VII. Our Earthuman Ascent: A Major Evolutionary Transition in Twindividuality

6. Bilateral World Religions and Science

Southgate, Christopher, et al. God, Humanity and the Cosmos. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999. A multi-author textbook that covers a wide range of subjects from epistemology, the new physics, evolutionary biology, psychology to Islamic thought and biotechnology and makes efforts to engage students with issues such as “Models of God in an Ecological Age.”

Spitzer, Robert, SJ. Indication of Supernatural Design in Contemporary Big Bang Cosmology. Ultimate Reality and Meaning. 27/4, 2005. The president of Gonzaga University carefully considers various models of the anthropic principle, including the current multiverse version, to conclude that our cosmos requires and exhibits such an array of finely-tuned parameters that it begs the presence of a Divine designer.

Stump, J. B. and Alan Padgett, eds. The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. This copious, inclusive tome is distinguished by 54 chapters in nine sections: Historical Episodes; Methodology; Natural Theology; Cosmology & Physics; Evolution; The Human Sciences; Christian Bioethics; Metaphysical Implications; The Mind; Theology; Significant Figures of the 20th Century. Full contents are on the publisher’s site. For a sample, we found Simon Conway Morris’ pithy “Creation and Evolutionary Convergence,” Jacqueline Broad’s “Women, Mechanical Science, and God in the Early Modern Period,” John Haught’s “Christianity and Human Evolution,” and “The Trinity and Scientific Reality” by John Polkinghorne to be of notable quality.

Targowski, Andrew. The Limits of Civilization. Hauppauge, NY: Nova Scientific,, 2016. Noted more in Complementary Civilizations, the Western Michigan University professor of computer information systems and global citizen philosopher provides another volume of luminous cultural and environmental guidance.

Taylor, Mark. After God. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. The prolific Williams College philosopher and new chair of religion at Columbia University writes an extensive essay of a 21st century encounter with numinosity reconceived in terms of a nonlinear dynamics. His earlier work, The Moment of Complexity, stands as one of the best humanist appreciations of this revolution. But it has a deep flaw similar to other works of this kind. Taylor draws in a provincial way upon the European philosophies of Gregor Hegel and Immanuel Kant to propose that the course of history, as it runs from transcendence to immanence, is really about the “self-embodiment of God,” which is fine and catches this epochal adjustment. The work goes on to provide in several places a lucid course in complex systems principles. But does Columbia know that now theologian Taylor concludes, as the final quote alludes, that all this proceeds as a fluidic novelty for its own sake, sans any ordained design and end? Other well-intentioned efforts such as Stuart Kauffman and Catherine Keller are similarly troubled in this way –much exoteric surface ‘creativity’ goes on, but the sense of a discernible, esoteric source and aim is not in play or excluded. (See “The Lord and Taylor” by Bernard Prusak in Commonweal for April 11, 2008 for a good review.)

As I have indicated, emergent complex adaptive networks are not limited to culture but can be found throughout the natural and social systems that compose the everyday world. They are not, in other words, merely subjective and epistemological but are also objective and ontological. In the final two chapters, I will attempt to show how life itself is an emergent complex adaptive network that harbors important religious dimensions, ethical norms, and political imperatives. (28)

In the present context, it is important to stress that networks and webs have the same structure and operational logic in natural, social, and cultural systems. Moreover, the interrelation and coevolution of nature, society, and culture are also governed by the dynamics of emergent complex adaptive networks. Whole and part are isomorphic; once again, interrelated networks display a fractal design. Networks are networks of networks that emerge through iteration and interrelation. (28-30)

As a network of networks, autopoietic systems are fractal – from the micro- to the macrolevel, life is an emergent self-organizing process.” (321) So understood, evolution is not simply an arbitrary process in which all things are possible. Once development starts down a certain path, alternatives are necessarily limited. Selection and self-organization are complementary: emergent self-organizing structures create networks of constraint within which natural selection can occur. (336)

Foundationalism: There seems to be no underlying ground or foundation that can secure the meaning and purpose of life. More precisely, the groundless ground from which all emerges and to which all returns (without having come full circle) approaches by withdrawing in a way that faults every foundation that seems secure. The absence of ground issues in the endless restlessness of life, in which everything is in motion and (the) all is in flux. (358) If, as I have argued, the trajectory of the coevolutionary process is toward increasing connectedness, it will become more and more urgent to develop an ethics without absolutes that can support and enrich the infinite complexity of life. (359)

Kabbalah and Complexity: Two Routes to One Reality. www.neiltheise.com. A posting from the website of the Beth Israel Medical Center philosophical pathologist that illumes lucid parallels, as there must be, between traditional Jewish wisdom and new self-organization science, from which we quote. Each try to convey in their vernacular a greater dynamic creation of interactive individuals which repeats and arrays itself into a nested ascendant hierarchy.

Further insights into such once and future common edification can be garnered from Dr. Theise’s publications: “Understanding Cell Lineages as Complex Adaptive Systems” in Blood, Cells, Molecules, and Diseases (32/1, 2004), and “Implications of ‘Postmodern Biology’ for Pathology” in Laboratory Investigation (86/4, 2006).

Now let’s play the film backward, instead of descending downward through levels of scale, let’s start from this ground of Being and move upward. The smallest elements of physical existence pop in and out of the void and then, interacting, they self-organize into different subatomic particles which then self-organize into still larger sub-atomic particles, and then, in turn, into atoms, then into biomolecules, cells, bodies, communities (of all kinds: villages, cultures, ecosystems, Gaia). All of existence, then, is simply the emergent self-organization of whatever arises from the Ground of Being.

And thus, we have a scientific correlate to the Kabbalistic description of creation. The first emergence of the world according to the big bang theory occurs in just this manner, the earliest manifestations of matter and energy self-organizing, moment by moment, as the universe cools, into larger and more complex structures. As the self-organizing emergence continued, historically, through ever changing conditions, the world as we know it emerged.

Troster, Lawrence. The Order of Creation and the Emerging God: Evolution and Divine Action in the Natural World. Cantor, Geoffrey and Marc Swetlitz, eds. Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. The Jewish chaplain at Bard College considers the writings of Paul Davies, Hans Jonas and John Haught in search of a modern accord of Judaic wisdom with an evolutionary emergence. If the later is seen as a Divine mode of temporal creation, albeit with much struggle and tragedy, a progression in vitality and consciousness at last fulfilled in human reflection is revealed. Thus, Judaism is not troubled by Darwin if an enhanced evolution is viewed as graced by self-organization and information, instead of the materialist model devoid of any such telos. In the same volume biologist Carl Feit considers the earlier 20th century thought of Rabbis Abraham Kook and Joseph Soloveitchik and their general affinity with Bergson and Teilhard. But throughout the collection, the holocaust casts its daunting shadow. In closing, Troster alludes that a resolve may occur with a recovery of the ‘two books of God’ metaphor whence nature, as a quickening genesis, may finally gain scriptural status.

Tucker, Mary Evelyn. Religious Dimensions of Confucianism: Cosmology and Cultivation. Philosophy East & West. 48/1, 1998. A new appreciation of Chinese wisdom is seen to be arising due much to William Theodore de Bary, Tu Wei-ming and Thomas Berry, which is so needed by our alienated, morally adrift world. The essay weaves together several historic strands by which to appreciate Confucianism as a middle way that can recognize and respect both person and cosmos in a mutually interactive reciprocity.

Ulanowicz, Robert. Ecosystem Dynamics: A Natural Middle. Theology and Science. 2/2, 2004. The philosophical ecologist considers a path between the material reductionists (E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins), who deny any creative agency, and intelligent design theists (Philip Johnson, Michael Behe) by means of process ecology and organic system theory. By this approach, a self-organizing, autocatalytic genesis becomes evident. This can replace the mechanist’s despair with a “cosmology of hope.”

Van Huyssteen, J. Wentzel. Duet or Duel?: Theology and Science in a Postmodern World. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1998. A well regarded attempt to sort through and move beyond the view that the various religions along with modern science are culturally specific and thus incompatible.

Van Huyssteen, J. Wentzel, editor in chief. Encyclopedia of Science and Religion. New York: Macmillan Reference, 2003. The broadly conceived two volume array of authors and contents, along with its preface, can be accessed at the publisher’s website www.galegroup.com. In distinction to other such works, the nascent sciences of emergent self-organization are given due credit.

Wallace, B. Alan, ed. Buddhism and Science. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. A survey of the convergence and affinity between Western domains such as quantum theory and neuropsychology with Eastern contemplative wisdom.

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