The Making of a New Biophilia: Evolutionary Governance and the Modern Creation Myth By Walter Truett Anderson

Another interesting article from the new issued of The Global Spiral from the Metanexus Institute.

The Making of a New Biophilia: Evolutionary Governance and the Modern Creation Myth

By Walter Truett Anderson

More than a half-century has passed since Julian Huxley proposed that humanity take a conscious—and, he added, unavoidable—role in guiding evolution on Earth.¹ Now, with advances in biotechnology that increase human ability to manipulate life processes, with increasing energy consumption that alters global climate and virtually all ecosystems, with the planet encircled by satellites that monitor the movements of migrating wildlife and the health of ecosystems, with public lands managers undertaking large-scale restoration projects that are actually the creation of new ecosystems—we know what he was talking about. We move ever more deeply into de facto evolutionary governance.

With the possible exception of a few isolated life systems—such as the marvelous biological communities that blossom around undersea hydrothermal vents—every ecosystem, every species, everything that happens in the air or the water or on the land is affected by what people do or have done. It is extremely difficult to find any place on Earth—certainly not on an Earth whose climate has been altered by industry, agriculture, mining, deforestation and the toxic fumes from millions of cars—that is truly untouched by human hands. Wherever you go, there we are. And there we have been, through many more millennia than anyone suspected until quite recently. Scientists are getting better at tracing the past—even the distant prehistoric past—and finding ample evidence that our remote ancestors had their own ever-growing toolkit of ways to alter the evolutionary fates of other forms of life. They did it on a far more modest scale than we do now, of course. But they did it: sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally, always in happy ignorance of any long-range effects of their actions. They hunted some species to extinction, domesticated others, burned forests to make grazing land, and later—with the invention of agriculture—plowed fields and dug irrigation canals. In the past two centuries, after several thousand years of ignorance—or, if you prefer, innocence—we have begun to recognize the extent of human impacts on the planet’s life systems. The present age is defined by two exponential curves: increasing impacts, and increasing ability to detect those impacts, both of which are certain to continue well into the future.

Since we lack any idea of how not to govern evolution, we need to think hard about how to do it in the most responsible and effective fashion. Some basic principles:

• Governance is not the same as control; it is not possible to control the behavior of complex systems. It is possible to influence them: there are many points of entrance to a complex system, many interventions that may be tried in response to complex issues such as climate change, but surprises are inevitable—not always failures of planning or execution.
• Governance is not, and never has been, an exclusive monopoly of governments. This is generally understood by contemporary political scientists, but is less likely to be grasped by those who assume—either with hope or apprehension—that all talk of evolutionary governance is about giving new powers and responsibilities to formally constituted institutions.

• Evolutionary governance is richly and unavoidably participatory. It is not even restricted to human activities—predators govern the growth of populations they prey on—but humans, with their ability to make and use tools, organize societies to hunt and gather, burn forests to create pasture, domesticate and breed animals, intervened in countless new ways. And even today, although the inequities in human power are enormous, even the humblest peasant farmer manipulates the lives of the plants and animals in his or her domain; that is what agriculture is.

As human power to impact Earth’s living systems grows—and it is growing, despite our newfound concern for the welfare of the planet’s living systems—it becomes increasingly important that we develop, and consistently apply, effective principles for how we exercise our enormous, yet limited, power in the world. This is in itself a tall order, but I want to propose something more: we need a deeply and solidly grounded concept of humanity’s place not only on Earth but in the universe; an ethic not only understood but felt. Many events of the modern age have been giving us one, piece by piece: among the pieces are the concept of biophilia itself; the trend among leading psychologists and neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio² toward a deeper understanding of the essential role of emotions in human cognition; the increasingly serious threat of global environmental catastrophe that gives a new poignancy to the slogan “save the Earth;” the work of modern-day cosmologists like Eric Chaisson, Paul Davies, and Carl Sagan; the “big history” movement; and several other developments that I will mention below. These are elements of a new worldview in the making, a new biophilia. I present it here partly as a scenario of something that might conceivably come to pass and be embraced by global civilization, and partly as a statement of what I believe will come to pass—not only because we need it in order to guide and moderate our actions in relation to the rest of the biosphere, but also because it is what we have within us, what we need to be in order to become fully human, and is therefore a response to Nietzsche’s famous challenge: “Become who you are.”³

Constructing Biophilia

The word “biophilia” was invented by Erich Fromm, who defined it simply as the love of life and living systems. Fromm was a humanistic psychologist and psychoanalyst, preoccupied with the development of mentally healthy and socially responsible people. He described biophilia as a mark of the sane and healthy person and identified its psychological opposite as necrophilia—citing Adolf Hitler as a prime example of such a personality, a man who “was fascinated by destruction, and the smell of death was sweet to him.”⁴ Fromm had nothing to say about concrete present-day environmental concerns such as pollution and climate change, but, in his analysis of the story of Adam and Eve, he did touch on the psychology of humanity and nature: he describes the expulsion from Paradise not as punishment for a sin, but rather as a positive experience, somewhat similar to a fledgling bird’s expulsion from the nest, making humankind “able to make his own history, to develop his human powers, and to attain a new harmony with nature.”⁵ This is very relevant to humanity’s present situation, in which there is a widespread sense of our being outside the garden, when arguably we are not only still in it but have become the gardeners—the only species that is linked to all other life on Earth. All life.

Edward O. Wilson reinvented the word later, with a different meaning and emphasis, in his book Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species. He writes in loving detail about creatures he has studied in his expeditions, and when he touches on ecological crisis he emphasizes the need to preserve nonhuman life forms and the wealth of genetic information they embody: “The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats,” he writes. “This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us. “⁶ His focus, like Fromm’s, is somewhat narrow, but in a different way: he has little to say about the many other forms of affection for life and living systems—such as the love of regions, ecosystems and cultures; the compassion for all living things that is taught in spiritual practice; even love of concepts such as truth, beauty, and justice—that are familiar parts of human experience.

In its simpler forms, biophilia is everywhere: people walking their dogs and stroking their cats, kneeling in their gardens. The love of homeland that is celebrated in so much of our art and literature. Children’s love of animals, their affection even for reasonable replicas of living things—teddy bears and rubber ducks. The furry seal-eyed robots used to comfort elderly people in Japanese nursing homes. Biophilia enters human hearts and minds in many ways. Wilson believes it has genetic origins. This is probably correct, but the drive is plastic and non-specific, subject to change in response to cultural conditioning and personal choice. Culture is not only given, but made. Indeed, creativity is central to the evolutionary process, as Henri Bergson pointed out a century ago⁷ and psychiatrist Charles Johnson has explored more recently in The Creative Imperative.⁸

Love is a famously many-splendored thing and also a most imprecise word: there is always, the big question raised in the title of Nicholas Monsarrat’s book Depends What You Mean by Love.⁹ So here are four things that I mean by it, that I see as always present in the passages of our lives that we call love: one, a sense of identification or connection with the objects of love; two, an acceptance of some responsibility for their well-being; three, an appreciation of their beauty; and, four, an ongoing act of will—a decision to love, to be connected to, to be responsible for, to find beauty in, the object of love.

Using these criteria as our guides, what evidence do we find, in the chaotic torrents of thought and feeling that swirl though the 21^st century world, of any change in the direction or capacity of our inherent tendency to love?

Are people, for example, beginning to develop a love for Earth? I frequently see cars with bumper stickers bearing the slogan “Love Your Mother” accompanied by the familiar Apollo astronauts’ photograph of the planet, to make sure we know what mother is being referred to. That photograph is ubiquitous, as are challenges to “Save the Earth.” Browsing through the web I find not only information about organizations such as the Save the Earth Foundation, but also a veritable library of instructions on how to do the saving: 10 Things You Can Do To Save the Earth. 101 Ways to Save the Earth. 1001 Ways to Save the Earth. 50 Single Things Kids Can Do To Save the Earth. Seven Technologies for Saving the Earth. Eating to Save the Earth. Godzilla Save the Earth PS2 Cheats. Please Save My Earth. And so forth. I imagine there is probably some useful advice in this; probably some not so useful. But it all has its function—which is culture-construction, hammering out a new worldview, teaching us to love the Earth or, at the very least, preaching that we should.

To love Earth is, if you accept the basic concept of biophilia—which I do, however nebulous the definitions of it—is to accept that Earth is alive, or, to put it more conservatively, a living system. Is it? Well, to paraphrase Monsarrat, depends what you mean by life. The distinction between life and nonlife has never been starkly clear. Primitive people have generally recognized a complementarity between the two—or, rather, recognized that they are not really two—and scientists have a hard time trying to define life in some indisputable way. Even Aristotle, biologist and master logician, noted that “Nature proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life in such a way that it is impossible to determine the exact line of demarcation.” The institutions of law, religion and medical science have had colossal difficulty agreeing on the exact line of demarcation in, say, a young accident victim’s journey from life to death, the moment when it is permissible to begin harvesting—wonderful word—the organs and tissues that can then give new life to another person. And we face the problem another way as we expand our mental maps into the solar system and the universe: Is Earth, as a giver of life and consciousness, to be regarded as somehow alive and conscious? Then what about the cosmos itself, which brings forth a planet that in turn creates life and consciousness?

We imply biophilia when we speak of love of nature—somewhat ambiguously, since there has always been an enormous range of ideas about what the word nature (or its equivalent, where one exists, in other languages) means. For the pre-Socratics, it included the totality of what people experienced. That “all is one” perspective walks among us in many forms : you find it in evolutionary thinking that sees everything since (or before) the Big Bang as a single process; in the Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism, Taoism and Advaita Vedanta that speak of the undivided nature of the universe; in 20th-century existentialism with its emphasis on Being itself (with a capital B); in the branches of science and philosophy that puzzle over the “laws of nature” and the question of how they came to be; and of course in organizations such as Metanexus that spread a tent over all such endeavors. This idea of nature , whether it wears a saffron robe or a lab jacket, is inclusive. Most importantly, it includes us: in the universe described by modern science, our bodies and brains are held to be material processes, subject to the laws that govern everything else in the cosmos.

We imply it when we speak of the love of place, a universal emotion that involves a form of psychological bonding, akin to the process by which parents begin after childbirth to love their children, including adopted ones. This is frequently manipulated by political leaders, who promote a belief in an organic connection to place—as in the Blut und Boden ideology of Nazism and the famous passage in Plato’s Republic in which Socrates proposes teaching the rulers and soldiers of the city the “noble lie” that they were reared under the ground and then sent up to defend their homeland as their “mother and nurse,” and to regard its other citizens as brothers, born out of the same earth.¹⁰

The love of place is not only an organic connection but a cultural one, part of what psychologist Antonio Damasio calls the “extended self” which—unlike the core self—is constantly being expanded and revised: “It evolves across the lifetime of the organism.” ¹¹ It also evolves across history, shaped by events such as those that occurred during the Age of Explorations and more recently with the beginning of the Space Age.

Since the middle of the 20th century, accelerating communications, travel and trade have made more and more people aware that they live on a planet. Science (and science fiction) have contributed to the project of bonding with it emotionally. I particularly remember a short story I read many years ago (1947, to be exact) in the Saturday Evening Post, then the queen of American middle-brow magazines.¹² It was “The Green Hills of Earth,” by Robert Heinlein, and it was the first science-fiction story published in the Post or (as far as I know) any mainstream national magazine. That was noteworthy, but it wasn’t what interested me. What interested me was that it described a new kind of love of place—of patriotism—that I had never encountered before: a love of Earth. It was about a space-age minstrel, radiation-blinded, who traveled about the solar system creating and singing his songs. One of them went:

We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth
Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies
And the cool green hills of Earth

I thought nobody but me remembered that story, but since then I have learned that it has had a long and busy life—in radio and TV dramatizations, in a Paul Winter song album, in a dramatic narration recorded by Star Trek’s Leonard Nimoy, in references in other books, even in a message to Earth from real-life space travelers aboard one of the Apollo expeditions. Still, its cultural impact has been small in comparison to the enormous response to the photograph of Earth taken by astronauts aboard the Apollo 8 mission. That became one of the most widely-seen visual images ever, as familiar an icon as the happy face in e-mail messages. And—in a way that a map could not—It invited people to see Earth as something they might choose to love.

Evolutionary biology has been another force for revision of self-concepts: Charles Darwin’s work provoked the famous debates about human descent from apes and even—to his principal antagonist, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce—“our unsuspected cousinship with the mushrooms.”¹³ More recently, Lynn Margulis showed that the mitochondria in the cells of eukaryotic organisms were once bacteria that came as invaders in the distant evolutionary past and stayed on as hard-working symbiotic subsystems. And current research continues to reveal astonishing similarities in the genomes of different species.

Today, scientists such as Eric Chaisson link several disciplines, creating a majestic picture that—it seems, almost effortlessly—connects the most recent discoveries of physicists and astronomers concerning the origins of the universe: the research of Darwin, the evolutionary synthesis biologists and contemporary genetics, and the inquiries into the future course of cultural change that you and I are pursuing at this moment. In one such passage, Chaisson writes :

Modern scientific research helps us realize that we are connected to distant space and time not only by our imaginations but also through a common, cosmic heritage. Most of the chemical elements comprising our bodies were created billions of years ago in the hot interiors of remote and long-vanished stars—a physical, stellar metabolism, no less. Their hydrogen and helium fuel finally spent, these giant stars met death in cataclysmic supernova explosions, scattering afar the atoms of heavy elements fused deep within their cores. Resembling a “galactic ecosystem,” whose interrelated components are as rich and diverse (though not as complex) as those of life in a tidepool or a tropical forest, this loose interstellar matter eventually collected into huge gas clouds which, in turn, slowly contracted to give birth to a new generation of stars, among them the Sun and its family of planets nearly five billion years ago. Drawing upon the matter gathered from the debris of its stellar ancestors, planet Earth then provided the conditions that eventually gave rise to life and intelligence, and ultimately to ourselves—a biological and cultural metabolism, no more. Like every object in our Solar System, every living creature on Earth embodies atoms from distant realms of our Galaxy, and from a past far more remote than the beginnings of human evolution.

The expansion of human consciousness into the cosmos has become a small literary movement, as writers and publishers choose book titles such as: At Home in the Universe, ¹⁵ Belonging to the Universe,¹⁶ Growing Up in the Universe,¹⁷ Our Cosmic Habitat,¹⁸ and Coming of Age in the Milky Way.¹⁹

These and other developments are coming together into what historian David Christian calls “the modern creation myth,” which encompasses the view of cosmic and biological evolution described by Chaisson.²⁰ All of this is work in progress, but I believe it has the makings of an ethic for evolutionary governance that is not merely one of technocratic dominance, but a view of our enormous power in the world that recognizes also our membership in it. We move beyond the image of ourselves as passengers on “Spaceship Earth” to a sense of an organic connection that is not a noble lie but a noble truth.

Biophilia, Nature, and Humanity

Biophilia can easily be taken as a synonym for love of nature, but that raises serious questions for some and presents yet another reason for paraphrasing Monsarrat: depends what you mean by nature.

For most people, particularly city dwellers, it probably presents no problem: people talk about “getting out in nature” when they mean visiting a farm, talking a walk in the woods, going to the seashore, even relaxing in a park. But Western philosophers have quarreled for centuries over what should be included in the term “nature” (or its equivalents in Greek or Latin) and today that question is at the very center of a political-philosophical cleavage that shows every likelihood of becoming deeper and more vexatious in the decades ahead. The issue is whether we include humanity as a part of nature, and regions that have been modified by humans as “natural.”

As we all know, and as I mentioned earlier, many bodies of thought unquestioningly include us within their concept of nature—Eastern nondualistic philosophies and Western science among them. Yet I was somewhat surprised to find that the lead definition of nature in my hefty Oxford American dictionary is: “The phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations.”²¹ The italics, of course, are mine.

Environmental writer Bill McKibben gives a similar perspective when he defends his choice of the book title The End of Nature. He writes: “When I say that we have ended nature, I don’t mean, obviously, that natural processes have ceased—there is still sunshine and still wind, still growth, still decay. Photosynthesis continues, as does respiration. But we have ended the thing that has, at least in modern times, defined nature for us—its separation from human society.”²² This narrowing-down of the concept of nature is not entirely new; well before the birth of the modern environmental movement, people often expressed a yearning for a certain kind of nature, pristine, untouched by human hands. Henry David Thoreau wrote that even his peaceful Walden felt like “a tamed and, as it were, emasculated country” and did not fully satisfy his yearning for undefiled nature, “an entire heaven and an entire earth.” Ecologist Paul S. Martin, in quoting this, notes that the last “entire earth” of the sort Thoreau had in mind had disappeared from the North American continent some 13,000 years earlier, with the disappearance of native species such as mastodons and giant sloths. ²³

The environmental movement comes in many different shades, of course. I expect and hope that it will be a major force in shaping the biophilia of the future. I also expect that it will grow and change. One needed change is suggested in Martin’s comment about Thoreau’s longing for “real” nature, is that environmentalists (and for that matter, people in general) tend to hold onto wildly inaccurate notions about unspoiled nature. This is revealed in the discussions that have been inspired in recent years by Paul Crutzen’s proposal to designate the present period in Earth’s history the Anthropocene epoch. Crutzen, a Nobel laureate for his work in discovering the causes of stratospheric ozone depletion, has argued that the time has come to bring down the curtain in the Holocene epoch—which began some 12,000 years ago with the end of the last Ice Age—and call this the Anthropocene, the epoch in which human activities have become a major force shaping evolutionary change. He says the Anthropocene began some two centuries ago, when the Industrial Revolution started releasing huge quantities of carbon into Earth’s atmosphere, setting off the process of climate change. Many scientists agree with this, and the formal machinery for renaming the epoch is in motion. Many non-scientists of course disagree, and continue to believe that the whole notion of anthropogenic climate change is merely an evil myth cooked up by Al Gore. But what’s particularly interesting here is that some scientists agree with Crutzen’s basic idea of climate change caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases, but disagree with the timing.

William Ruddiman, a paleoclimatologist—that is, a specialist in the study of ancient climates—accepts the basic proposition of greenhouse gases altering climate, but disagrees with the timing. He writes: “Before we built cities, before we invented writing, and before we founded the major religions, we were already altering climate. We were farming.”²⁴ Ruddiman puts the beginning of the Anthropocene Epoch back some 12,000 years, to the beginning of farming; and argues that the emissions of CO2 and methane caused by rice paddy irrigation in Asia were sufficient to head off a mini-Ice Age which would normally have occurred 5,000 years ago.

And there is yet another entry in the when-did-the-Anthropocene-begin conversation, coming from paleoecologists such as Paul Martin, well-known among the fraternity of scientists who are busy tracing the ecosystem-transforming impacts of humanity back even farther yet into shadowy reaches of prehistory, into times long before people made the revolutionary discovery of how to plant seeds and harvest plants. He studies the evidence of yet another human practice—hunting—and concludes that it was having major impacts on ecosystems around the world tens of thousands of years before the invention of agriculture: “Simply stated, as humans moved into different parts of the planet, many long-established huntable animals died out.”²⁵ And, because the “huntable animals” that became extinct were often large mammals and other members of the so-called “climax species” that play particularly large roles in the ecosystems they inhabit—as prey or predator to other species, as consumers of vegetation, as modifiers of land and streams—their disappearance had secondary impacts that are only now being discovered.

Obviously, this kind of research—of which more can be expected in the future, because the skills, technological resources and knowledge base of these sciences is advancing rapidly—offers serious challenges to some of the myths that are popular among romantic environmentalists: the myth of the pristine ecosystems in the not-too-distant past, and the myth of the noble savages who lived lightly upon the land. It also calls for some rethinking of the widespread practice of ecological restoration, because it raises the question of what stage in an ecosystem’s history one might attempt to restore.

In closing, I would like to take a brief look at another movement—transhumanism—with some positive thoughts about its contribution to the future of biophilia, and some criticism of one part of its program that I see as very troublesome.

In some ways, the environmental movement and the transhumanist movement appear to be polar opposites: Where environmentalists tend to be highly suspicious of technology, transhumanists tend to be devout technophiles. Where environmentalists tend to be misanthropic, as evidenced by their reluctance to view humans as a part of nature, transhumanists tend to be exuberant boosters for the human future. It doesn’t appear to me that transhumanism was quite as strongly identified with technology as it is now when it was first proclaimed by Julian Huxley (in the same book where he proposed recognizing our responsibility for evolution). He wrote then: “What can be done to bring out the latent capacities of the ordinary man and woman for understanding and enjoyment; to teach people the techniques of achieving spiritual experience . . . to develop native talent and intelligence in the growing child, instead of frustrating or distorting them.”²⁶ This seems to me remarkably similar to the “Human Potentialities” lectures that his brother Aldous was giving at the same time, and that are credited with launching the “human potential” movement in the 1960s.

But ideas and movements tend to have their own lives—especially in today’s superheated culture—and it appears that transhumanism has become much more oriented toward technology and science. I note the increasing emphasis on the expectation of the Singularity (when machine intelligence catches up to human intelligence) and the promotion of immortality. The latter would worry me if I thought there was any likelihood of its being achieved in the foreseeable future—but since I don’t, I assume that the people who are committed to the cause will carefully asses the enormous problems it would produce in the world. These, as I see it, come under two headings: equity and ecology. Regarding equity, I recall political scientist Harold Lasswell’s famous pronouncement that politics is a matter of who gets what, when, how.²⁷ I see no reason at all to believe that—if an end to aging should become possible—the beneficiaries would be poor and uneducated people in developing countries. Regarding ecology: a human being is an organism/environment system, an enormous consumer through life of resources, space, and energy. We already have overpopulation, the result of two factors: birth rates and death rates. Until now, the concern has been rising birth rates. Has anybody at all thought about spectacularly falling death rates? I hope that some of my friends in the transhumanist world will reassure me that they have.

These two movements that I have briefly described are important and significant now, and will be in the future. Each has its concept of nature, its visions of the future, and its own kind of biophilia. Each brings us reasons for hope, reasons for concern. Neither is about to go away. The usual course we take when presented with what appear to be irreconcilable opposites is to take sides and argue. But there are other alternatives: there is what Charles Johnson called the creative integration of previous realities. There is the dialogue process, identified with the work of people like David Bohm and Daniel Yankelovich.²⁸ These methodologies, and others like them, are not about making nice and ignoring real differences. They are about going deeply into differences, in ways that move beyond stalemate. They are work, and they do work.

These remarks summarize my thoughts about something I think of as happening, a handful of seeds, but far from a realized reality. It requires much more. This challenge echoes the words of Rollo May, who wrote: “in every act of love and will—and in the long run they are both present in each genuine act—we mold ourselves and our world simultaneously. This is what it means to embrace the future.”²⁹

Notes

¹Julian Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), 13.

² Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. (Orlando: Harcourt, 1999).

³ Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 159.

⁴ Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil. (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 39.

⁵ Fromm, 20.

⁶ Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 121.

⁷ Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution. (1911) (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998).

⁸ Charles Johnson, The Creative Imperative: Human Growth and Planetary Evolution. (Berkeley: Celestial Arts, 1986.

⁹ Nicholas Monsarrat, Depends What You Mean by Love. (London: Cassell, 1947).

¹⁰ Plato, The Republic, trans. Allan Bloom. (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 94.

¹¹ Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. (Orlando: Harcourt, 1999) 16.

¹² Robert Heinlein, “The Green Hills of Earth.” (Saturday Evening Post, Feb. 8, 1947). Also in Heinlein, The Green Hills of Earth. (Riverdale, NY: Baen Books, 1951).

¹³ Samuel Wilberforce, review of Origin of Species (1860) in The Quarterly Review, 108, no. 215 (July 1860), 231.

¹⁴ Eric Chaisson, Cosmological Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 222.

¹⁵ Actually, I know of three books with this title: Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); John Archibald Wheeler, At Home in the Universe: Masters of Modern Physics. (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1995); Rudolf Steiner, At Home in the Universe: Exploring our Supersensory Nature. (Herndon, VA: Steiner Books, 2000).

¹⁶ Fritjof Capra et al, Belonging to the Universe: Explorations on the Frontiers of Science and Spirituality. (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991).

¹⁷ Richard Dawkins, Growing up in the Universe: Science as Epiphany. (DVD, Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science), 2007.

¹⁸ Martin Rees, Our Cosmic Habitat. (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 2001.

¹⁹ Timothy Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way. (New York: William Morrow, 1988).

²⁰ David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big Histor.y (Berkeley: University of California Press), 2004.

²¹ The New Oxford American Dictionary. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1140. (Italics added.)

²² Bill McKibben, The End of Nature. (New York: Random House, 1989), 64. (Italics in original.)

²³ Paul S. Martin, Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 56.

²⁴ William Ruddiman, Plows, Plagues and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 4.

²⁵ Martin, 51. See also Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Sixth Extinction” (The New Yorker, May 25, 2009) 52-63.

²⁶ Julian Huxley, Ibid.

²⁷ Harold Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (New York: Peter Smith, 1950).

²⁸ David Bohm, On Dialogue. (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); Daniel Yankelovich, The Magic of Dialogue: Transforming Conflict into Cooperation. (New York: Touchstone, 2001).

²⁹ Rollo May, Love and Will. (New York: Norton, 1969), 325.

Tags: The Making of a New Biophilia, Evolutionary Governance and the Modern Creation Myth, Walter Truett Anderson, The Global Spiral, Metanexus Institute, conscious evolution, evolution, consciousness, Philosophy, Spirituality, biophilia, Erich Fromm, Edward O. Wilson

Change Management Blog

I've recently discovered the Change Management Blog through a twitpic that someone posted from his blog. Great stuff for anyone who is interested in the change process. Here is a recent post.

Change Models: A Systems Perspective

Like other people who collect stamps, I collect change models. I find it interesting and fascinating how much energy and passion people put in the development of a conclusive generalization in what happens during a process of complex organizational or political change. And most of the models make a lot of sense - in certain contexts, organizational cultures or applied to a specific issue that the organization needs to address. However, I haven't found a model yet (and I believe I will never find it) that is applicable to all different situations on the ground. Or, maybe better: although many models might be applied to all kinds of contexts, the result of this application in terms of an improved organization or political process is not always satisfactory to
either the client or the people who are impacted by the change process. I can't believe that some consultants still have only "their" model in their briefcases.

Let us first have a closer look at why no change model can be a panacea and then have a look at different change models and evaluate them in terms of popularity and applicability. There is no finally proven scientific concept of change - as their is no universally valid sociological model that explains human groups or societies - because change happens in complex social systems. The behavior of highly complex social systems can be described and modelled but not exactly predicted and it looks like that it will never be possible to do so. All change models that do not take into account the enormous complexity and final unpredictability of human systems might help to understand certain aspects of how a system reacts to a change driver but it will evidently fall short to produce repeatable explanations that are valid and accepted for all different stakeholders. Present the same model to 10 different people in an organization and you will hear 10 different interpretations of it. You might say now - if a change model fails which does not take into account complexity theory, can't we then find a universally valid change model that respects the laws of complexity theory?

Well, there are indeed a variety of complexity theory based change models. Problem is that complexity theory is a very young discipline which developed over the last 30 years, originally based on the mathematical description of theoretical or artifiically created systems. Since then, complexity science (vulgo: Chaos Theory) has been expanded but those theorems that have been proven experimentally are not that specific enough to explain every aspect of a a system's behavior. (John Smart says: "Most prediction is a predictable failure."). Let us look at what seems to be the scientifically agreed fundament of systems theory. These theorems are not taken from a text book but I wrote them up. So, as I am not a complexity scientist, please tear me apart if you can:

1. Complex systems consist of different, interconnected and interdependent parts.
2. Complex systems show non-linear behavior.
3. Complex systems are not stable; if they look stable, they are in a state of equilibrium.
4. Emergent phenomena are a common feature of complex systems not because they are magic but because we lack the computational power to exactly predict the behavior of the system.
5. Social systems are complex per definitionem.
6. You need a specific model for each kind of system to compute/predict its behavior. The more complex the system the more we depend on empiric findings to establish a specific model. Any prediction can only be an approximation.

Because of theorem No. 6, no model for organizational or political change can be universally applicable to more than a limited set of change processes. Practice will show its validity.

In the next weeks, I will publish a series of blog posts that describe different change models, their background, theoretical foundation, applicability, field validation.

Posted by Holger Nauheimer at 11:13 AM

Be sure to check out the Change Management Toolbook.

Tags: Psychology, change, Philosophy, Change Management Blog, Holger Nauheimer, Change Management Toolbook

The Balancing and Synthesis of the Opposites, by Roberto Assagioli

Another great article from Roberto Assagioli, founder of psychosynthesis.

The Balancing and Synthesis of the Opposites, by Roberto Assagioli

By Roberto Assagioli , Source: P.R.F. Issue No. 29

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Polarity is a universal fact; it is inherent in cosmic manifestation. It is true that the Ultimate and Supreme Reality is the One, the Absolute, the Transcendent; but it can only be defined by what it is not.

From the very moment that cosmic manifestation begins to unfold, duality is horn. The first fundamental duality is precisely that between manifestation and the Unmanifest. In the Bhagavad Gita this is expressed in the words: "Having pervaded the whole Universe with a fragment of myself, I remain." In the process of manifestation the fundamental polarity is that of Spirit and Matter.

It is at once necessary to state that all polarity is a relationship between two elements, and that, as such, it is never absolute, but relative even to a particular pair of opposites: the same element can be positive in its relation to a certain "pole" and negative in its relation to another. An instance of the relativity of the "polar relationships" exists in the fundamental polarity´ between Spirit and Matter. According to some, Spirit is the free and transcendent Reality which stands above the various pairs of opposites existing in manifested life. Such is the conception of Keyserling, contained in his book, From Suffering to Fulfillment (London; Selwyn and Blount) (cf. also Das Buch von Personlichen Leben (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlag Anstalt, 1936), by the same writer, p. 505-510-515.) According to others, Spirit corresponds to the positive pole, to the dynamic and creative element in all duality. Such is Jung´s idea. In other words, Keyserling regards the "tension" between Spirit and the various manifestations of life as existing in a vertical" direction, which he refers to as the "dimension of intensity," while Jung conceives polarity more as a horizontal relationship.

Physical Polarity

In the physical world, the most commonly recognized polarity is that between the positive and negative poles in electricity. This polarity is the basis of the constitution of matter since, as is well known, each atom contains charges of electricity differentiated into a positive nucleus and a varying number of negative electrons. Electric polarity manifests itself in various ways which have many practical applications, as in induced and alternating currents, etc. Interesting analogies can be found in various polarities in the field of psychology, such as emotional attraction and repulsion, ambivalence and the "compensatory" function.

Within living organisms, such as the human body, there are various polarities. One of the most important is that between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous Systems; the former stimulates catabolism, the latter assimilation or anabolism. Other polarities exist between the different endocrine glands.

One of the most important and general polarities in the three kingdoms of organic life (vegetable, animal and human) is the sexual. The positive pole is represented by the masculine element, the negative by the feminine element. This does not mean that the former is active and the latter passive. Both are active, but in a different way, the masculine element being the dynamic, initiating pole, while the feminine element is the receptive, "gestative," elaborative pole. This type of polarity extends far beyond the man-woman relationship to innumerable manifestations in life. It has been particularly and deeply emphasized by the Chinese who regard these two principles as the foundation both of cosmic evolution and of every aspect of human life. The creative aspect, symbolized by the father and Heaven, they call Yang, while Yin is the receptive and elaborative aspect, symbolized by the mother and the Earth. The well-being of Man depends, in the view of Chinese philosophy, on the harmonious accord between Man and the cyclic evolution of the Universe, woven from the innumerable relationships and interactions of Yang and Yin. (1)

Emotional Polarity

In the field of the emotions and feelings we find those dualities which are familiar to all: pleasure-pain; excitement-depression; confidence-fear; attraction-repulsion; love-hate. Such is their extent that one might say that the life of the average human being is based on his emotional reactions to things, to events and to persons. These reactions have a definite function and purpose, provided they are maintained within appropriate hounds. But if we allow them to take over-as too often is the case-we are apt to become their slaves. Later we shall consider how the limitations of these opposites can be overcome.

Mental Polarity

In the mental realm there is the polarity between the analytical activity of the concrete mind and the synthetic operation of the abstract intelligence; between the inductive process (from the particular to the general) and the deductive process (from the general to the particular).

Consideration of the human personality in its totality discloses various fundamental polarities which have been extensively investigated by modern psychology. The knowledge about the human being acquired in this process has stimulated the development of important psychological, educational and psychotherapeutic techniques. The principal polarities here are: Body-Psyche; Consciousness-the Unconscious; the lower Unconscious-the Superconscious; Pathos (Receptivity, Sensitivity, Reactivity)-Ethos (Activity, Dynamism, Will); Eros (Feeling)-Logos (Reason).

Spiritual Polarity

The fundamental duality in the spiritual realm is that existing between the personality and the Transpersonal Self, a polarity which is the cause of many inner conflicts, until harmonious relationships and an increasing blending or unification (spiritual psychosynthesis) are achieved.

Interindividual Polarity

There are also many "inter-individual" polarities which are of the utmost importance. The most and fundamental one is that existing, on all levels, between Man and Woman. Then there is that between adults and young people, particularly in the interaction between parents and their children. There are, further, the various relationships between individuals and the different groups to which they belong.

Among them we find the family considered as a unit, as a "psychic entity," which is made up not only of members who are alive, but also of ancestral influences and family traditions. Such influences are sometimes a help to the individual, offering him an ideal and a way of life which he may be encouraged to live by. Other times, and perhaps more often, they may hem him in and even oppress him.

Then come the social groups of different kinds (social and professional classes, cultural and religious groups, nations) with which the individual may find himself associated, in a condition of passive subordination or of cooperation, as leader and directing agent or in conflict. Similar relationships exist among groups; both among those of the same kind and size, i.e., between families and families, classes and classes, nations and nations, etc.; and the "hierarchical" ones, between the family and the state; classes and nations; between a state and a federation of states.

Two kinds of polarities which are of great importance are that between the northern and southern individuals and groups in each nation and continent and that between Western and Eastern peoples.

Balancing Opposite Poles

Each of these numerous polarities confronts us with the problem of their interplay and balancing. The following is a brief survey of the general principles and methods of balancing opposite poles with the object of resolving "polar tensions:"

1. Fusion of the two poles, involving the neutralization of their charges of energy.
2. Creation of a new being, of a new reality.
3. Adjustment of the opposite poles, by means of an "intermediary center" or of a principle higher than both. A regulating action of this kind can be brought about in two ways:
   1. By diminishing the amplitude of the oscillations between the two extremes, at times even to vanishing point, thus inducing a more or less complete neutralization ("the happy medium"). An instance of this, of great actual interest, is the oscillation between excessive authority and uncontrolled freedom in education and the search for a balanced attitude.
   2. By consciously and wisely directing the alternations so that the result is harmonious and constructive, and in accord with the cyclic alternations of both individual and general, human and cosmic, conditions. (This is the method taught by Chinese philosophy and particularly by the I Ching.)
4. Synthesis, brought about by a higher element or principle which transforms, sublimates and reabsorbs the two poles into a higher reality.

The different types of polarity require correspondingly appropriate solutions. Man often has the freedom -- and consequently the responsibility -- of choosing between different methods of balancing. It should, however, be pointed out that the indicated solutions are not always as clear tut as the above enumeration might lead one to believe. Sometimes, as the following examples will show, they can overlap or be combined in various ways.

In the field of electricity, the most simple outcome is neutralization through the fusion of the positive and negative charges. However, the conditions in which this fusion is effected determine the results, which are thus subject to considerable variation. When, for instance, the poles are brought towards each other, and the voltage with which they are charged overcomes the resistance of the medium which separates them, a discharge is produced which manifests as a spark. Lightning is an instance of this phenomenon. When, on the other hand, the poles are kept apart but connected by a conducting wire, with some "resistance" introduced at a point along the conducting wire, the electrical energy becomes susceptible to various transformations. This latter process is being utilized with increasing ingenuity in the transformation of electricity into light, into heat, or into movement. In these cases the process of neutralization produces various useful effects. In the biological realm, health can be defined as a dynamic equilibrium ever threatened and ever restored between a series of polarities, such as exist between the divisions of the nervous system, between various endocrine glands, and in general between the anabolic and catabolic functions. In the same way, psychological life can be regarded as a continual polarization and tension between differing tendencies and functions, and as a continual effort, conscious or not, to establish equilibrium. Among the most important psychological polarities are: impulse-inhibition; feeling-reason; extroversion-introversion.

ln sexual polarity, the union of the two physical elements has a creative effect. The dynamism of their fusion brings about the birth of a new organism similar to that of the parents. In humanity this wonderful physical creative function is closely associated with the psychological polarities, and this often produces very complex situations and difficult problems.

In the fields of drives, emotions and feelings, the balancing of opposite qualities requires the intervention of a higher regulating principle of a mental or transpersonal nature. The first task is to prevent the drives and the emotions from overwhelming and submerging the reason and the will. The best way to achieve this is to learn how to disidentify oneself from them at will, in order to be free at any time to maintain the "I", the center of consciousness, on a higher level above them, in order to be able to observe and evaluate them, and to wisely regulate them as needed.

Let us make it clear that to regulate does not mean to "suppress," and that this does not in any way lead to aridity or a lack of sensitivity. Let us, for example, consider a fundamental polarity, pleasure-pain. As long as we remain slaves of this duality, always actively seeking pleasure and fearfully fleeing from pain, we shall not find lasting peace or permanent satisfaction. On the other hand, a forced inhibition, an artificial impassivity, certainly does not constitute a satisfactory solution. This can only be arrived at by means of that clear insight which enables us to understand the causes, the nature and the functions of both pleasure and pain. This insight carries the recognition that, in accepting pleasure without craving for it and attachment to it, and in accepting pain, when unavoidable, without fearing it and rebelling against it, one can learn much from both pleasure and pain, and "distill the essence" which they contain. Moreover, one can gradually raise the quality and level of these "opposites"; one passes by degrees from the physical pleasures in and of themselves to the joys of feeling and of the mind, finally experiencing spiritual joy. One makes one´s way from physical suffering to emotional troubles, to intellectual turmoil, then to compassion for the sufferings of others and then of the whole human race. From all these experiences one gathers the fruits of wisdom, and learns to keep the center of consciousness stabilized more arid more at a level above the alternations of personal pleasure and pain. Finally we can acquire the ability to identify ourselves with the Universal Life, with the Supra-Individual Self, with the Supreme, which transcends all "opposites" in ineffable bliss.

If we examine more closely the specific polarities of the emotional field, we can clearly distinguish two main types of solutions. One is realized on the same level; it can be called "the middle way" of compromise, the blending of the two poles. The other solution is achieved at a higher level: it is the fusion of the poles into a higher synthesis.

The method of synthesis which is analogous in a certain sense to a chemical combination, includes and absorbs the two elements into a higher unity endowed with qualities differing from those of either of them. The difference between the solutions achieved through compromise and those brought about through synthesis can be clearly indicated by a triangular diagram. Here are a few examples:

The polarity between "mind" and "heart", between reason and feeling (Logos and Eros), is regulated in the first place by the recognition of their respective functions and of the legitimate field of action of each of the two functions, so that neither dominates the other. This can be followed by a mutual and increasing cooperation and interpenetration between the two, finally arriving at the synthesis so well expressed by Dante in the words "Intellectual light full of love."

The polarity between sensitivity and receptivity (Pathos) and dynamism or Will (Ethos) which, in a wider sense, corresponds to psychosexual polarity -- for the former pole is the "feminine" and the latter the "masculine" modality -- can also at first be controlled by a balanced adjustment, to be superseded by a creative synthesis.

The fundamental polarity between the human personality as a whole and the spiritual Self can also be resolved into a unity. This is the aim of the process of harmonization and transmutation involving a protracted series of conflicts, approaches, and contacts, each producing partial, increasingly expanded fusions. In short, this is the process of spiritual psych~ synthesis. It constitutes the noble effort, the central drama of Man who, either consciously or unconsciously, aspires to this high goal, or is pushed towards it by his inability to find lasting satisfaction or a true peace until he has attained it.

The interaction between the Self and the personality creates a series of "triangular" relationships similar to those previously indicated. Here are some of them:

The various equilibrations, adjustments and syntheses can be produced in different ways. At times, they are preceded by intense crises and conflicts. In other cases they are reached in a more gradual and harmonious way by means of a progressive decrease in the oscillations of the "pendulum". A clear understanding of this process of synthesis enables one to achieve it more easily and rapidly. The essential requirement, as previously mentioned, is to avoid identifying oneself with either of the two opposite poles, and to control, transmute, and direct their energies from a higher center of awareness and power.

Notes

1. Numerous Chinese texts deal with this point. One of the most interesting is the I Ching or The Book of Transformations, which, disguised under the form of a method of divination, contains treasures of wisdom. Jung, in The Secret of the Golden Flower, and also Keyserling, expressed great appreciation of it.

Tags: Psychology, Philosophy, therapy, The Balancing and Synthesis of the Opposites, Roberto Assagioli, Psychosynthesis, polarity

Emptiness by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Another great article from Thanissaro Bhikkhu.

Emptiness

by

Thanissaro Bhikkhu

© 1997–2009

Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to and takes nothing away from the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there's anything lying behind them.

This mode is called emptiness because it's empty of the presuppositions we usually add to experience to make sense of it: the stories and world-views we fashion to explain who we are and the world we live in. Although these stories and views have their uses, the Buddha found that some of the more abstract questions they raise — of our true identity and the reality of the world outside — pull attention away from a direct experience of how events influence one another in the immediate present. Thus they get in the way when we try to understand and solve the problem of suffering.

Say for instance, that you're meditating, and a feeling of anger toward your mother appears. Immediately, the mind's reaction is to identify the anger as "my" anger, or to say that "I'm" angry. It then elaborates on the feeling, either working it into the story of your relationship to your mother, or to your general views about when and where anger toward one's mother can be justified. The problem with all this, from the Buddha's perspective, is that these stories and views entail a lot of suffering. The more you get involved in them, the more you get distracted from seeing the actual cause of the suffering: the labels of "I" and "mine" that set the whole process in motion. As a result, you can't find the way to unravel that cause and bring the suffering to an end.

If, however, you can adopt the emptiness mode — by not acting on or reacting to the anger, but simply watching it as a series of events, in and of themselves — you can see that the anger is empty of anything worth identifying with or possessing. As you master the emptiness mode more consistently, you see that this truth holds not only for such gross emotions as anger, but also for even the most subtle events in the realm of experience. This is the sense in which all things are empty. When you see this, you realize that labels of "I" and "mine" are inappropriate, unnecessary, and cause nothing but stress and pain. You can then drop them. When you drop them totally, you discover a mode of experience that lies deeper still, one that's totally free.

To master the emptiness mode of perception requires training in firm virtue, concentration, and discernment. Without this training, the mind tends to stay in the mode that keeps creating stories and world views. And from the perspective of that mode, the teaching of emptiness sounds simply like another story or world view with new ground rules. In terms of the story of your relationship with your mother, it seems to be saying that there's really no mother, no you. In terms of your views about the world, it seems to be saying either that the world doesn't really exist, or else that emptiness is the great undifferentiated ground of being from which we all came to which someday we'll all return.

These interpretations not only miss the meaning of emptiness but also keep the mind from getting into the proper mode. If the world and the people in the story of your life don't really exist, then all the actions and reactions in that story seem like a mathematics of zeros, and you wonder why there's any point in practicing virtue at all. If, on the other hand, you see emptiness as the ground of being to which we're all going to return, then what need is there to train the mind in concentration and discernment, since we're all going to get there anyway? And even if we need training to get back to our ground of being, what's to keep us from coming out of it and suffering all over again? So in all these scenarios, the whole idea of training the mind seems futile and pointless. By focusing on the question of whether or not there really is something behind experience, they entangle the mind in issues that keep it from getting into the present mode.

Now, stories and world views do serve a purpose. The Buddha employed them when teaching people, but he never used the word emptiness when speaking in these modes. He recounted the stories of people's lives to show how suffering comes from the unskillful perceptions behind their actions, and how freedom from suffering can come from being more perceptive. And he described the basic principles that underlie the round of rebirth to show how bad intentional actions lead to pain within that round, good ones lead to pleasure, while really skillful actions can take you beyond the round altogether. In all these cases, these teachings were aimed at getting people to focus on the quality of the perceptions and intentions in their minds in the present — in other words, to get them into the emptiness mode. Once there, they can use the teachings on emptiness for their intended purpose: to loosen all attachments to views, stories, and assumptions, leaving the mind empty of all greed, anger, and delusion, and thus empty of suffering and stress. And when you come right down to it, that's the emptiness that really counts.

Provenance:

©1997 Thanissaro Bhikkhu.

Transcribed from a file provided by the author.

This Access to Insight edition is ©1997–2009 John T. Bullitt.

Terms of use: You may copy, reformat, reprint, republish, and redistribute this work in any medium whatsoever, provided that: (1) you only make such copies, etc. available free of charge; (2) you clearly indicate that any derivatives of this work (including translations) are derived from this source document; and (3) you include the full text of this license in any copies or derivatives of this work. Otherwise, all rights reserved. For additional information about this license, see the FAQ.

Tags: Buddhism, emptiness, Thanissaro Bhikkhu, dharma, meditation

PZ Myers - The Deepest Links (on Evolution)

A very cool article from Seed Magazine (well, really it's from Pharyngula's PZ Myers) on they ways in which evolution is an adaptive process.

The Deepest Links

Pharyngula / by PZ Myers / July 6, 2009

Evolution is a tinkerer. When novel features evolve, old parts are co-opted for new roles.

Illustration: Alison Schroeer

Open any biology textbook with decent evolution coverage, and you’ll find a version of a familiar diagram—a bat’s wing, a dolphin’s fin, a horse’s leg, a human’s arm. These vertebrate-limb structures are homologous, their similarities the result of shared origins in an ancestral mammal with a general-purpose limb. Evolution has modified each, but all have a common internal structure, a common embryological origin, and a fossil history that reveals a shared phylogenetic origin.

Comparative biology seems to make it clear that the limbs of invertebrates such as insects have different origins. There is little correspondence to what we see in our own structure: Insect limbs lack bones altogether. Embryologically, insect limbs arise as repeated segmental bulges in the cuticle. The comparative evolutionary history of vertebrates and invertebrates is most telling. The ancient chordate ancestors of our finned or limbed modern vertebrates were completely limbless, little more than undulating ribbons of eel-like swimmers, and our appendages are evolutionary novelties, less than 500 million years old. The arthropods, on the other hand, have been flourishing elaborate limbs for as long as they appear in the fossil record, beginning with tracks laid down in the pre-Cambrian, easily 500 million years ago. The last common ancestor of insects and mammals was a legless worm, and each of our lineages independently worked out how to build limbs, so they can’t be homologous.

The same can be said of other structures, like our eyes: The mirror eyes of scallops, the compound eyes of arthropods, and the camera eyes of chordates each represent a unique and unlinked solution to the problem of vision. We would not call a dragonfly eye and a human eye homologous—they seem so different, in so many ways, and the evidence suggests that our last common ancestor was eyeless, with little more than photosensitive spots.

And yet…

A curious phenomenon has nagged at biologists for the past few decades, as they have acquired better tools for probing deeper into the molecular biology of diverse organisms. Where they once assumed that the passage of vast amounts of time, over half a billion years in this case, would have produced divergences in the molecular patterns that govern animal forms as radical as those seen in the forms themselves, it now seems that something else transpired. As we discover more about the molecular basis of building structures like limbs and eyes, we’re finding more instances of homologous molecular players being recruited to do similar jobs in morphological features that are not themselves homologous.

Take insect and vertebrate limbs. They evolved independently, but the molecules that stake out the orientation and location of the various tissues within both kinds of limbs are homologous to an impressive degree. For example, a gene named distal-less in flies affects the tips of the limbs most strongly. A homologous mouse gene called Dlx, revealed as such by their nearly identical sequences, is similarly important in regulating the formation of the most distal elements of the limb.

The similarities go further. The dorsal-ventral boundaries of the vertebrate limb bud and the insect wing disc are established by a gene called fringe; other axes and boundaries are defined by genes in the wingless, apterous, hedgehog, and decapentaplegic families, and they operate in roughly similar ways in both groups of animals. This is like discovering that two cultures have independently invented a game like basketball, and then finding that while the games look vastly different in play, the court dimensions are the same, right down to the distance of the three-point line and the diameter of the center circle. It should make one question how independent their origins actually are.

The underlying similarities in eyes are even more striking. Eyes have evolved dozens of times and diverged wildly, as in the compound eyes of insects and the camera eyes of vertebrates, and have also on occasion converged on similar solutions. The octopus eye and the human eye superficially resemble each other from the outside, but structurally the tissues of each are organized in profoundly different ways, with different arrangements of cells in the retina, different kinds of photosensitive cells, and very different optic nerves. Dig deeper still, however, and all these eyes—octopus eyes, human eyes, fly eyes, spider eyes, flatworm eyespots—have a common master regulator gene, called Pax-6 in vertebrates and eyeless in flies. Wherever the animal expresses this gene, it initiates a cascade of activity that leads to the formation of an eye. And the genes are interchangeable! Extract Pax-6 from a mouse, inject it and express it in the limb of a fly, and the confused tissues of the fly will respond by assembling an eye—a fly’s eye—on its limb.

The photoreceptor types in the eyes were once thought to be distinct. Invertebrates have rhabodomeric cells that use a special version of the photopigment called r-opsin, and activate cells by a particular pathway called a phospholipase-C cascade. We vertebrates have ciliary cells, c-opsin, and a phosphodiesterase pathway. These are fundamental differences, and scientists have not changed their minds about the large differences between the two, but they have discovered an enlightening fact. Many animals have both! In our eyes, we primarily use the ciliary photoreceptors for vision, but we also maintain a set of rhabdomeric photoreceptors that have the job of sensing light to set circadian rhythms. Some invertebrates also have both, but they use the rhabdomeric receptors for vision and the ciliary receptors for circadian rhythms. It is not a difference in kind, but a difference in specialization and emphasis that distinguishes the visual systems of each lineage.

To make sense of the apparent conflict between anatomical divergence and a shared genetic inheritance, three biologists—Neil Shubin, Cliff Tabin, and Sean Carroll—have proposed that we need a new concept that they call deep homology. Evolution is a tinkerer that cobbles together new functions from old ones, and the genome is a kind of parts bin of recyclable elements. When new features evolve, the parts in the bin are co-opted to operate in new roles. As a result, the same parts appear in anatomically and evolutionarily distinct structures because it is faster and easier to reuse an old gene network that almost does what is needed, than it is to spend another few million years evolving a distinct gene for the function.

This makes these master genes precisely analogous to the stock of goods found in a hobbyist’s electronics store. Standard subunits—oscillators, op-amps, field effect transistors, switches, rheostats, and so forth—will get incorporated into many different kinds of projects; whether she is building a radio or a synthesizer or a burglar alarm, the hobbyist will find it easier to just grab an oscillator integrated circuit off the shelf than to design her own. We could sample devices built by different hobbyists with different purposes, and when we rummaged about in their insides, we would find the same subunits incorporated into novel, larger assemblies.

This is what we’re seeing in biology, too. We find an evolutionary novelty, like the vertebrate limb, and we can determine that it arose uniquely in our lineage. At the same time, we find a deeper heritage of shared genes that we hold in common with all other animals—a metazoan tool kit upon which we all draw to evolve.

Tags: evolution, Nature, Science, PZ Myers, The Deepest Links, Seed Magazine, Evolution is a tinkerer, Pharyngula, adaptation

God, Strings, Emergence, and the Future of the World By Nicola Hoggard Creegan

A new issue of The Global Spiral is out, with some great new articles that will be presented at the Metanexus Conference next week in Phoenix, AZ. I had planned to go, but life doesn't always conform to my plans.

Here's one of the many great articles.

God, Strings, Emergence, and the Future of the World

By Nicola Hoggard Creegan

Introduction

This paper is a part of a larger project in which I argue that a reconnection with nature, and a reconceptualization of nature, are necessary accompaniments to a well developed sensus divinitatis. Schleiermacher talks about faith being neither a knowing nor a doing but a kind of feeling, a sense of absolute dependence, and a consequent understanding of all things in and through the infinite.¹ Calvin mentions the sensus divinitatis directly, and also the connection between this sense and the natural world.² Like any capacity, however, it may remain undeveloped or under-developed. The sensus divinitatis may be awakened by connection with, and participation in the natural world—as centuries of mystics testify—although this connection is then explained by and made meaningful in sacred narratives.

The twentieth century has not been an easy time for a theology of nature. This was the century of Karl Barth and a turn away from nature in the interests of affirming the otherness and holiness of God. At the same time, neo-Darwinians taught us to look at all order as only design-like (spandrels). The indeterminacy of the quantum level, combined with the random nature of biological mutation, made any sense of divine presence in nature much more difficult to discern.

The resulting mix of positions in science and theology tended to gravitate either towards a deism, like that espoused by the 2006 recipient of the Templeton Prize, John Barrow, or to the process-like position of many others, like Ian Barbour. Even with the latter, however, there is little sense that God is revealed in nature; in a process theology of nature there is only the presence and influence of God understood as a continuous but perhaps indiscernible lure.

Towards the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, however, there has been a pronounced turn back towards a theology of nature. This has been inspired in part by the growth of eco-theology and by an increasing awareness of the fragility of the planet, and is evident in the new theological language of recent years. Alister McGrath has written on the re-enchantment of nature.³ More recently Anna Primavesi speaks of appreciating the paradoxical in nature,⁴ while those within the ranks of radical orthodoxy argue for a participatory ontology, that is, the understanding that all things exist in and through God rather than as independent beings in their own right, a mistake they credit first to Duns Scotus.⁵ Moreover, animals have now become the objects of theological attention and concern.⁶

But what bearing does this theological return to nature have on science, and what place does science have in illuminating eschatology? I will argue that science and theology, including eschatology, should be brought into conscious dialogue at a level of deep grammar. Negative judgments about the compatibility of science and theology are usually made at the level of intuition. This is the level at which the sensus divinitatis is operating or has been stilled. Many assume that science knows almost all there is to know. We can trace the very small and the very large; we know how cells work, how galaxies hang together and how protein folds. Intuitively it is felt that talk of life after death or of a new heavens and a new earth is incommensurate with such scientific knowledge. Where in all the 12 billion years worth of space might there be room for such things?

Shifts of emphasis in the sciences are changing all this. I will argue that there are a number of aspects of the physical world now apparent to contemporary science which makes a conversation between science and eschatology more fruitful and more fitting than was previously the case. For science and eschatology to have any rapprochement requires the possibility of discernment of purpose within nature and the recognition that that we do indeed see all finite things “in and through the infinite,” that there is an infinite depth to reality, and that we observe only a very small part in the aspects we know as ‘nature.’ Both purpose and depth are of the essence of an eschatological outlook, one which believes by faith that God has not dangled ‘eternity’ in our eyes only to take it from us, but that there will be an end or telos to all things, when “God will be all in all.”⁷ For this to be possible, even though it will always be inscrutable and the movements of God are hidden, requires that we believe in a bigger world than the one we grasp, even in its present immensity, and also that we discern a direction, a movement within a larger whole which can be described as the perception of purpose.

Recent developments in science which are compatible with these eschatological evidences include i) a re-interpretation of evolutionary development that gives more weight to the nature of the constraints under which random mutational change works, and hence more weight to the direction these constraints impose on the process; ii) the advent of the science and philosophy of emergence, in which it is recognized that new ontological states emerge in unpredictable ways from previous states and that the universe will undoubtedly experience more of these; iii) chaos theory, and the pioneering of the physics of strings and of eleven dimensions, of which our small four dimensional time-space continuum is but a small subset. I will argue that the first of these give rumours of purpose and that the second and third present hints of an immensity beyond that which we can see and comprehend. All of this is required if the grammar of eschatology and that of science are to be even partially reconciled.

This new science speaks of a world of wonder and immensity and paradox, a world that can be seen as “re-enchanted” because it is more dense, more interconnected, and more numinous than it once appeared. Science is beginning to glimpse what was once the domain of human intuition and fantasy. What we know of this world is necessarily limited; we can apprehend only a very small slice of all there is. We no longer need to attempt to reconcile transcendent religious longing and hope with the machine-like world of earlier science. In the flat land of scientific modernity God appeared to have so few resources with which to work eschatologically. The more science reduced life to molecular activity and agonized over how many cells constituted personhood, the more it became unthinkable to believe in post-mortem existence. The more scientists believed they were close to cracking the comprehensive understanding of reality, the less room there appeared for the unseen things that faith describes. Now the near impossible glimpses of the future attested by individual and corporate eschatology encounter an almost equally impossible science. Of course eschatology will always remain a matter of faith, something affirmed, as Schleiermacher intimated, at an intuitive, feeling level. But its vision of the future becomes less unthinkable in a natural world which, contemporary science shows, confronts us with its strangeness and otherness.

If we can perceive of God as closely involved in this vast and complex and paradoxical natural world, the more resources God can appear to have to bring a new order of being into existence, an order that is in continuity as well as in discontinuity with this one. If we are able to catch a glimpse of God’s presence in the natural world, our faith in the purposes God has for the natural world will only be increased. At the same time the faith intuitions we experience at the level of feeling are more likely to be satisfied by the juxtaposing of these with scientific understandings.

In what follows I do not explore how we might imagine the resurrection state, or life after death, or the new heavens and the new earth, or how we might understand them scientifically. Much of that necessarily remains obscure, even if wondering “what if” is intriguing and a part of the imagination of piety. In a paradoxical sense, the whole of God’s revelation is densely hidden. Moreover death itself has still a “sting,” a part of which is our not knowing and not being able to understand God’s activity. We may even be said to intensify the sting of death by our illusory sense of understanding comprehensively what, in fact, we really understand so superficially.

My goal is to examine the ways in which science has limited our imaginations and deadened our intuitive connection to God through nature, and to identify some of the ways in which newer understandings of science, which are more compatible with a theological formulation of God’s surprising and unexpected work in creation, may encourage that connection. For if we are able to re-conceptualize nature as purposeful, and divinely imbued—even if tragically flawed for whatever reason—a conversation between science and Scripture, and particularly a conversation with eschatology, becomes both feasible and rewarding.

I will proceed by examining first the grammar of theology, to show that Christian theology has always assumed God’s presence in and guidance of creation. I will then examine three aspects of the scientific understanding of creation which, although not demanding of a theological interpretation, do allow more interaction with theological notions of eschatology.

The grammar of theology

Christian eschatology, at least in its more orthodox conceptions, necessarily points to the future, to an after-life and to a whole new order. But to what extent does it really speak of nature as intrinsically God’s? Is recent theological language of re-enchantment a new and imaginative reconstrual of traditional belief? Or is it the case, as I believe it is, that Scripture and theology have always affirmed that the whole of the natural order is undergirded by and permeated with the divine.

Many theologians speak of space and time as theological concepts. The old theological language of creation, providence and governance of nature, together with newer understandings of God’s proleptic call to the future, speak undeniably of God’s indwelling of nature. When theologians speak like this, they point to a deep grammar of God’s immanence in and ultimate concern for creation rather than a day by day meddling.

The testimony of Scripture

Throughout Scripture there is explicit and implicit mention made of God’s intimate involvement with the natural world. Parts of Scripture, like passages which speak of the trees “clapping their hands” (Isa 55:12), could be dismissed as mere metaphor. But the witness to God’s closeness to creation is found in every part and at every level the Scripture. It is not just that “in the beginning” everything was made good. There are affirmations that life itself is God’s special preserve, that life is induced by the breath of God (Gen 2:7). God exists in covenant relation with humankind and “with every living creature of all flesh” (Gen 9:11). Therefore our fate and the fate of all creation is closely linked with God’s.

Throughout the Old Testament there are references to the earth as God’s temple,⁸ the sphere God fills with God’s presence, and images of temple continue on in the New Testament, albeit with slightly changed reference. Christ, as well as being the son of Mary and Joseph, has cosmic connections. He is both a bringer of the gospel, and also a calmer of the seas and a worker of miracles in the natural sphere. His followers are told to preach the gospel, not just to human beings, but to the whole of creation (Mark 16:15). At the end of the canonical story, we learn that there will be a new heavens and a new earth and that God will dwell with us on earth (Rev 21).

More than any other player, it is the Holy Spirit who speaks of God’s closeness to the cosmos. The Spirit is that boundless, relentless love of God set forth in redemption and in creation, to blow wherever it wills, to inspire and to revive the dull (Ezek 37) and to raise the dead (Rom 8:11) Speaking of the Spirit, Denis Edwards writes: “The Spirit breathes life into the universe and all its creatures. The story of the Spirit begins not with Pentecost but with the origins of the Big Bang.”⁹ “The Spirit,” he continues, “can be thought of as the ecstasy of the divine Communion, the pure abundance and free overflow of the divine life immanent in creation and grace.”¹⁰

One passage where all of this is brought to a climax is Colossians 1:15-19.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him.

Whatever this poem means, it is scarcely reconcilable with a shallow mechanical view of the world. Nor is it reconcilable with an entirely knowable or wholly random universe, nor with a universe in which God is absent or even appears to be absent. The text does not require some arbitrary projection of ontology onto trees or nature, but it does require, at least, an appreciationof the billions of years connection between God and the natural world, long before humans ever arrived, a recognition of what Ruth Page calls “pansyntheism”, God with everything.¹¹

Scripture, then, speaks of a God who is in intimate contact with and governance of nature. Theology, from whatever period, also speaks in terms of God’s intimate indwelling of all that exists.

Theology before Darwin

Before Darwin there was ample theological testimony to this God of nature. “The medieval view of nature, inherited from remnants of the Aristotelian, Platonic and Christian views,” was, as Neil Evernden argues in The Social Creation of Nature, “one resplendent with notions of vitality and otherness, overflowing with the ‘signatures’ of God, its creator. Nature was not ours to tame or to own. It was God’s and could only be known empathically.”¹²

If subsequent theology can be accused of ignoring nature, it is only because its story of human salvation has at times eclipsed proper attention to the natural world. Jonathan Edwards stands out as a prime example of a theologian before Darwin who took the creation seriously, and who studied it as a way of understanding God. Wallace Anderson describes how Edwards “portrayed reality as the emanation, the ‘breathing forth’ of God. The word and idea were somehow unified in an epistemological, metaphysical, and even ontological sense, and conveyed the larger, underlying unity of God and creation.”¹³ This is exemplified by Edwards himself in the Images and Shadows of Divine Things:

Therefore ‘tis allowed that God does purposely make and order one thing to be in an agreeableness and harmony with another. And if so, why should not we suppose that he makes the inferior in imitation of the superior, the material of the spiritual, on purpose to have a resemblance and shadow of them? We see that even in the material world God makes one part of it strangely to agree with another; and why is it not reasonable to suppose he makes the whole as a shadow of the spiritual world?¹⁴

Edwards goes on to affirm the sense of purpose in both nature and theology by saying: “all the world, from growing things, to history of redemption is in a progressive state.”¹⁵

Contemporary theology

Edwards is not unique is his theological appreciation of nature. Consider, for example, Colin Gunton. Speaking of the doctrine of creation he says:

A third feature…also deriving from its Trinitarian structure, is that God remains in close relations of interaction with the creation, but in such a way that he makes it free to be itself. God’s transcendence as the maker of all things is not of such a kind that he is unable also to be immanent in it through his ’two hands.’¹⁶

Conservation, preservation, providence, and redemption, he continues, “are all to do with the way God works in and towards the creation”.¹⁷ All of these are evidence, too, that God has purposes for creation which are not entirely obscured. More recently Robert Jenson has underlined this view when he says:

Theology need not demand that the sciences reopen themselves to teleological explanations–though for all anyone know this too might prove beneficial. But even if the particular sciences must continue to bracket teleology, it is integral to any plausible general interpretation of the world.¹⁸

Such theology is shot through with affirmation that God is very close to the natural world, that God’s glory is revealed in nature, and that the natural world requires the ongoing work of God to exist. God is not posited as a weak force, nor as one secondary cause among many others; rather the “grammar” of God suggests One on which all else is intimately and continuously dependent, acting so to speak at right angles to all other causes. This coheres with the steadfast view of Scripture in which Spirit and logos are the very essence of life and order. The deist picture of the world, now so common, is not found in Scripture at all. Nor to be found there is the Barthian suggestion that God is revealed only through the Word, nor the Calvinist belief that our fallenness is so great that we cannot naturally perceive God’s presence in the beauties of the world around us.

This rich biblical and theological appreciation of nature invites dialogue with science. One objection to such dialogue may be to claim that the two disciplines are non-overlapping magisteria, whose deeper structures never touch. Yet theology has always resisted the idea that knowledge can be compartmentalized in this way. Faith in God’s truth also resists any absolute demarcation, demanding that the two disciplines be brought together in some way, even if this means, as it does for creationists, that modern science is rejected.

A more promising alternative is to attempt a “transversal juxtaposition” of the worlds of science and theology. In this method, developed so well by J. Wentzel Van Huyssteen, the metaphors and life-worlds of two or more disciplines are brought into respectful contact.¹⁹ Neither is reduced to the other, and neither discipline can trump the other. Science cannot trump religion’s sense of the numinosity and promise of nature, something to which Scripture refers and which so many ancient societies lived within. This sense of wonder and promise must always be present in any attempt to understand nature and eschatology, whether theologically or scientifically.

Science beyond quantum and the machine world

Yet the twentieth century was not an easy time for reconciling theology with science. Theology was wary, but in part because science gave so little with which to work. Machine models of the universe were common, and although a certain strangeness entered the scientific scene with quantum mechanics, in some ways this only gave us another kind of randomness, in addition to that implicit in natural selection. Neither shallow mechanism nor randomness appeared reconcilable with the deep careful molding of creation by the God of theology and Scripture. John Haught expresses the dilemma this way:

The main issue now as always, is that of how to reconcile evolution with the idea of divine providence. After Darwin, what does it mean to say that God ‘provides’ or cares for the world?...What most perplexes theology is the Darwinian recipe for the evolution of life over the last 4 billion years.²⁰

Haught’s answer is to go “deeper,” to the see the creativity of God as inherent in randomness, and to appeal to the notion of God’s kenosis in Christ’s incarnation in the world. Others attempt to resolve the dilemma by proposing that we should be seeking, not evidence of God’s purposes in nature, but instead God’s purposes for nature.²¹ Still others, like Alister McGrath, appeal to the way in which all explanations of nature are socially constructed, arguing that Christians have every right to choose to construct reality as God’s creation.²² Yet none of these approaches speaks to the deep unease that scientific portraits of the world create for theological grammar, especially in the area of eschatology.

The approach I wish to advocate stems from recognition that our intuitive religious sense, and our sense of wonder, depend upon a deep connection to nature. Seeing God in and not only for the natural world is vital for faith. I am convinced that there has been a long evolutionary process, that we are kin in more ways than one to all the animals, but I am not convinced that God’s involvement in this process must be opaque. Yet nor do I think that God’s hand is as obvious as some proponents of Intelligent Design claim. If the hand of God is at work, it is in the subtle fabric of the evolutionary process itself.

Beyond Darwin

We may begin with Darwinism, which is particularly interesting because it has been in a dialogue of sorts with theology for over a hundred years now. Darwinism, of course, is no longer just survival of the fittest and natural selection; it has long since become more sophisticated. On its edges there are understandings which have gone beyond traditional Darwinian reductionism and are already operating within a paradigm more conducive to theological notions of telos. Jonathan Sapp has recently given us a tour of the heterodoxy of evolutionary interpretation in the previous one hundred and fifty years.²³ If Sapp is right there have always been less orthodox voices in the evolutionary mix, and evolution may be construed as equally cooperative and competitive; information flows also from the gene to the environment and backwards as well. With the cracking of the human genome and recent strides in evolutionary theory there have been subtle changes, moving the ground just far enough from a Dawkins-type Darwinism to be more conducive to the idea of formal and final causes behind the evolutionary processes.²⁴

For one hundred and fifty years, give or take a few mavericks, and less known schools of thought, evolution has been seen in a functionalist way, as gradually adding information to the DNA structure, driven only by a randomness the blunt instrument of survival with vague notions of fitness fields hovering somewhere in the background. There is a whole school of evolutionary thought, however, which has until recently received almost no attention. Stephen J. Gould discusses this in a paper entitled...”A Developmental Constraint in Cerion.”²⁵ In this paper Gould discusses the place of constraints in the evolutionary process. Gould, himself had some sort of failure of nerve and reverted back to his doctrine of historical contingency and natural selection in the last decade of his life.

There are now a huge number of other approaches to evolution than the ones made popular in the human mind by Richard Dawkins who is always slanting the Central Dogma of evolution toward one that leads inexorably to the presumption of atheism. The best known alternative voice in this respect is Simon Conway Morris, Cambridge palaeontologist of the Burgess Shale. Conway Morris notes that the evolutionary process comes up with the same or similar answers again and again, namely a pattern of parallel evolution or “convergence”. He likens this to the progression of Polynesians out of Asia into the Pacific Islands. They did not, apparently, go randomly out into the ocean to meet an almost certain death. They had a method for finding islands, using currents, and then returning to base if they found nothing. Evolution proceeds similarly, Conway Morris argues, not selecting from a random set of possibilities but from a much narrower number of outcomes. Some as yet unknown mechanisms guide the evolutionary process toward specific goals, like sentience and spirituality.²⁶ Moreover the scope of this convergence appears to be almost endless in itself. There is a convergence of intelligence, albeit different kinds of intelligence. The prime examples of this is the parallel development of intelligence in crows and apes. Another example, though, is the development of a distributed non-central type of intelligence in colonies and plants. Molecules also exhibit this convergence.²⁷

Constraints and self-organising elements, creativity in the very centre of life, all point to a process which is ‘guided’ from below by deep inner principles of life, by a geometry of sorts—suggestive perhaps of logos. The mystery of life itself is evocative of the constant upholding of being in a dimension at “right angles” to our present existence. Thus God works from below and more actively to uphold all that exists, without in any sense cancelling the freedom, nor the apparent randomness and indeed historical contingency of parts of the process of evolution. What matters to theology here, is that the process is not at heart one of randomness, driven only by the ever pressing will to survive and dominate others. There are deeper, more loving, gentler aspects at work which can be seen to set the direction of the evolutionary process.

This makes more possible a reconciliation of evolutionary theory with theological impulses which affirm the salvation of humans and of creatures as the telos or end of history. If there are deep constraints, working at the level of natural law, as strong and as constraining as gravity and the weak and strong nuclear forces, then we are dealing with a very different phenomenon. This makes more possible the sense that there might be final causes working alongside the efficient and material causes in nature. And if purpose is discernible, as argued in the introduction, then science and eschatology are more compatible.

John Haught, in a recent address, urged us to recognize that evolution can be seen in this multi-layered way, that scientific explanations need not exhaust the possibilities for explanation of a biological event. Nevertheless, offering explanations at several different levels only works if these do not contradict one another or cancel one another out. Natural selection by blind mutation has always had a grammar all but incompatible with that of the indwelling logos and life breathing Spirit. Newer understandings of evolution may break this deep incompatibility and open up new visions of a biology consistent with final causes. In this way, although theology is not directly adding to science, it is contributing to the sense or meaning of the picture science presents.

Others who enter into more exploratory engagements with evolutionary theory include Stuart Kauffmann, Michael Denton, Sean Carroll and Christian de Duve.²⁸ Ian Stewart draws links between mathematics and biology, arguing for levels of reality working in such a complex fashion that they are unpredictable by human observers. The idea that mutations allow an organism to explore its “phase space” and that these are mathematically situated in some as yet unknown manner is subtly but importantly different from the genuinely random mutations of neo-Darwinism.²⁹ Stewart does not at all deny natural selection, which is responsible, he thinks, for the forward movement of the evolutionary process, but he does insist that the constraints on the evolutionary process are of great importance and have been overlooked. These constraints are mathematically determined and are responsible for the recurring patterns and fractal type proportions—not to mention beauty—that keep re-emerging within biology. This sort of understanding of evolution is much more compatible with the perseverance and governing love of God that is a purely random process without constraints.

Both Conway Morris and Ian Stewart allow an understanding of evolution as full of promise and direction, although not a direction that in any sense undermines or devalues the steps along the way. Both see evolution as law-like and humanity as in some sense the telos of evolutionary progress. This resonates with an eschatological paradigm. While we cannot look to evolution to find the key to the universe, or to know God’s ultimate purposes, the theological idea of an ultimate eschatological purpose behind reality is consistent with a progressive evolutionary process, and much less consistent with a random process in which there are no guiding constraints. None of it is conclusive or definitive. A strictly atheistic or agonistic explanation is still always possible. But what was barely audible in science a few decades ago, the possibility of seeing purpose and connection in the natural world, is now being beginning to be heard.

In this respect it is sometimes hard to overestimate the deadening role that Darwinian reductionism has had on religious perceptions for over a century, teaching us systematically to read design as random order. Yet Darwinian insights can also vastly expand and enrich our theological life. Darwin has enabled us to understand deep time and to appreciate the radical interconnection of all life, bound together by common ancestry, insights rich in theological potential.

Emergence, chaos theory and strings

The other characteristic of a science that might speak in the same grammar as theology is one that is aware of the depth of nature beyond our knowing, even our possible knowing. This sense of depth is important in allowing faith space to work. The theory of “emergence” is another clue to God, or at least the possibility of God, and hence of an eschatology. Emergence is recognizable in a number of natural phenomena. Take the hardness of water as it freezes for example. At a certain point a new phenomenon occurs which is not reducible to previous states, even though it has emerged out of them. The universe seems to be full of examples of emergence at every level, of solid planetary bodies from gaseous precursors, of light emerging out of darkness 900,000 light years after the Big Bang, perhaps of life emerging out of the primal mud, of consciousness out of the long evolution of hominids.³⁰

In a world dominated by positivism and reductionist science, distinct levels of reality have long been explained away. Emergence, at least in some of its forms, counters this reductionism, claiming that higher ontological levels really do exist, that direction and movement toward another level is not illusory. There is now a whole science of emergence, with strong and weak forms, and with various thresholds being debated depending on whether the new state can be predicted, whether it acts back upon the substrata, where it is composed or non-composed.

One of the theological repercussions of the science of emergence is that however thorough we think our knowledge of the universe to be, it is likely to be very scant. For inevitably there will be new emergent levels in the future about which we can know nothing or very little in the present. Although a new emergent level sometimes “makes sense” backwards it cannot be predicted or anticipated forwards. This gives us hope that there will indeed be a final, eschatological transformation which will emerge out of this universe, a universe which currently appears to be headed only for annihilation, darkness and emptiness.³¹ Emergence does not necessitate such but it does begin to open up the possibility within the imaginable for the first time in two hundred years. Extrapolating from present parameters gives us only future death—of our species, of our sun, of our galaxy. But extrapolating from previous emergences of new phenomena suggests there may be surprises in the future we cannot yet envisage or begin to imagine. Overall, a conception of strong emergence points to hierarchies of existence, and to an ongoing process whereby the universe, presumably as it is indwelt by God and transformed by incarnation, gives rise by an emergent process to new and surprising states of being.

Similarly, there has been an explosion of interest in string theory. String theory postulates that the universe is constituted, not of elementary particles, but of resonating strings in ten or eleven dimensions. Surpassing string theory is M theory—the very recent contender to the “theory of everything”—which goes further and postulates that reality is lived on a membrane in eleven dimensions. If true, string theory/M theory affords a view of the world that is more wonderful and strange than ever before. It is a world not only of eleven dimensions but of parallel universes.

Physicists are not yet decided on string theory, though some form of testing will be done in the new particle Hadron accelerator in 2010. I am inclined to believe that even if string theory is not true, then something even more improbable is needed to describe reality. For one thing, mathematics deals easily in multiple dimensions. If it can be done it in two or three dimenions, why not in four or eleven. Mathematics also becomes paradoxical around the infinite. There are higher and lower levels of infinity. There are other paradoxes at the heart of mathematics, in set theory for instance. If the universe is reflected in some way mathematically, then it is not surprising that it would also bear puzzles and paradoxes far beyond our grasp, however sophisticated our theories may become. String theory, then, gives us glimpses of immensity, placing our present four dimensional existence into perspective, and is therefore very conducive to a conversation with theology, and in particular with eschatology.

Chaos theory also breaks up the old deterministic mechanistic worldview. Chaos theory postulates the existence of complex systems in which slight differences in boundary points lead to widely varying end results. Neither the initial conditions nor the end result is predictable, yet patterns of great beauty emerge out of these systems. Chaos theory can be used to ‘model’ everything from storms and air flow to economic systems. Chaos give us glimpses of order—in spite of its name—emerging out of unpredictable and highly variable states. These have been understood to mirror both the orderedness and the ‘freedom’ of complex reality. Chaos also gives us a sense of depth and breadth and a tantalising beyondness to our grasp of physical reality, suggesting the possibility of God and of an end point in and beyond the chaos.

I commented earlier that we are sometimes tempted to wonder whether God has enough resources to bring off the eschaton, especially when the cards seem stacked against the very survival of life on this planet. Developments in physics, such as M theory and string theory, give reason to pause, and caution against asking too many pedantic questions about how exactly life after death fits into our truncated views of reality. For strings give us a glimpse of the enormity of God’s resources, the enormity of the project that would bring the universe or universes to another phase of existence. Worm holes, parallel universes, and eleven dimensions are like rumours of the mysterious interconnections between heaven and earth.

Conclusion

All of this makes possible what has been absent for a long time—a theology of nature that is truly in “transversal” conversation with science. But this is only possible if Christian believers become less cautious about their engagement with science. A new science is giving us a renewed sense of our interconnection with all things, of our relationality, and of the numinosity, extraordinary depth and prodigious richness of nature.

This change of paradigm extends also to ourselves. Just as God has become one with us, we too must recognize our oneness with nature. We must journey conceptually back into nature, to recognize the richness of the nature that has brought us forth, inspirited as it is by God. The journey must be spiritual, emotional and rational, for our connection to nature and our sensus divinitatis contain elements of all of these. The way we think about nature inevitably affects our intuitions and attachments to God. If we can reconnect with the natural world, we may be able to reconnect with God, and with the story of God that has its resolution in resurrection and return.

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Notes

1 Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, translated by John Oman (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958), 36.; Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, edited by H.R. Mackintosh and J.S. Stewart (Fortress, 1976), 36f.

2 John Clavin, Institues, Vol 1:3,

3 Alister McGrath, The Re-enchantment of Nature (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2003)

4 Anne Primavesi, Sacred Gaia (Routledge, 2000), 69f

5 Catherine Pickstock, John Milbank, Graham Ward, editors, Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, (Oxford: Routledge, 1999) 50f

6 See for example, Andrew Linzey, Animal Theology (London: SCM, 1994)

7 1 Cor 15:28

8 See for example Rikk Watts’ discussion of this in Rikk Watts, "The New Exodus/New Creational Restoration of the Image of God," in What Does It Mean to Be Saved?, edited by John G. Stackhouse (Grand Rapids, MI: BakerAcademic, 2002).

9 Denis Edwards, Breath of Life: A Theology of the Creator Spirit (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2004), 171.

10 Ibid. 174.

11 Ruth Page, God and the Web of Creation (London: SCM Press, 1996), 40.

12 See Neil Evernden, The Social Creation of Nature (Baltimore/London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1992).

13 Wallace E. Anderson, "Editor's Introduction," in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, edited by Wallace E. Anderson, Mason I. Lowance Jr., and David Watters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 26.

14 Jonathan Edwards, "Images and Shadows of Divine Things," in The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Typological Writings, edited by Wallace E. Anderson, Mason I. Lowance Jr., and David Watters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 53, #8.

15 “Images and Shadows” #10

16 Colin E. Gunton, "The Doctrine of Creation," in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, edited by Colin E. Gunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 142.

17 Ibid., 143.

18 Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology: The Works of God. Volume 2. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 128

19 J.Wentzel Van Huyssteen, Alone in the World?: Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006)

20 John F. Haught, "The Boyle Lecture 2003: Darwin, Design and the Promise of Nature," Science and Christian Belief 17/1 (2005), 5.

21 Ted Peters and Martinez Hewlett, Evolution from Creation to New Creation: Conflict, Conversation, and Convergence (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2003), 167.

22 Alister E. McGrath, Scientific Theology, Volume 1, Nature (London & New York: T&T Clark, 2001), 110f, 33.

23 Jan Sapp,Genesis: The Evolution of Biology, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)

24 Ian Stewart, Life’s Other Secret: The New Mathematics of the Living World, (New York: John Wiley, 1998)

25 Stephen J. Gould, “A Developmental Constrain in Cerion, with Comments of theDefinition and Interpretation of Constraint in Evolution, Evolution, 43/3, (1989), 516-539

26 Simon Conway Morris, Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 2.

27 See Simon Conway Morris (ed) The Deep Structure of Biology, (Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2008)

28 Christian De Duve, Vital Dust: Life as a Cosmic Imperative, (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Michael J. Denton, Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe, (New York: The Free Press, 1998); Sean B. Carroll, Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom, ( New York: W. W. Norton, 2005); Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)

29 Stewart, 111.

30See for example, Philip Clayton, Mind and Emergence: From Quantum to Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

31 William R. Stroeger S.J., "Scientific Accounts of Ultimate Catastrophes in Our Life-Bearing Universe," in The End of the World and the Ends of God: Science and Theology on Eschatology, edited by John Polkinghorne and Michael Welker (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000).

Tags: God, Strings, Emergence, Future of the World, Nicola Hoggard Creegan, The Global Spiral, Metanexus Institute, Science, Religion, Spirituality, Nature, sensus divinitatis, theology