The humanity is destined to reach its perfection.

Teleology and religion. The evolution of humanity towards its perfection

Nowadays, the scientists do not dare to admit they are teleologists because it is something they can not demonstrate. In any case, there is nothing in place of that, and the place remains empty.” Cl. Bernard

Teleology:   (C18: from New Latin teleologia, from Greek telos end + -logy)  (Philosophy)  1. The doctrine that there is evidence of purpose or design in the universe, and esp. that this provides proof of the existence of a Designer  2. The belief that certain phenomena are best explained in terms of purpose rather than cause  (Biology) the belief that natural phenomena have a predetermined purpose and are not determined by mechanical laws 

God or emptiness ? Sense or meaninglessness ?

Here are 3 theories:
1/ The world is submitted to a creative principle (god). This one is aware of its work and its purpose. In this case, human evolution takes place as it has to take place to affect this predetermined purpose.
2/ The world has no creative principle. The creation happens by chance and the human evolution has no sense except the one that we want to give it.
3/ There is a creative principle but it has no predetermined purpose to the universe which it created and the creatures which result from it. In that case, the man would have all the leisure to build his own destiny.

God and meaning

You certainly already understood that on this website we agree with the first theory. According to us, the world is the result of a creative principle, aware of its destiny; and its creatures cannot escape this destiny.

From this point, we shall think about the sense of humanity and about the reasons which guides the man towards such a destiny.

God and the religion

The questioning about the fate of humanity is not new.

The efforts to solve this enigma occupy for a long time the spirit of philosophy. These efforts met their highest level with Emmanuel Kant and the philosophy of Enlightenments and then with George Wilhelm Friedrich

The religion at the origin

However, the first one to give a universal answer to the question of the sense of the humanity, are the religions.

Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism

One of the first propositions, finalist and positivist, of the meaning of humanity is given to us, and certainly for the first time, by the Judaism. Definitely, for this religion, the humanity will come true with the arrival of the Messiah: When the messiah will come, the authenticity of the Torah and the existence of God will universally be recognized, and from this universal acceptance, will shine the light of the truth, the justice, the tolerance and the peace on the whole world.

This "positivism", planning the happy end of time, goes on and grows rich quite naturally with the Christianity and the Islam through the image of Apocalypse (the ultimate victory of powers of "good" on the powers of "evil" and the final institution of the kingdom of God on earth, in other words, the institution of the realm of the love, because God is love).

The concept of human progress towards the perfection is also found in Asian spiritualities but under another approach.
Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism envisage the universe and the creation "in a cyclic way (it was also the faith of the ancient Greece). A golden age declines towards the chaos then restarts towards a golden age...

The vision is different but the principle has the same sense.

In fact, concerning these spiritualities, if the human evolution is included in a kind of eternal resumption from the golden age to the chaos and from the chaos to the golden age, it is definitely the golden age (in other words, the perfection), that acts as ideal to be reached.

At least, linear or circular, for all the big spiritualities of the world, humanity evolves towards a point of perfection.

From religion to philosophy

From metaphor to science.

Quand l'eau courbe un bâton, ma raison le redresse : la raison décide en maîtresse. La Fontaine

If the reason of the world was the ruler, the world peace would already be our reality. But it is not the case. Instincts, drives, blind will, are still very often at the controls of our evolution.

However, beyond the human reality, the religions have already thought of our destiny in terms of peace, equality, brotherhood and universality. At the end of time, the lamb will lie down beside the lion and the young children will play in the nest of the cobra. (Isaiah 11: 6). In other words, the man will not be any more a wolf for another man, the abuse of the dominant on the dominated will end, and the whole of humans will finally have carried out their unity.

However, if most of intuitive religious (from any religion) discovered the big enigma of this world, the metaphoric nature of their explanations lost some influence as the scientific pragmatism emerged.

The spiritual intuitions consequently demanded, in a certain way, to be enlightened with the light of the reason and of the science.

The philosophy arose from this necessity. The wish to explain rationally the mythological intuitions is at the origin of the philosopher. The intention to rationalize the irrational and the spiritual is at the origin of the philosophic work.

From the Milesians to the Epicureans, the Greek philosophers wanted to explain rationally the cosmogony, the mythology and the mystic experiences (Plato, the Banquet, for example).

In the same way, until the 18th century, the Jewish, Christian and Moslem philosophers enlightened the metaphors of the sacred books. They tried then to explain God in an ontological way, which is by starting from God himself.

From the Age of Enlightenment, the big philosophers changed their point of departure. To prove the existence of God, certain philosophers like Kant and later Hegel, decided to start from material phenomena, from phenomenal world and not any more from God himself.

By enlightening the world until the limits of the knowable realities, these thinkers aimed at bringing to light what was beyond... The material put itself in the service of the immaterial, the physics in the service of the metaphysics.
Among these last philosophers, some of them like Kant and Hegel really offered their life to the question of the historic destiny of the man.

Towards the big point of convergence

Helped by their phenomenal intelligence, their logical and intuitive capacities and the scientific discoveries of their time, these geniuses succeeded in demonstrating in a most rational possible way, the sense of humanity.

Their conclusions are identical to those of the religions: the humanity evolves towards a positive and spiritual realization. It is only the choice of the words to denote this purpose that is different.

Therefore, any teleological reflection aims at establishing a link between the world of the phenomena (the universe such as it appears to us) and the principle at the origin of this universe.
It is also the purpose followed by our philosophy.
We aim at discovering the connection between the visible matter and the immaterial form of this one (waves or invisible elementary particles). To simplify, it is basically a question of making the connection between the creative principle and its creation, between god and its creatures... In other words, every philosopher of the history, every metaphysician, aims at proving the unprovable: the existence of god.

Millions of thinkers and mystic (very often in the biggest exaltation) worked until exhaustion on this mission of Don Quixote, without ever succeeding in resolving it.

MU, The mécanique universelle

From the beginning, the work on the “MU” joined in the philosophy of history.
Starting from the first intuition: "humanity is destined to reach its perfection", we try to demonstrate, and most concretely possible, that there is a meaning in the human evolution, an attraction of this one towards a precise purpose.
According to us indeed, our evolution (nevertheless sometimes chaotic and declining), guides inexorably the man towards the accomplishment of its ideal values. In other words, we evolve gradually towards charity, brotherhood, world peace, equality, etc...

But let us not deceive ourselves. The key of the world will not be given to us. The ultimate secrets of the universe will not offer themselves to us, after having remained unsolved to the biggest thinkers and mystics. We shall not show irrefutable, no concrete proofs of god's presence nor of the sense of the humanity.

Our effort, as the previous ones, will guide us at least at feet of the inaccessible tops of the real world, in front of the heavy door of the authentic enigma. We just hope to be able to provide some new arguments to the teleological and religious conceptions.

We just would like to suggest other relevant elements at the idea of the sense and the idea of god.

The quest of the divine

The spontaneous life and the questioning life.

From the moment we put the head up to the sky, or we look into the origin of the matter, into its constitution, from the moment we realize the height and the power of the enigmas of this world, the nihilism retracts, it shows to be a simple failure of reflection. Believe on the contrary becomes an evidence.

I think there are two general ways to consider the existence.

The first one asks questions on the creation, and the second does not question and contents with living.

Neither of the two is superior to the other one. Both are necessary to build this world.

Asking oneself questions permits to develop the human consciousness, but it very often means to lose the sense of the common realities.

Not questioning permits to concentrate one’s existence on the concrete things of the life. It certainly permits a better adaptation to the world, therefore a better efficiency in the construction of the humanity.

If we ask no question on the creation, we can express then superficially the idea according to which god or his equivalent does not exist, the idea that the world, like the humanity, does not make sense... But as soon as we wonder seriously about the world, we meet fatally the presence of a creative principle.
In the case of the natural primates, most of the actions are controlled by the instinct. Living without a superior objective and without consciousness of the sense perturbs then not at all their life or that of the group.

It is not any more the case of the aware humanity.

Nowadays, the human drivings are not supervised any more by the laws of nature, but by those of the culture, God's idea and the values which it conveys (like the principles that bring sense to the life), are fundamental for our psychic health and to avoid absurd drivings.

Between the idea that life has a sense and the idea which it does not have any one, the humanity, in its majority, chose the first idea because it tries to improve (therefore it tries to aim at a superior purpose, and that makes sense) and to understand (and that is the opposite of the fate).

At least, until the science succeeds in giving us the certainty which there is, or which there is no divine existence at the origin of the creation, the anguished and curious human mind will persist in resolving this powerful source of anxiety.

The interest of the philosophy

The philosophy, ideal intermediary between the religious and the scientific fields, seems to be the actor the most involved in the rational study of what the divine can be. At least, it is what it makes since its origin, in two ways:

Some philosophers (Saint Anselm, Boece, Descartes and Spinoza) considered God a priori and this way, tried to demonstrate that he is necessary. It is the ontological proof.

Others looked for God a posteriori, by establishing the limits of the phenomenal world beyond which is situated something unknown and enough intriguing to be considered as the divine... This way of proceeding could be called "phenomenological proof ".

Kant is certainly the first one to have separated the phenomenological world (the reality such as we perceive it) from the metaphysical world (God, the hereafter, such as we conceive them).

Let us not be mistaken about Kant and about the phenomenology. His first motivation is not material but spiritual. He does not aim at explaining us the visible mechanisms of the phenomenal world, but at marking the limits of the territory beyond of which is situated the enigmatic.

The enigmatic, in other words: "the divine" (even if this divine is called empty space, or nothingness, like in the Asian cultures).

God reveals himself through the flesh,

not through the mind

By choosing God or the phenomenal world as point of departure to explain god, has no big importance.

None of these ways are able of becoming clearer this mystery. The divine is unattainable by the mind and by the scientific experiment.

It only reveals its fullness through the sensation, through the personal, intimate and silent experience. And even if the man succeeds one day, as we think he will, in demonstrating that “HE IS” (“I am the one who is”, says the Bible about this matter), neither the philosophy nor the science will succeed in reporting its authentic reality.

Only the one in raptures, the blissful one, the bright one, whether he feels this way through the faith (touched by grace), by chance (through an experience of imminent death, for example) or by the will (ascetic, monk, Sufis), is able to understand the real qualities of what we call the divine.

In any case, all the descriptions of the unknown (god, empty space, substance, the being, etc.) made by all our predecessors, I mean Judaism, Christianity or Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism or Taoism, I mean Plato, Plotin, Saint Augustine or Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Bergson or Michel Henry, become clear and obvious,

To the one who felt the delights of the rapture, all the relevance of the sacred texts offered by the Judaism, the Christianity, the Islam, the Hinduism or the Buddhism, is quite obvious.

Therefore, all the explanations of God meets themselves in front of two unbridgeable limits: the impossibility of the words to equate with the sensation of the rapture they are supposed to describe, and the colossal difficulty for an individual, to understand what is the mystic awakening without having lived it.

This difficulty also includes a sort of impossibility to establish the formal and inexorable proof of a "something” that concerns our intimacy above all, the flesh about which Michel Henry talks.

Let us repeat it again:

Our claim here is of the most modest.

We do not claim to prove God here, just like it was an elementary calculation, we just would like to bring more bricks on a building begun for a long time. We would like to give evidence in a thoughtful way, a new stone on the old ford built by the man to come always more closer to its big mystery.

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