At worst, religion eschews evolution; at best, religion is ambiguous toward evolution. In either case, neither position is tenable if in fact evolution is the dynamic of life and the universe.
Though not every aspect of evolution is known or can be known, the fact of evolution cannot be denied without doing violence to our personal self-reality. Vatican II formally accepts the reality of evolution and calls for ongoing “analysis and synthesis” so as to come to a more valid understanding of interpersonal relationships and their theological implications. [The Second Vatican Council, Const. IV, “Gaudium et spes”, Intro,, #5]
The literal interpretation of the Genesis Story of Creation supposes the denial of evolution, for the acceptance of evolution implies, in creationist thinking, the denial of place for divinity in creation.
The so-called “culture wars” root also in conflicts between creationist and evolutionary thinking. Evolution and Creationism represent two extremes of belief inside the social spectrum of cultural consciousness. The factual basis of evolutionary consciousness “inside the cultural spectrum” is itself illuminating to consciousness and the causes of eco-social undoing.
Cultural disconnection from evolutionary consciousness is at the root of cultural ignorance, arrogance, and disrespect toward nature and each other. Corporate exploitation, feudal predation, and wars for social supremacy and resource control are enabled by ignorance, arrogance, obsession, greed and violence. The cumulative destruction of these anti-social tendencies now put cultural civility and natural environments at mortal risk.
A shift away from cultural degradation cannot happen by the habituated cultural misdirection of consciousness that now prevails. The mistaken presumptions of culture that deny the relational sensitivity and evolutionary dependency of all life will continue to advance the same disconnections and degradations that now confront us.
Religion and politics are equally misinformed in cultural inauthenticity. The two, religionists and politicians, position themselves against each other and aggravate the despair of cultures. Both need to reconsider their priorities and change to accommodate a holistic rationality that alone might rescue humanity from the perils of its own making.
A science-based consideration of the dynamics of cultural evolution, religious and civil, might give us a “green” and vitalizing sense of life and consciousness, if we are ready to take evolution seriously.
How is religion, culture, “GREEN”?
G is for GOD, Intelligent Design, Who/ what consciousness experiences and recognizes as the Provident, purposeful Personality/ Rationality in Creation.
R is for RELIGION, the consciously mindful human insight (religere, faith), and the divine bonding of necessity (religare, reason) that gives inherency and coherency to the Vital Continuum of purposeful Intelligence.
E is for ECOLOGY, the means of vital provision, the “house”, the network domain of life built of and by light energy (electromagnetism). The living complexes of eco-social environments sustain diversification, the conscious continuum from which humankind obtains.
E is for EDUCATION: consciousness derives from within life’s network domain; it is a subtle energy complex and process that is transmitted from generation to generation, and which enlightens humanity to divine sense and expands in consciousness the self-originating potentials of learning, teaching and prevision.
N is for NATURE/ NURTURE: Nature is about ecological balance; Nurture is about learning and teaching the sustaining lessons of ecology, of reciprocity — intentional symbiosis. Self-reflective consciousness is in-tensional and intentional. The deep wave/ particle bonding and transformation of cosmic substances, is internally tensioned (ex opere operato) and intentionally motivated (ex opere operantis); internal tension is in the nature of strong force bonding, as in the atomic nucleus, and intentional motivation is force-dependent, as the weaker bonding (nurture) of electrons.