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The award-winning author of Christ in Evolution and The Emergent Christ breaks new ground with this capstone in a trilogy that opens our eyes to the everywhere active, all powerful, all intelligent Love that guides and directs our new awareness of interrelatedness and interbeing.
She writes: We all have a part to play in this unfolding Love; we are wholes within wholes; persons within persons; religions within religions. We are one body and we seek one mind and heart so that the whole may become more whole, more personal and unified in love. This is our Christian vocation, to live in the Christ who is rising up from the ashes of death to become for us the God of the future.
- Sales Rank: #99685 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-04-15
- Released on: 2013-04-15
- Format: Kindle eBook
About the Author
Ilia Delio, OSF, a Franciscan Sister of Washington, DC, holds the Josephine C. Connelly Endowed Chair in Theology at Villanova University. A native of Newark, NJ, she earned doctorates in pharmacology from the New Jersey Medical School/School of Biomedical Sciences and in historical theology from Fordham University, NY, and is the recipient of a notable Templeton Course in Science and Religion award. Delio is the author of seventeen books including The Unbearable Wholeness of Being and Making All Things New and she lectures internationally on topics including evolution, artificial intelligence, consciousness, and religion.
Most helpful customer reviews
61 of 67 people found the following review helpful.
Ode to an Unborn and Unbearable God
By James Gerofsky
I'm giving Unbearable Wholeness of Being 3 stars instead of the usual 5 because I'm approaching this work from the perspective of someone quite different than the typical reader. I can understand how the work of Dr. Ilia Delio, OSF, would be attractive to thoughtful Roman Catholics who remain loyal to their church, yet long for its reconciliation with the modern world; who await a renewal of the brilliant but short-lived “window opening” spirit of the Vatican II era. I myself am not a member of the Church, and although I share a concern for a viable theology for the 21st Century, I am approaching this work from a different spiritual and personal perspective.
I was given this book by a Catholic friend who appreciates my interest in the intersections between theology, spirituality and modern scientific knowledge. About 35 years ago I took a college course in process theology and have some familiarity with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Catholic priest and paleontologist whose writings in the 1920's, 30's and 40's sought to reformulate Catholic theology and Christology within the context of a universe undergoing a grand evolutionary process wherein God is not a distant watchmaker, but an integral part (THE integral part) of evolution itself. I.e. , God is changing and emerging in time, as evidenced by cosmic and biological evolution. This evolving God moves across history towards “Point Omega”, a teleological equivalent of Jesus's “Kingdom of God”. Obviously this is a departure from standard Scholastic theology and Nicene Christology, and got Fr. Teilhard censured by Rome. However, his works finally found their way into print and into Catholic university circles during the reforms of the late 50s and 60s .
Since 2000, Teilhard's visions have enjoyed something of a comeback, fueled by recent works from theologian and biographer Ursula King. Dr. Delio continues this revival in Unbearable Wholeness; her work is basically an updated Teilhard de Chardin fitted into a digitalized, interconnected techno world. The question is, just how good and useful is this fit? From my own perspective, it leaves various gaps and disconnects despite its undoubtable good intentions.
Dr. Delio cogently argues that Catholic theological ideas conceived in the Middle Ages worked well over centuries of relatively little change in how we viewed the cosmos. Over the past 300 years, however, scientific knowledge has accumulated at an accelerating pace, causing radical changes in how the universe is understood relative to the age of Bonaventure and Aquinas. Science now offers the world a broad and increasingly sophisticated view of reality, in light of which classic scholastic theology no longer seems credible. If Catholicism and Christianity are to remain relevant, something's gotta give.
It's wonderful that Catholics are now having this conversation; however, it's a bit disheartening that the proposed vehicle to bring Church theologies back to life is Teilhard de Chardin, given his outdated understanding of the bio-evolution concept. Teilhard did most of his science before WW2, well before DNA was discovered and understood, before computers allowed modeling of chaotic and complex processes with their strange attractors and tipping-point events. Teilhard's “evolution” was a fuzzier, more generic notion than exists in the minds and textbooks of scientists today. Richard Dawkins gives a much better account of what bio-evolution is than Teilhard's “Phenomenon of Man”. And, as Dawkins is anxious to point out, many of the implications of modern evolution do not fit well with a benign transcendent power, neither as divine author nor loving co-creator in process.
It's sort of like finding a precious cargo perched on a medieval donkey cart deep in the woods, and trying to bring it back to civilization by loading it onto a Model T Ford. In an era of gravity waves, Higgs fields, fractals, superstrings, black hole information paradoxes, holographic spacetime, et al, something more capable will be needed. (And if I knew what that was, you would be reviewing my own book right now!)
An inherent problem with most process theologies and especially Teilhard's relates to the age-old paradox between immanence and transcendence, a contradiction that arises in any serious God-talk. If God is in process, tending towards some more perfect state through evolution, is God really God then? Or is that perfection towards which God is emerging really the TRUE God? Or is “evolution” itself the real God? Teilhard's evolution-based theology is ultimately confusing and inconsistent. Immanence dilutes transcendence; a God too much like us would be unable to get us beyond ourselves. And yet, pure transcendence gives us a remote, unsympathetic God, probably uninterested in helping. This will need to be carefully considered in any proposed “theology for the future”.
I also felt that the “problem of pain” and the related problem of absurd emptiness, problems inherent to any attempt to reconcile God with man and cosmos, were not adequately dealt with by Dr. Delio. If there is an ultimate evolutionary tendency towards love and “more being” in the universe, do we see any evidence of it in human history (given that humans are the only known entity that might care about what “love” and “more being” mean)? Do we see actual examples of love conquering evil in the long haul? Do they amount to an undeniable trend over centuries and millennium and ages? And can we really contend that the human race is the ultimate point of the universe, and the midwife for the birthing of its God?
The universe is a vast thing existing over a huge timescale; the human race is but a tiny phenomenon occurring in an instantaneous fraction of its history. And our prospects for the future are uncertain; we could be the progenitors of a new form of intelligent life that will eventually spread throughout the universe [see Dyson, O'Neill,Tipler]; or we could be gone in a few hundred years. Humankind would birth the God that will lead us to Point Omega?? Some might find that hard to swallow, even amongst the faithful.
Dr. Delio certainly understands theology and Teilhard de Chardin quite well, but some of her descriptions of modern scientific concepts seem a bit shaky. E.g., on page 26, she refers to the EPR experiment regarding quantum particle entanglement, and she says that it focused upon “a quantum particle split in half . . .” However, by definition, a quantum entity cannot be divided. The experiment itself could more accurately be described as generating pairs of quantum particles from the same energy event, thus entangling their behaviors in a nonlocal fashion.
Another error occurs on page 24, where she says that matter is created in alpha and beta decay reactions in the atomic nucleus. I imagine Delio means that a reaction converting bosonic energy into mass transpires; such reactions are known to physics. But the alpha decay process, intermediated by the strong and electromagnetic forces, and beta decay, by the weak force, do not represent such events. Also, on page 53 she says regarding the process of species adaptation via DNA mutations (which is at the core of the modern understanding of evolution) that genes “have more of an eye on the species than on the individual”. Obviously she is arguing against Dawkins and his “Selfish Gene”. But my Robert Sapolsky 101 says that although natural selection sometimes promotes limited altruism, the main driver of the selection process is the enhanced reproductive ability of the individual (and, to a lesser degree, enhancing the reproduction opportunity of those sharing one's own genetics, i.e. immediate family).
Another irony is her approving citation of Dr. Anthony Damasio's popular book on human consciousness, “Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain”. Both Damasio and Dr. Delio give Descartes a bad rap for his cogito ergo sum. They both assume that Descartes argued that the brain's intellectual capacities are superior to its emotive faculties. And they both argue (Damasio with the benefit of his professional training and research as a neuroscientist) that emotions are just as important to our conscious being, Descartes notwithstanding.
This is a popular mis-reading of what the cogito was concerned with, i.e. the epistemological grounding of conscious being (any being at all, actually). Descartes was not concerned with splitting the mind between the logical and the emotional, despite the popular translation of his work as “I THINK therefore I am”. Any conscious awareness, no matter how intellectually refined or how emotionally entrenched, qualifies according to what Descartes actually intended.
Thus, in order to satisfy pop-psychology's discontent with the notion that critical reasoning represents humankind at its best, Dr. Delio recruits an ally whose works on consciousness ultimately limit it to the physical and material processes known to science. I.e., consciousness “just is” a lot of neurons and brain chemicals and electrical charges running around obeying strictly deterministic laws . . . a notion that is used by atheists to argue against a personal God (although there are atheist philosophers who challenge physicalist explanations in favor of a more dualistic view, e.g. David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel). And she works with this ally to defeat a philosopher who was trying to develop (however ineffectively, by modern standards) an argument in favor of a God who cares about us. You never know who your friends are, Doctor Delio.
Actually, this pseudo-dichotomy between thinking and feeling provides a clue on how to understand this book. At first I had trouble unpacking much of the writing, searching for an idea to take away. Here's a little taste of what I mean: “The return to self is the core of the gospel and Christianity's role in evolution, the law of love by which every person can be made whole in love”. Or, “Religion brings to light the transcendent nature of the cosmos, the excess of love that lures the whole into more love and a new future”. Or “every being stretches towards its own self-expression, its longing to love as it is loved, reaching out towards more being and more love”. It finally struck me – this is the language of myth and poetry. In many ways, a very beautiful poetry. That IS “the takeaway”.
Dr. Delio offers many cogent and valid criticisms of modern life and where our technology is leading. I appreciated her critique of the sunny forecasts of Ray Kurzweil regarding “the Singularity” and Transhumanism, i.e. when we start merging with and evolving into our machines. Delio well describes the paradoxical loneliness created by our hyper-connectivity, e.g. texting and social networking. There appears to be an opportunity for religion to stand up and defend some of the basic ideas that make being human a desirable experience, despite all the pain and uncertainty.
But not withstanding Dr. Delio's wonderful theological poetry in the spirit of Teilhard de Chardin, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being does not leave me with new hope for a divine and beneficent entity within a seemingly meaningless universe having a tiny array of “bright matter” islands shaped by invisible icebergs of dark matter, floating in an ever cooling void driven to unending expansion by a mysterious dark energy, heading inevitably towards an ultimate dark stillness . . . i.e., your basic LamdaCDM universe.
[But then again, some cosmologists say that even after our dark-energy driven universe achieves its eternal heat death state, quantum uncertainty will remain . . . and across an eternity, even the most unlikely fluctuation will eventually occur, such that in an absurd flash, a new realm of energy and space will emerge from the vacuum – and in some tiny fraction of those, matter, life and consciousness could arise -- although no guarantee that it won't be a Boltzmann-brain consciousness. So, you would-be successors to Teilhard de Chardin, get cracking on that!]
38 of 41 people found the following review helpful.
The most important book ever written in the English language
By Paul Ludwick
In The Unbearable Wholeness of Being, Ilio Delio places the reader precisely in the present moment in evolution. She guides one through the histories of philosophy and scientific exploration by explaining primary concepts from the writings of key thinkers in ways that are relatively easy to understand. She does it in a way that shows how it is possible for religion and science each to bookmark the present place of humankind in evolution. Both wondrous and cautionary, this book should be next on the reading list for every person who shares the belief that some day when science and religion both get it right they will converge.
27 of 28 people found the following review helpful.
Kindle edition of The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love
By Mary Hess
Well written book with a wonderful analysis of how to think about God in this day and age. If you are a fan of Pierre Teilhard De Chardin it is a must read. She uses many of his writings and ideas to bring us into the 21st century with our spirituality. Sister Ilia is brilliant, but writes her thoughts so all can understand. She changed the way I pray.
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