What is God Today? God as the Power of Evolution

Ilia Delio, in this fourth video of our seven-part series on “What is God Today?”, explores God As The Power of Evolution: “Whether or not you want to accept evolution, you are in evolution. There is something deeper that is driving us, and I think at the heart of it, the best name I can give is that mysterious name we call God.”

+

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
by Jennifer Wallace

What is evolution? How might we experience it in our own lives?
Here, a lot of my own thoughts are inspired by the Jesuit, Pierre Teihard de Chardin, who brilliantly reflected on evolution and faith. Evolution is a process of increasing complexification and with that complexification we see there is a rise in consciousness. He calls this the “Law of Complexity Consciousness.” And we become more and more aware and that rise of consciousness eventually comes into an awareness of transcendence, awareness of divinity.

By complexification, Teilhard meant that the degrees of relationality increase: single cells don’t remain single cells, they join up with other cells. They become prokaroytes then eukaryotes, then multicellular. And then, before you know it, we have little earthworms and little babies and then big baboons and then we have humans. What we see from the point of evolution, life seeks more life. And where life is constrained or thwarted, when the conditions are not optimal
for life, nature will find ways to seek more life.

Now we come into religion and nature and we say, “Oh, that’s what religion is about–seeking that ultimate fulfillment of life. Our old religions no longer satisfy us. They don’t satisfy out deep need for longing, for desire, for that center within us. They don’t speak the language. They don’t have the paradigms that can help motivate us to be in love in a more deep and soulful way.

God is the power of evolution. Our world has rapidly evolved with technology. So, whether or not you want to accept evolution, you are in evolution. There’s something deeper that’s driving us and I think at the heart of it, the best name I can give is that mysterious name that we call God. God is that absolute horizon of infinite being in love.