The merger of Unitarianism and Universalism almost 50 years ago accelerated an identity struggle both denominations had been having for the last 100 years. The struggle for Unitarians began with applying reason to the Bible, seeing the humanity of Jesus through textual criticism and the recognizing potential nobility of the human spirit through the advance of science. The Universalists retained the Trinity but rejected irrational Calvinistic theology that permitted babies to be damned to hell because, before they were born, God had decided they were not among the saved. Both traditions rejected priestly authority to interpret scripture, reserving recognizing the truth to individual discernment.
Trying to find unity when people are permitted to discern truth for themselves can be quite difficult. Since we prefer to get along with each other, the natural tendency is to accommodate difference. Over that 100 years before merger, that accommodating tendency led both traditions to expand their concepts of Ultimate Reality beyond exclusive Christian truth claims and exclusive theistic truth claims. We know what we don’t all believe, what has been harder is to identify what we all do believe.
One of the truth claims that just about every Unitarian Universalist accepts is the process of evolution. The scientific evidence for evolution is overwhelming. There may be evidence of intelligence operating in the process of evolution but that evidence comes from intelligence inside the process, not outside the process. Genes that sense their environment and turn on or off may be able to pass that information to offspring but God isn’t twiddling the DNA strands to accomplish some grand design. Beautiful and wonderfully complex as living systems are to us, there are still plenty of tragic flaws that mar that beauty (as the aged know well).
We tend to think of evolution only in the context of random biological processes. Evolution may well be working in other places as well. Computer programmers are recognizing the most powerful way to get machines to think is to get them to learn by trial and error. Self-organizing computers use programmed goals, perceptual resources and actuators to take in information, act and compare the result to its goals. Just as a baby takes its first faltering steps, computers today are learning how to create their own feedback loops to control their actions. What researchers are seeing is cybernetic processes work the same for hardware as they do for “wetware.”
Evolution could also be driving social biological processes. One of the neglected aspects of evolution that Darwin first identified was group selection. The organizing ability of groups can trump the superior fitness of the individual to survive. This should be no surprise to us reflecting on the complex organization of our bodies. The similar principles of human organization also seem to be working at the cellular level. The intelligence of organizing may itself be its own force beyond energy and matter. Maybe it is the essence of spirit and spirituality.
Something happens when groups organize be it cells, neurons, or people. These organized groups develop emergent properties that no individual in the group manifests. At higher and higher levels of organization, greater properties emerge. When people organize together in a religious community and integrate awareness of these emergent phenomena back into the organizing process, amazing things can happen.
Bringing together evolutionary thinking with human systems that are widely inclusive but not bounded by what they include and open to emergence I believe is the future of Unitarian Universalism. This is an entirely new way to do religion that doesn’t fit with the old paradigms. It doesn’t promise us eternal security but it does allow us to find tremendous meaning by being a partner in the evolution of the Spirit of Life.
I’ll be speaking more about this October 7th.