Overview of Developmental Perspectives from
Honest to God: Christianity at the Convergence of Tradition, Reason, and Mystery
by John Speers

For Panel Discussion: Religious Experience and Human Development
Hosted by the Institute of Advanced Theology and the Interdisciplinary Study of Religions at Bard
Monday, September 11, 2023, 12:00 PM

Honest to God is my personal attempt to sort out the conflict between the traditional Christian worldview and the scientific worldview that emerged in the Modern period. This conflict rages on today in our culture wars. Making sense of this crisis has been an important part of my own spiritual journey. In my view, the crisis is not simply a matter of conflicting ideas about which propositions are true or false but a clash of different ways of using our brains for such decisions. These differences are rooted in developmental issues at both the individual and collective (cultural/evolutionary) levels.

Drawing on the Triune Brain theory of Paul McClean, the work of many other theorists as synthesized particularly by Ken Wilber, and my own experience, I propose that the clash is between what I refer to as social intelligence and rational intelligence.

 Social intelligence consists of the instincts, emotions, and thinking abilities that enable us to live in communities. These include instincts of dominance and submission, loyalty, commitment, competition and cooperation, affection, fairness, compassion, revenge, and the abilities to interpret and respond to the behaviors of others. These instincts, emotions, and thought processes determine how our social groups cohere and function, including who leads and who follows. Rational intelligence, on the other hand, is the capacity to think abstractly and critically, as in basic problem solving, mathematics, science, philosophy, and self-reflection. Social intelligence resides primarily in the limbic system (paleomammalian brain) and especially in the amygdale. Rational intelligence resides primarily in the neocortex. (49)

Social intelligence is the seat of subjectivity; rational intelligence is the seat of objectivity.

While our social instincts are quite active from birth, we must learn to read and write and to use critical reason in a disciplined way. Thus, we are hard wired for social life at a deeper level than we are wired for rational consciousness. (To use a computer analogy, social intelligence is preloaded in our ROM while rational intelligence must be programmed into our RAM.) Our default way of making sense of things is to model them in terms of human social relationships. We resort to our rational intelligence only secondarily. It takes disciplined reason and careful scientific thinking to really see beyond our natural, socially oriented, anthropomorphic way of structuring our understanding of reality. (49-50)

Pre-scientific human cultures naturally anthropomorphized the world around them. Using their innate social intelligence, they attributed human-like motivations, emotions, and thought processes to other animals and to the unseen forces (nature, spirits, gods) that they believed affected their lives. This was a very subjective way of making sense of the objective world because it projected our human feelings and motivations onto everything else. During the modern period we have learned to use our rational intelligence to better distinguish the objective and subjective dimensions of our experience. It is important to extend this differentiation to our religious understanding. (50)

It is crucial to understand that the balance of how we use these types of intelligence changes for us as individuals over the course of our life journey. We can think of our vehicle as having a series of gears, with the lowest gear being pure social intelligence and each subsequent gear adding more and more rational intelligence until reason provides as much thrust and then even more thrust than social intelligence. As babies we start out in first gear—all social intelligence. As our brains develop through childhood and into adolescence, we shift up through the gears to use more and more reason. If we are exposed to formal education, we can shift faster and farther. The important word here is can. As we move up toward the higher gears, the shifting becomes increasingly optional as education and disciplined thinking become increasingly a matter of opportunity, effort, and choice. (51)

It is also crucial to realize that the quality of a society will vary according to how many of the spiritual vehicles (bodies and brains) that make up that society are running in which gears of consciousness. We can think of these different qualities of society as the traffic patterns we traverse on our spiritual journey. Societies where people run mostly on social intelligence will be driven by instincts of group cohesion and of dominance and submission. These will tend to be tribal and nation-state societies unified by a shared mythology and ruled by forceful leaders or aristocracies. As more members of a society shift up into more rational gears, there is a shift from myth to science with a tendency toward egalitarianism (democracy) and the rule of principle (law). (51)

In developmental stage theory there are a variety of names for these stages. I follow Ken Wilber in referring to them as pre-rational and rational. There is additionally a transrational stage in which mystery is recognized beyond what reason can fully understand.

Religion is in crisis today because its prerational, mythic worldviews have slammed into the rational scientific worldviews that emerged in Modernity. Resolving the crisis requires reconciling myth and science, traditional belief and reason. I suggest that such reconciliation requires a shift from supernatural theism to evolutionary panentheism and a shift in locating religious authority from tradition to spiritual experience. Religion must recognize its myths to be myths that are not literally true, but rational perspectives also must recognize the deep intelligence and truth expressed in prerational myth. Myth is the language of social intelligence. It is a language that speaks—not in direct, logical propositions—but indirectly through metaphor and stories of relationship and often with deep insight and wisdom.

The overarching developmental task in moving from prerational through rational to transrational is the differentiation of the subjective (social) and objective (rational) dimensions of cognition and their harmonious reintegration. This development happens first at the individual level and eventually finds social expression in institutions and the broader culture.

The table below aligns cognitive development as described above with two lines of Christian religious development, one broadly historical and theological and the other mystical. Each line of development consists of two earlier stages leading to a transitional crisis that resolves into the final stage.