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Does
the Emergence of
“Everything”
Include God?
December
3, 2005: Schumann Pavilion Sabbath School. What is the relationship between mind and matter?
Is there purpose in nature? If
anything, to what does the word “God” properly refer?
In The
Emergence of Everything: How
the World Became Complex (Oxford University Press, 2002), Harold J.
Morowitz, a biologist and philosopher at George Mason University, offers
new answers to these old questions. Without
always naming them, he pays respect to the ways Francis Bacon (1561-1626),
Rene Descartes (1596-1650), and Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677) dealt with
them at the dawn of modernity. He
then moves beyond their proposals in provocative and often persuasive
ways. The result is one form
of process thought that can be compared with others.
Mind and Matter. In
the seventeenth century, Rene Descartes, the father of modern philosophy,
posited two irreducibly different substances.
What he called “extended substance” we call “matter” and
what he called “thinking substance” we call “mind.”
Among other things, the history of philosophy from Descartes to the
present can be read as a series of attempts conceptually and empirically
to bridge the chasm Descartes dug between them.
Three primary alternatives emerged.
One of these, which is evident in views such as occasionalism and
parallelism, continued with Descartes’ dualism and proposed various ways
that mind and matter interact despite their fundamental difference.
A second alternative, which is available in Hegel’s idealism, was
to make mind primary and matter derivative.
A third option, which can be seen in Marx’s materialism, was to
make matter primary and mind derivative.
Despite their other differences, all three alternatives fell short
of completely bridging Descartes’ gap.
Morowitz inherits this three-fold legacy, combines
it with evolutionary thought and computer science and proposes a theory of
emergence in which mind gradually arises from matter.
He outlines this process by identifying and describing twenty-eight
of the innumerable stages in the history of the universe, from the Big
Bang to the present. Each
stage arises out of the previous ones, comprises a novel synthesis that is
greater than the sum of its parts, and then influences what takes place at
the previous levels through downward causation.
Contrary to most initial impressions, Morowitz’s
theory is not irrelevant or worse to those who reject evolutionary theory
in favor of some form of short-chronology creationism.
Such creationists can agree with him that life is now arranged in a
series of stages, that each stage is closely related to but greater than
those below it and that the higher stages exert downward causation on the
lower ones. Replacing Morowitz’s horizontal view that the stages of life
move from the past to the present, they can adopt a vertical account that
sees the entire ecological order coming into being much like it now is in
a brief period of time. That
higher stages over long periods of time arise
from lower ones is the one thing that short-chronology creationists
must reject.
Morowitz begins with the least complex things and
traces their development over time to the most complex.
Alfred North Whitehead, who offered another form of process
thought, arrived at somewhat similar conclusions by reasoning in the
opposite direction. In harmony
with what he called “the reformed subjectivist principle,” he began
with ourselves, the most complex organisms that we presently know, and
reasoned backward over time to the least complex.
Claiming that it is impossible for us to doubt that we are both
mental and material, he postulated that, because Descartes’ dualism is
mistaken for other reasons, something decreasingly akin to mind must have
been present all the way back to he subatomic particles and whatever was
behind them. Morowitz reasons
from past, or bottom, to top, or present, whereas Whitehead reasons from
present, or top, to past, or bottom.
Whiteheadians and emergence theorists sometimes
chide each other today for being “closet dualists.”
The Whiteheadians contend that the emergence of mind from nothing
but matter leaves important gaps unless we posit something akin to mind
all the way back. Those in the
emergence camp contend that the Whiteheadian view leaves significant gaps
between unconscious and conscious mental states and that it makes no
scientific sense to posit anything akin to mind in things further back
than single cells. These are
lovers’ quarrels, however; each camp can claim with justification that
it comes as close as necessary to bridging Descartes’gap.
After all, leaving some small gaps, bridges in real life usually
are not absolutely solid from end to end.
Nature and Purpose.
Aristotle held that the world of nature exhibits directionality, a
movement toward a goal, a tendency toward a final cause.
In this context, the expression “final cause” does not refer to
the last in a long series of causes. It
applies instead to the target at which living things aim.
Such organisms do not act randomly, Aristotle held; they act so as
to protect themselves, to promote their own wellbeing and to procreate as
profusely as possible.
Francis Bacon, the father of modern science, had
little use for final causes. “Research
into final causes,” he famously wrote, “like a virgin dedicated to
God, is barren and produces nothing.”
He expelled final causation from scientific inquiry with such
success that today his views on this matter amount to an unquestionable
dogma. To suggest that nature
is teleological, that it is oriented toward some goal, is no longer merely
impermissible; much like belching at a banquet, it is impolite.
Morowitz’s treatment of this issue is more
diffident than is his discussion of dualism.
He does not assert that nature is teleological; he does not even
offer extensive critiques of the doctrine that it isn’t.
His entire scheme of emergence, with its 28 most significant steps,
certainly implies that nature is directional, however.
So does his doctrine of God. Most
importantly, Morowitz invites the scientific and philosophical communities
to suspend complete judgment about this and to cultivate the virtue of
epistemological humility.
Morowitz suggests that there has been a tendency
“to assert without much reflection that each emergence is the result of
a frozen accident.” Holding
that directionality in nature “may become an empirical question that
therefore should not be answered a
priori,” he argues that “an overly generous use of the concept of
“frozen accident” can have an anti-intellectual thrust.” (65
It is possible to respond with mixed reactions to
these concerns. On the one
hand, when even Richard Dawkins can begin a book by writing that many
people wrongly believe that nature is designed for a purpose because it
actually looks that way, perhaps we should not be too dismissive of
teleological thinking. This is
one reason why many Whiteheadian process thinkers are reintroducing the
idea. On the other hand,
we are like dots on a long line that do not have the ability to know for
certain whether it is progressively going any where.
Those who hold that nature is directional can easily be confronted
with evidence of disorder and randomness.
Likewise, those who hold that nature is not teleological can easily
be shown patterns of regularity and directionality that appear to be more
than the consequences of mere chance.
Either way, one must make an inferential leap beyond—but not
necessarily against—the immediately available empirical evidence.
Why not suspend judgment completely?
Because over the long haul and for most people the realities of
human nature do not permit such ongoing agnosticism.
Human beings are irreducibly religious.
Only some people all of the time and all people some of the time
can live with no practical convictions, tentative though they may be,
about the purpose of their lives as this relates to the life of the
universe. The human religious
impulse, the human craving for comprehensive meaning, is not only
omnipresent, it is very intense: more
intense than the human desires for sex, money, power, and fame combined.
This is why those who have attempted to stamp it out have failed
even though they have used brutal methods that have slaughtered millions.
In harmony with this view of human nature,
Scripture does not ask us if there is a god; it implores us to decide
which of the many gods that compete for our trust and loyalty will be the
center of our lives. The only
way to answer this question responsibly is to participate in one or more
appropriate communities of faith, agreeing where one can, disagreeing
where one must, hoping always to interact in ways that will heal rather
than hurt.
God and Universe.
Morowitz’s theory accounts for the emergence of everything
including God. He proposes that God does not yet exist but that God will
exist in the future. Therefore,
if we agree with him, we should not say “At the beginning God” but
rather “At the end God,” as Donna Carlson Reeves has indicated.
Unlike Spinoza, the first modern theologian, who set the terms for
all subsequent discussion by contending that God and the universe are
identical, Morowitz does not equate the two as now fully actual.
Because Morowitz frequently cites Spinoza’s views approvingly,
this is somewhat surprising.
Morowitz is not entirely alone in his idea that
God does not yet exist but is in the process of coming into being.
In Mind and Emergence:
From Quantum to Consciousness (Oxford University Press, 2004),
Philip Clayton, an accomplished philosopher of science and religion at
Claremont, reminds us that the contemporary German theologian Wolfhart
Pannenberg asserted early in his career that “it is necessary to say
that, in a restricted but important sense, God does not yet exist.”
Pannenberg, who visited Loma Linda in those years at the invitation
of Dalton Baldwin, depicted God as “the power of the future.”
Perhaps Dalton Baldwin can tell us whether on this issue the views
of Morowitz and Pannenberg represent a substantive or merely a semantic
difference. In any case,
Clayton also reminds us of “the more radical view of the Romantic
philosopher Friedrich W. J. Schelling, who argued in his famous Essay
on Freedom (Freiheitsschrift)
that God was at one time merely potential and only gradually becomes
actual over the course of history.”
Space, Time
and Deity,
Samuel Alexander’s Gifford Lectures for 1916-1918, appears to be
Clayton’s favorite example of this line of thought.
“Alexander’s metaphysic,” Clayton writes, “endorses a God
who is in the process of coming to be:
at one time there was no God, and now—to put it strangely—there
is only partly God. No
spiritual force set up the process in advance; instead [the emergence of]
deity is radically dependent on the world.”
“Alexander accepts,” Clayton continues, “one might say, a
verbal notion of God: the
deity ‘deisms’ (his verb); and these ‘deisings’ or ‘enjoyments
of the God’ are things that the world does.
The world is the subject
of these actions; it does them;
but what the world does is to
deify itself.” [Emphasis in
original] According to
Alexander, God is not creating the universe; the universe is creating God.
Although Morowitz often sounds like the early
Pannenberg, Schelling and Alexander, he sometimes strikes a different
note. This occurs when he
refers to God in connection with the laws of nature.
Such references appear to create a problem for Morowitz’s account
of emergence, however. The
laws of nature could not have been effective in the past, as they surely
were, as evidenced by the fact that we are here, if they are what God is
and God does not yet exist. Morowitz
has apparently painted himself into a conceptual corner. If the laws of
nature are God, God cannot come into being only in the future; if God
comes to be only in the future, God cannot be equated with the laws of
nature. Morowitz’s account
of the emergence of God is invalid because it is incoherent.
This negative judgment is too swift and severe,
however. We can argue on the
basis of what he writes that when Morowitz equates God with the laws of
nature he means God as immanent. Likewise, we can contend on the basis of
his remarks that when Morowitz says that God does not yet exist he means
God’s as the transcendent integration and harmonious reconciliation of
our minds and everything else. His
concept of God is not incoherent at this point after all, even though it
may still have other problems.
Once again, Morowitz’s approach appears to be
one form of process thought that differs from the kind that we find in
Alfred North Whitehead and his followers.
Whitehead’s alternative holds that, in the sense that Horowitz
uses the terms, the universe is not emerging from God and God is not
emerging from the universe. Instead, both God and the universe participate
in an everlasting process—past, present and future—of mutual creation
In this process of mutual creation, what Whitehead
calls God’s primordial nature is everlastingly transcendent.
It envisions every possibility as an eternal object of divine
thought and ranked desire. It
also makes pertinent to each developing occurrence a specific ideal which
the developing occurrence can more or less accept.
In this way, God participates in each occurrence’s formation as a
positive influence that often evokes genuine novelty without solely
determining what the occurrence makes of itself.
What Whitehead calls God’s consequent nature is
everlastingly immanent as well. This
aspect of God makes it possible for God to prehend—to appropriate or to
take in—the outcome of every occurrence’s partial but real
self-determination and respond accordingly with another specific ideal
possibility. In these ways, God everlastingly contributes to the
experiential development of the universe and the universe everlastingly
contributes to the experiential development of God.
As both primordial and consequent, both
transcendent and immanent, according to Whitehead’s “di-polar
theism,” God constantly changes in some respects and never changes in
others. This claim is somewhat
like the Christian conviction that God’s unchanging love constantly
changes as it interacts with varying circumstances.
From Whitehead’s point of view, God has never been without a
universe of some sort and the universe in some condition has never been
without God. Because God truly
interacts with the universe, God is always developing or emerging.
Nevertheless, as both immanent and transcendent, God has always
been and will always be.
Because it
implies that God and the universe each possesses it own power-to-be, many
Christians object to Whitehead’s idea that God and the universe are
engaged in an everlasting
process of mutual creation. Dalton
Baldwin and Richard Rice are among the most notable of these.
As evidenced by Paul’s claim to the philosophers in Athens that
all other things “live and move and find their being in God,” this
criticism has merit. It is probably the single greatest reason why many
Christians are reluctant wholly to embrace Whitehead’s form of process
thought despite its many other attractive features.
Some (like me!)
contend that this problem can be resolved if we posit that the universe is
simultaneous with but dependent upon God.
According to this option, the universe has never been without God
and God has never been without a universe of some sort.
Nevertheless, the universe everlastingly depends upon God for its
ongoing power-to-be whereas God does not depend upon the universe in this
way. This proposal succeeds as
a more thorough synthesis of Whiteheadian and Christian views only if it
is harmonious with their respective sources of evidence and forms of
reasoning, something that most specialists in both camps doubt.
As indicated by
Scripture’s claim that someday God “will gather up all things in
him” (Ephesians 1:10), for Christians God is still in the future in some
ways. Because we now see such
things through a dark glass (1 Corinthians 13:12), this is certainly the
case with respect to our own knowledge and understanding of God.
It is also the case that as of yet not all things are
reconciled to God. (1
Colossians 1: 20).Yet the One who in the future we will know more
completely, and the One to whom all things will be reconciled, will be
same One who has always existed and always will
The result of
all this is that, for somewhat different reasons, the alternative forms of
process thought offered by both Whitehead and Morowitz, at least as
usually interpreted, can be critically
adapted, but not uncritically
adopted, by Christians. As our discussions continue, we can be
thankful for Morowitz’s account of emergence, for the way it gives us
new answers to old questions, and for the thoughts and conversations it
stimulates. We are in his
debt.
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