution of love is the evolution of intimacy, which means that we begin to recognize ever-wider and ever-deeper levels of shared identity, with ever widening circles of humanity and circles of life itself.
On the basis of the evolution of our level of consciousness, we naturally begin to realize that there are sacred values worth dying for and corrupt values that do not deserve our sacrifice.
Unlike a postmodern view, the newly emerging metamodern view is not neutral on values.
Reality is constituted by the evolution of relationships.
That has a nice ring to it.
But the book comes with a warning.
Transformation Is Not Inevitable in the Anthropocene: From Crisis to Crossing
Human choice could cause evolution at the cultural level to devolve or even fail outright.
Ending this tiny taste of First Principles and First Value on the dark note of possible failure, my next essay on this book will be About Death.