Teleological Consciousness as the Ground of Religious Growth

Abstract

Erez Ashkenazi

This essay explains why religiosity - as a way of seeing the world and as an institutional form - arises systematically from the structure of human consciousness. The starting point is simple: we are vividly aware of our willing, we are far less aware of the causal chains that produce it. From this asymmetry springs teleology: a bias to ask “what is this for” rather than “how did this come to be” when teleology becomes shared, it condenses into norms and then into religious institutions. The claim is not polemical, religion here is described as a frame that amplifies, stabilizes, and formats antecedent tendencies - an amplifier, not a generator - and therefore changes when conditions change. In this way we preserve the principle of sufficient reason without collapsing meaning into a void.

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