Natural Law, Purpose, and Spiritual Evolution

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

  Natural law is the paradigm that classical jurists and philosophers in all world religions have declared is their premise for judging human responsibilities and rights.  In Islamic classical thought the concept of natural law, known as the Sunnat Allah or ways of the divine, requires respect for freedom of religion as the overarching principle, followed by respect for human life, human community, economic justice, political self-determination or freedom, gender equity, and freedom of speech.  These are interdependent in that no single such responsibility and right can be pursued effectively without all the others, which means that each must be designed and carried out in ways that best maximize the role of the other six.

  Yesterday evening, on January 29th, 2009, natural law was the subject of a panel at the University of Maryland sponsored by The Scholars Chair, founded and inspired by Khalil Shadeed, which is an Islamically originated discussion group in the Washington area for scholars of all the major religions to discuss fundamental issues in their respective religions.  See http://www.scholarschair.com  The title of this month’s panel was “Natural Law: The Role of Science and Religion,” at which I gave a short presentation entitled simply “Truth and Justice.”  The other two panelists were Imad ad Dean Ahmad, who is a professional astronomer and founder of the Libertarian think-tank, Minaret of Freedom, and Professor Fatima Jackson of the University of Maryland.

  Since all three of us agreed on essentially everything and were all Muslims, I insisted beforehand that the founder, Khalil Shadid, invite a leading theoretician who could rebut everything we said.  Sure enough, he invited Edward Hudgins, who earned a doctorate in philosophy from Catholic University and is the Executive Director of the ultra-libertarian, ultra-secularist Atlas Society, http://www.atlassociety.org.  This is commonly known as the “Center of Objectivism,” which is the philosophy originated by Ayn Rand in her two very influential books of a quarter century ago, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.  Perhaps it most active branch has long been The Objectivist Society in India.

  This philosophical movement is based on four principles, two of which are consistent with natural law, as classical Christian and Islamic scholars conceive of it, and two which violate this natural law.  The first one, which the panel supported with minor qualifications, is that “reason is the only means to discover how to survive, prosper, and flourish.”  We agreed to the extent that any interpretation of divine revelation that disagrees with natural law as arrived at through human reason must be rejected, though reason uninformed by divine guidance is unreliable.  The second we also supported, but also with qualifications, which is that “productive achievement is the measure of human greatness and the driving engine of human progress.  Here the qualification is the definition of “progress.” 

  The two principles of Objectivism with which we had major differences, beyond mere definition, are that “we are each ends in ourselves” and “freedom is the value that political systems should protect in every sphere of life.

  In the discussion, Hudgins admitted that justice comes prior to freedom, because freedom without justice is impossible.  Nevertheless, he insisted on the core principle of Objectivism, which is that, “It is no paradox that such individualism would produce a benevolent society.”  In this utopian view he disagrees with both social credit and the just third way.

  The issue that I emphasized in my talk and in an hour and a half of heated public discussion afterwards was the panels’ contention that every person has a purpose beyond oneself.  This is the opposite of the Objectivist premise that “we are each ends in ourselves.”  We concluded with Imad ad Dean’s statement that the burden of proof always lies on the skeptic to disprove a positive statement. 

  As the only lawyer there, I agreed with Imad ad Dean.  Nevertheless, I am not at all sure of this except as a debating point, and besides the answer depends on who starts an issue.  My statement was that every human being, as well as humanity as a community, exists with and because of a prior purpose, which science cannot know within its own circumscribed terms of reference.  Does the materialist carry the burden to prove the opposite, which, of course, is impossible, because the finite cannot disprove the infinite. 

  If we start with Edward Hudgins’ statement that “we are each ends in ourselves,”  do I have to disprove that?  Of course, I cannot do this within his terms of reference, because one cannot prove from scientific observation, other than strong circumstantial evidence, anything, namely, higher purpose, that can exist only outside a materialistic frame of reference. 

  Hudgins placed great emphasis on Darwin’s theory of evolution as excluding intelligent design.  This can easily be disproved mathematically on a purely secular basis, which would eliminate the entire philosophy of “might makes right” that nineteenth century colonialism and modern NeoConservatism have used to justify themselves.

    A much more interesting dimension of evolution, however, may be the spiritual, which, of course, the Objectivists would deny except by reducing the term spiritual to something entirely immanent rather than transcendent.  My contention was that recognition of higher orders of reality and of possible evolution at these levels would turn the argument of evolution against its secular implications and open up the entire basis of materialistic culture to philosophical critique.

  In fact, I do not subscribe to spiritual evolution, even though I once was attracted to Father Tailhard de Chardin’s enormously influential but later proscribed theories, based on his work as a paleontologist in Central Asia at mid-century.  But I never dismiss anything that cannot be proven one way or another merely because I do not believe in it.  For example, I do not believe that there is an infallible Hidden Imam, but I cannot dismiss the possibility, simply because I have no way of knowing this.  This makes me neither a Shi’a nor a Sunni, because they differ on whether or not this is a dogma of Islam as a religion.  I accept no dogmas on anything, especially on the nature of God, because my personal experience contradicts all religious dogmas of every religion.

  By way of challenging the materialistic concept of evolution on its own terms while supporting evolution on transcendent terms I introduced the concept of creation spirituality of Meister Eckhard, who succeeded Thomas Aquinas as head of the philosophy department at the new University of Paris.  Eckhard was condemned as a heretic by the Avignon Pope, which was a great honor in my opinion, for teaching that ultimate reality is beyond the Trinity, and that the Trinity amounts really only to the attributes of the divine essence, which is beyond quantity and beyond human comprehension.  His successor as the greatest Christian theologian of today, Hans Kung, has been similarly proscribed for teaching the same thing.  Both taught that reality is infinite and dynamic and cannot be frozen by any human dogma.

  The two most influential advocates of creation spirituality in the modern era are Paul Eidelberg and Rabbi Michael Lerner, who are, respectively, Orthodox and Reform Jews.  Eidelberg bases his teachings on the Torah as the Being of God in the world, similar to Jesus as the Logos.  In a enormous tome based primarily on quantum physics he refers to an ordinary table in one’s home, which appears to be solid but actually consists only of moving electrons.  He postulates that the very existence of energy as a higher reality teachs that energy itself may be a manifestation of something still higher, namely, God, whereby energy is merely the Will of God.  This combines both immanence and transcendence as a link between science and religion.

  Rabbi Lerner approaches this issue of God differently but with similar conclusions in his article, “A Jewish Renewal (Kabbalistic-Mystical-NeoHasidic) Approach to God,” which he sent to members of his Network of Spiritual Progressives on January 14, 2009, http://www.spiritualprogressives.org.

  He says that we have evolved beyond the era of the ancient world, which was full of religious systems that validated the mystery and wonder of the natural order, but saw the social world as part of this, including the inequality of social classes and wealth, and even assumed that human slavery and oppression was natural.  Spirituality consisted of adapting to the system and escaping from material reality into a higher realm.

  In contrast, he writes, “The Jewish people had a very different message: that the world could be fundamentally transformed.  Spirituality and morality were not features of some other reality apart from the world, but were inherent ingredients of this world, because the God who created the universe is also the God who brought morality into the world, and we embody God’s spirit by being made in the divine image.”  This doctrine that man is made in the image of God was emphasized specifically in the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, because it appears in various ways throughout the Qur’an.” 

  Rabbi Lerner says, “The Torah thus places transcendence on the agenda of the human race,” which, of course, is the purpose of all divine scriptures. He writes, “Transcendence does not mean rejecting the world, but rather our ability to bring more fully into being in this world aspects of ourselves and of reality that are already present in germ but which we need to nurture and develop within ourselves and each other. ... Much of the pain and oppression we experience in this world is a reflection of the way we do not recognize God in the world in one another and in ourselves.”

    Then his punchline: “Bringing God back into the world involves recognizing one another both for that which is unique about each of us but also for the way that each of us shares this common potential to partially embody God’s presence in the world,” which he calls “the energy that God manifests in each of us.”

  “God is the Force of healing and transformation,” writes Rabbi Lerner, “the force that makes it possible to break the tendency to pass on the pain and cruelty from generation to generation, the Force that makes possible the breaking of the repetition compulsion.”  He explains, “In every generation those who have heard the voice of God have also heard within themselves the voice of the inherited pain and cruelty, and not infrequently we, like all human beings, have attributed some of this cruelty to the voice of God.  As I explain in my book, Jewish Renewal, the compilers of the Torah were no exception - they were human beings who struggled to hear the voice of God, but they were simultaneously terrified to stay connected to the message of radical freedom that they heard.  They retreated at times into hearing the more familiar messages, one that seemed more congruent with their world of pain and oppression.  They adopted pictures of God as a big authoritarian man in heaven who was judging and angry.  It was too difficult for them to always stay connected to their radical insight that God was actually a force of goodness and love and healing.”

  Rabbi Lerner then goes into an extensive discussion of seven stages of religous evolution in human history, from the Archaic-Instinctual, to the Magical-Anamistic, to Feudal Power Gods, to an absolutist and hierarchical Righteous Order, to Individual and Objective Consciousness, to the Permeable Self of Communitarian and Sensitive Self-Consciousness, and finally to a higher level, not yet readily observable, of Integrative and Holistic Consciousness. 

  At this higher level we recognize that God, the Creator, and created sentient beings are engaged in a joint venture to create reality.  Instead of reality as a mechanistic meaningless accident, “we will begin to conceive of a universe whose every cell is a manifestation of spirit and is held together by the ultimate gravity of the universe, which is the gravity of God’s love.”

  He tries to explain, “At any given moment we are part of God and God is part of us, but we are not all that there is to God.  Nor is God simply the sum of all physically existing things in the infinite universe, though that is also part of God, just as a given moment of our conscious experience is a part of who we are at that moment, though not all of who we are at the moment and certainly not all of who we are in our totality.”

  Some Muslims mystics have explained this by referring to the ant crawling on the beautiful Persian carpet.  It may have a very limited concept of the beauty in the intricate designs, but it has no concept of the weaver of the carpet or of the artist who designed it.  The distinction of human beings is that our nature makes us aware not only of the beauty of creation but also of its Creator.  Rabbi Lerner says, “Just like the liver cell, we intuit and ‘know’ that we are part of some larger totality, that we are serving a purpose in the larger story.  But just like the liver cell, we have only a very limited vocabulary for describing what the larger story is, even though we ‘know it,’ can feel it in every ounce of our being, at least when we not deflected from knowing by certain poisons in our system.”

  Here Rabbi Lerner merges with Paul Eidelberger’s theories of transcendent physics when he writes, “When the mystics talk about God breathing us and the breath of God traveling through our every pore, we get a language that tries to say that there is no radical division between the dancer and the dance, between the inner and the outer, between that which is object and that which apprehends and categorizes the objects. ... The universe is pulsating with spiritual energy, and every ounce of Being is permeated with an extension of that spiritual energy.”

  Rabbi Lerner is careful to distinguish what he is saying from the Gaia theorists who say that the universe is conscious and that this consciousness is God and that we are nothing more than a part of God and, in effect, are God.  This would amount not only to panentheism, which says that God is in the universe, but pantheism, which says that God is the universe, and vice-versa, both of which forms of polytheism may be considered to be at the core of post-modernism and of any ultimate collapse of all civilization.

  “The Kabbalists,” writes, Rabbi Lerner, “talk of God contracting in order to create the space for human beings, so we might say that God’s contraction [through the creation of human free will] is a contraction of the consciousness pool in order to allow specific beings to embody that consciousness and to develop it toward self-consciousness, and then, eventually, toward consciousness of the totality.”

  Then Rabbi Lerner goes beyond the frontiers of thought, as did the radical Sufi, Al-Hallaj many centuries ago, to suggest that, “To see ourselves as being one of God’s forms of self-awareness is to see ourselves as having a responsibility and a task rather than as having a special status and entitlement - just as breath might imagine itself as having a special responsibility, as indispensable to human life, but not as therefore entitled to more than contributing to the well-being of the totality. ... To be human is both to be created in the image of God and to be in relationship with God.  And God is in relationship with human beings, needs human beings, cares about human beings and is in a process which is not yet completed and in which human beings have a partnership role.”

  Rabbi Lerner concludes with a forecast about the purposiveness of every human’s life beyond the Objectivist theory that “we are each ends in ourselves.”  He writes, “The future of the human race is deeply tied to this experience of the self-revelation of God to and through human life, and we can be sure that future generations will look back on our own level of awareness of God in the same way that we might look back upon those who used a patriarchal or power-over others model of the divine such as we might find [in the earlier stages of spiritual evolution].  In short, the birthing of the next stage in consciousness is a joint task - and it is one that faces each of us as a personal decision about how to lead our lives.”