The existence of the world (all-that-is) is not self-explanatory. If we ask the famous ‘mystery of existence’ question, ‘Why is there anything at all?’, science cannot provide any answer. Whatever the physical milieu (a fluctuating quantum field, superstrings, or whatever) in or from which the universe emerged and expanded twelve billion or so years ago, no scientific account is possible for the fact of its existence as such. Nor is an account possible of the existence of the relationships it manifests (the laws of physics, such as those of quantum theory). They are not logical necessities. Thus there is not, nor can there be, any scientific account of the very existence of a universe of this kind and not some other. All has to be taken as given, as contingent, since all could have been otherwise.
The best explanation to be inferred from the very existence of the world and of the fundamental laws of physics which it instantiates is that the whole process, with all its emerging entities, is grounded in some other reality which is the source of its actual existence. Such a reality cannot but be, by definition, ultimate – it must be self-existent, the only reality with the source of its being in itself, the Ground of Being. It is not a ‘cause’ in the scientifically observed nexus of events, for that would lead to the notorious infinite regress of causes and events ad infinitum. The ‘mystery of existence’ thus points to an Ultimate Reality (the capitals denoting its uniqueness) which in some sense gives existence to all-that-is – words ‘strain, crack, and sometimes break, under the burden’1 of striving to express and refer to such a Transcendent. That such an Ultimate Reality is and was and always will be is, I am urging, the best explanation of the very existence of all-that-is. This Ultimate Reality is what gives existence to all matter-energy-space-time in their manifold forms. But what this Other, this Ultimate Reality, is is bound to be inexpressible and of a nature that, by definition, can be referred to only by metaphor, model, analogy and extrapolation.
Philosophical enquiry has unpacked further the implications of postulating the existence of this Ultimate Reality that is the source of all being and to which IBE, when applied to all-that-is, has led us. To be a coherent notion, there can only be one such Ultimate Reality, for the universe discovered by the sciences is an interlocking network of multifarious entities universally related by the same regularities and laws – it is indeed one world (see pp.42ff.). Furthermore, if the putative Ultimate Reality were itself multiple and divisible into separate realities, we would be bound to ask the origin of this multiplicity, for it would not then be ultimate. All entities, structures and processes in the world, including humanity, are too interlocked – mutually and reciprocally linked and subject to common laws – for any proposal that there is a multiplicity of originating realities to be feasible or coherent.
The world, past and present, displays a rich, cornucopian variety in its constituent entities, structures and processes. It manifests remarkable diversity, fecundity and multiple levels of complexity. So the ‘Oneness’ of the Ultimate Reality must be of such a kind that it has the capacity to give existence to this variety of entities, structures and processes (the ‘Many’). Its unity cannot be that of mere simplicity but rather of some kind of diversity-in-unity, one Being of unfathomable richness, capable of multiple expression and variegated outreach.
One of the earliest experiences of the novice research scientist is the warm glow that suffuses him or her when planned experiments or postulated theories about the natural world actually work – when it turns out that experiments can succeed in determining what was previously unknown, and that theories can explain and sometimes even predict. We recall the percipient remark of the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle quoted in chapter 1:
When by patient enquiry we learn the answer to any [scientific] problem, we always find, both as a whole and in detail, that the answer thus revealed is finer in concept and design than anything we could ever have arrived at by a random guess.2
In physics, mathematics – a free creation of human ratiocination – transpires to be the necessary means at the deepest levels for formulating the fundamental relationships on which the observable world depends.
It is not only mathematics that excites wonder. Biology at all levels (molecular, macromolecular, organismic, phenotypic, ecological) is delving more and more deeply into the structures of life. The intricacies of the interlocking mechanisms of the utilisation of food, of reproduction, of protection, of behaviour, of all that favours the survival of evolved living organisms seem to be inexhaustible. Yet they prove to be amenable to intelligent explication and to exhibit an inherent rationality different from but just as impressive in their own way as the elegant equations of fundamental physics. In this context, too, we can echo Einstein’s aphorism ‘The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.’3
But why should the world possess this embedded rationality amenable to the most comprehensive analysis of which the human mind is capable and to formulation in terms of often the most abstract of human concepts? The simplest explanation, and so the best in this global context, is that the source of the existence of all being, the Ultimate Reality, must possess something akin to, but far surpassing, human rationality – must be supremely and unsurpassedly rational.
All-that-is must in some sense also be known by its Originator for it to be the embodiment of rationality; and this Ultimate Reality that gives it existence must therefore know all that it is logically possible to know – that is, it must be omniscient. Again, ‘giving existence to’ all-that-is implies the possession of powers such that the Ultimate Reality is able to do whatever it is logically possible to do – it must be, in this sense, omnipotent.
To our ordinary perceptions, based on our senses and conscious experience, the world appears to consist of matter which possesses energy and to exist in space enduring through time. However, all of these concepts have had to be radically transformed in the light of investigations into and new understandings of the very small, the subatomic, and for anything moving at speeds comparable to that of light. Einstein’s insights at the beginning of the twentieth century not only established light as being the fastest signal that can be transmitted across the universe but also spatialised the concept of time and temporalised the concept of space. Both now have to be thought of together. Even what we mean by ‘simultaneous’ is found to depend on the frame of reference in which we are operating and its speed relative to those in other such frames whose events we seek to relate to those in our own. Much of this leads to results that are counter-intuitive, not least in the fundamental identification of matter and energy which Einstein’s analysis also entailed. Indeed, ‘e = mc2’ – representing the relation between energy (e), mass (m) and the speed of light (c) – has become a fashionable logo and is confirmed every time we turn on the light using electricity from a nuclear power station. At the most fundamental mathematical level matter (mass), energy, space and time are inseparable concepts for the physicist dealing with the subatomic and cosmological, even if this is outside the experience of our biologically limited senses. Hence, when we propose that there is an Ultimate Reality giving existence to all-that-is, that Reality must be other than, give existence to, and so transcend (‘go beyond’) matter-energy-space-time. It follows that this postulated Ultimate Reality that gives existence to all experienced space and time must know and be present to them – and so must be omnipresent and eternal, transcending all created space and time, as well as matter and energy.
Furthermore, does not the very intimacy of our relation to the fundamental features of the physical world, its so-called ‘anthropic’ features (p.70), together with the distinctiveness of personhood, point us in the direction of looking for a best explanation of all-that-is in terms of some kind of entity that could include the personal? Since the personal is the highest level of unification of the physical, mental and spiritual of which we are aware, it is legitimate to recognise that this Ultimate Reality must be at least personal, or supra-personal – that is, it will be less misleading to attach personal predicates to this Ultimate Reality than not to do so at all – for example by calling the Ultimate Reality a ‘Force’, or ‘Power’, or ‘the Absolute’, or even just ‘Reason’. In English this Ultimate Reality is therefore at least ‘he/she’ rather that ‘it’. We are therefore justified in attaching personal predicates to this Ultimate Reality, while recognising continuously and sensitively the limitations of such language. Hence, mysterious as is this source of all being, this Ultimate Reality, it transpires on reflection that he/she must be the self-existent Ground of Being; one, but a diversity-in-unity, a Being of unfathomable richness; supremely and unsurpassedly rational; omniscient; omnipotent; omnipresent and eternal; and at least personal or supra-personal. In English the name of this existent is ‘God’, with all its cognates in the other languages of the monotheistic religions, and this is the term we shall use from now on. It will be this God, a Creator God, towards whom (‘whom’ rather than ‘it’ now) our exploration will henceforth be directed.
I have already drawn attention to the fundamental revision of our concepts of time and its relation to space and of matter-energy that have been necessitated by the well-confirmed insights of Einstein and his successors. In order to understand the relation between observed events in different frames of reference, having relative velocities with respect to each other, theoretical physicists have resorted to a ‘block’ model of the universe. This involves placing events at points in a four-dimensional model (three of space plus one of time), each point representing a particular spatial location and time. Entities then trace a succession of points in this representation, which is their ‘world-line’. The relation of such world-lines, or trajectories, in four-dimensional space-time sorts out the many counter-intuitive paradoxes that result from the loss of simultaneity and from the speed of light, though immense, being an upper limit to the speed of transmission of any signals across space and time. If we take this model to be what actually exists, then we are led to what is called a ‘block view’ of the universe, or simply the ‘block universe’. On this interpretation world-lines extend until the entities they represent go out of existence; and furthermore at our present ‘now’ in our time all future events would already exist ‘there’ at a point in the block universe representing the future of the universe as a matter of unalterable fact.
One influential interpretation of God’s relation to time has often been encapsulated in the famous phrase of the fifth/sixth-century philosopher Boethius that God’s eternity is ‘the total, complete, simultaneous possession of eternal life’. In this interpretation God is aware of the contents of past, present and future with the immediacy of an eternal ‘now’. In this view, which has been dominant for many centuries, God surveys, as it were, from a mountain peak the whole sequence of past, present and future along a continuous line and knows it all. God is believed to transcend time in this almost geometrical sense. However, it has also been recognised while this notion has prevailed that this view of God’s relation to time leads to irresolvable problems concerning free will and the determination of events – the problem of predestination. This was sufficient for Milton to mock the interminable disputes to which these problems led by saying that Satan and his fallen angels in hell
reason’d high
Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,
Fix’d fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,
And found no end, in wand’ring mazes lost.4
If God knows in advance what we are to do, can our will be free and is God responsible for human evil (as well as for natural evils)? Do we then live in an absolutely determinate universe? And how does this square with the ontological indeterminancy of the outcome of measurements on quantum-mechanical systems (see p.97)? In the view of a growing number of philosophical theologians and scientist-theologians – who otherwise differ widely in their theologies and philosophies – the problems so formulated are insoluble and can be surmounted by taking note of the following considerations:
This understanding of God’s relation to time makes more intelligible than does the ‘block universe’ proposal the nature of prayer and of God’s continued personal interaction with human beings. It will be presumed in our subsequent exploration towards God from the world of science. That is, I shall assume that:5 God is not timeless; God is temporal in the sense that the divine life is successive in its relation to us – God is temporally (and so personally) related to us; there is a dipolarity in God’s relation to time – God is transcendent but also experiences succession in relation to events and persons; God creates each segment of time in the created world; God transcends past and present created time; God is eternal in the sense that there is no time at which God does not exist nor will there be a future time at which God does not exist; God is omnipresent – is present to all past events and will be to all future events.
There is a feature of time as we experience it to which so far I have drawn insufficient attention – namely, that time has a direction from the past to the future. This is inherent in our sense of self-consciousness, for we have memories of the past, experience the present ‘now’ and anticipate a future in which we shall still exist, at least for a time. This psychological sense is closely linked with the metabolic processes in our brains and bodies and of the experience of growing to maturity and subsequently of declining powers. These processes are themselves biochemical and like all such are not totally reversible. The non-reversibility of natural events has always been recognised by human beings but in the nineteenth century it was clarified and given wider significance as a result of new insights into the exchanges between different kinds of energy. Some of these forms of energy were more directional and capable of being harnessed to perform work, in mechanical processes. Others (notably heat) were more random and non-directional and proved to have limitations in the extent to which they could be interconverted. For example, not all of the heat in a system can be converted into work: there are defined limitations to the exchange. From these considerations, constituting the science of thermodynamics, it was possible to measure the degree of irreversibility of any natural process in terms of a quantity called ‘entropy’. The change in entropy during any process represents its degree of irreversibility. Later in the nineteenth century it became clear that entropy was related to the degree of randomness in the distribution of energy among the possible energy states of the system (the science of statistical thermodynamics). In all natural processes in closed systems (no matter or energy entering or leaving) it was proved that there was an increase in entropy, in randomness. Hence the quantity entropy came to be called ‘time’s arrow’ because its continued increase in natural closed systems (taken as a whole) runs parallel with the direction of the clock time of physics as well as with that of our experienced sense of time.
Along this now scientifically defined direction of time in the observed universe, new systems emerge through cosmic, physical, chemical and biological evolution. There seems in these processes to be a kind of ratchet effect whereby one level of complexity can often provide the launching stage for another more complex one – right up to the intricacies of living organisms and, eventually, of the human brain, the most complex organisation of matter known to us. The time to which the Creator God gives existence is indeed the ‘carrier and locus of innovative change’.6 In the created order, God is unfolding, by the interplay of chance and law (see pp.75ff.), the potentialities of the universe that God’s own self has given it.
In such a perspective, God has to be conceived of as relating to the continuously unfolding panorama of events and entities at all levels and so to have changing relations with them, each according to their distinctive capacity. In this regard, God is again not immutable or timeless. However, just as a human person while reacting to the kaleidoscope of experience can nevertheless display certain steady, defining characteristics, so God can be regarded as unchanging in purpose and disposition towards creation, including humanity, while reacting continuously to it in the time Godself goes on creating. This is what is referred to in the Judaeo-Christian tradition as the steadfast love and faithfulness of God which intends the ultimate good, welfare and fulfilment of creation, including humanity.
It is on this basis that this tradition has looked forward to a stage in cosmic history in which time as we know it will cease and in which God’s purposes for the created order and for humanity will be consummated by all being taken up, in some new form, into the divine life. This hope can rest only on what is believed to be the character of God as creative Love and, in my view, can have no other basis. What this consummation (this ‘End’, eschaton, Omega point) might consist in has been the subject of much speculation – including the last book of the New Testament, Revelation. I prefer to be judiciously agnostic about its nature and to rely entirely on the character of God, not only inferred as the best explanation of features of the world as we are attempting here but, to take a different tack, also on the revelation of God as self-offering Love in the person of Jesus the Christ. All speculation on detailed scenarios of this consummation, the theological exercise called ‘eschatology’, surely constitutes a supreme example of attempting to formulate a theory underdetermined by the facts. As such, it seems to me a fruitless and unnecessary exercise – for the source of Christian hope rests only on the steadfastness and faithfulness of the God who is revealed as Love.
The underlying unity of the natural world is, we have seen, evidenced in its universal embedded rationality, which the sciences assume and continue to verify. In the realm of the very small and of the very large – the subatomic and the cosmic – the extraordinary applicability of mathematics in elucidating the entities, structures and processes of the world continues to reinforce that it is indeed one world. Yet the diversity of this world is apparent not only in the purely physical – molecules, the Earth’s surface, the immensely variegated entities of the astronomical heavens – but also more strikingly in the biological world. New species continue to be discovered in spite of the destruction caused by human action.
This diversity has been rendered more intelligible in recent years by increased awareness of the principles involved in the constitution of complex systems. There is even a corresponding ‘science of complexity’ concerned with theories about them. The natural (and human) sciences give us more and more a picture of the world as consisting of complex hierarchies – a series of levels of organisation of matter in which each successive member of the series is a whole constituted of parts preceding it in the series. The wholes are organised systems of parts that are dynamically and spatially interrelated. This feature of the world is now widely recognised to be significant in relating our knowledge of its various levels of complexity – that is, the sciences that correspond to the different levels.
The concepts needed to describe and understand – and also the methods needed to investigate – each level in the hierarchy of complexity are specific to and distinctive of those levels. Sociological, psychological and biological concepts are characteristic of their own levels and quite different from those of physics and chemistry. It is very often the case (but not always) that the properties, concepts and explanations used to describe the higher-level wholes are not logically reducible to those used to describe their constituent parts. Thus sociological concepts are often not logically reducible to, that is translatable into, those of individual psychology (e.g. the difference between communities of more than three, three and two); psychological concepts are not reducible to those of the neurosciences; biological concepts to those of biochemistry, etc. Such non-reductionist assertions are about the status of a particular kind of knowledge (so they are ‘epistemological’) and are usually strongly defended by the practitioners of the science concerning the higher level of complexity. When the non-reducibility of properties, concepts and explanations applicable to higher levels of complexity is well established, their employment in scientific discourse can often, but not always, lead to a putative, and then to an increasingly confident, attribution of a causal efficacy to the complex wholes which does not apply to the separated, constituent parts. It has often been argued that for something to be real, new and irreducible it must have new, irreducible causal powers. If this continues to be the case under a variety of independent procedures and in a variety of contexts, then new and distinctive kinds of realities at the higher levels of complexity may properly be said to have ‘emerged’. This can occur with respect either to moving up the ladder of complexity or, as we shall see, through cosmic and biological evolutionary history. This understanding accords with the pragmatic attribution, in both ordinary life and scientific investigation, of the term ‘reality’ to that which we cannot avoid taking account of in our diagnosis of the course of events, in experience or experiments. Real entities have effects and play irreducible roles in adequate explanations of the world.
All entities, all concrete particulars in the world, including human beings, are derived from and constituted of fundamental physical entities (see pp.67ff.) – quarks or whatever it is that current physics postulates as the basic building constituents of the world (which, of course, includes energy as well as matter). This is a ‘monistic’ view that everything can be broken down into fundamental physical entities and that no extra entities are thought to be inserted at higher levels of complexity to account for their properties. I prefer to call it ‘emergentist monism’, rather than ‘non-reductive physicalism’. Those who adopt the latter label for their view, particularly in speaking of the ‘physical realisation’ of the mental in the physical, often seem to hold a much less realistic view of higher-level properties than I wish to affirm here – and also not to attribute causal powers to that to which higher level concepts refer.
If we do make such a commitment about the reality of the emergent whole of a given total system, the question then arises of how one is to explicate the relation between the state of the whole and the behaviour of parts of that system at the micro level. The simple concept of chains of causally related events (A
BC ...) in constant conjunction is inadequate for this purpose. Extending and enriching the notion of causality now becomes necessary because of new insights into the way complex systems, in general, and biological ones, in particular, behave. (See also the next section.)
This perspective on the relationships between higher and lower levels of complexity has been derived primarily by reflection on the hierarchy of complexity manifest in the world as we now see it described by the sciences pertinent to different levels. It has become increasingly clear that one can preserve the reality, distinctiveness and causal powers of higher levels relative to lower ones while continuing to recognise that the higher complexes are complex assemblies of the fundamental building blocks currently being discovered by physicists. No new entities are being added to the constituent parts for such parts to acquire the new distinctive properties characteristic of the wholes. For example, in the early twentieth century it was proposed that something had to be added to matter to explain the difference between living organisms and the inorganic. Such ‘vitalism’ is now universally rejected by biologists. Even more significantly with respect to human beings, one can affirm the distinctiveness of the language of the ‘mental’ as not, in principle, reducible to that of neurophysiology without asserting the existence of an entity, the ‘mind’, in a realm other than that of the physical world. The new challenge then becomes how it is that what we have regarded as physical entities can in the human-brain-in-the-human-body-in-society be so organised to become a thinking self-conscious person. Persons are better regarded, it transpires, as psychosomatic unities with physical, mental and spiritual capacities – rather than physical entities to which a ‘mind’ and/or a ‘soul/spirit’ have been added. This is in fact the biblical understanding, as H. Wheeler Robinson expressed in a famous epigram: ‘The Hebrew idea of personality is an animated body and not an incarnated soul.’7 Talk of the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ of human beings as such entities, and especially as naturally immortal ones, no longer represents the best explanation of the emergence of spiritual capacities in the light of what we now know about the kind of complexity that constitutes a human being. Dualism of that kind seems to be incommensurate with any picture of the world consistent with scientific observations. Holistic language becomes more appropriate. This does not, of course, undermine the reality and validity of mental and spiritual activities and capacities. Those Christians who have affirmed not the natural immortality of the soul/spirit but the biblical doctrine of resurrection of the whole person, can welcome this development.
The only dualism now theologically defensible appears to be the distinction between the Being of God and that of everything else (the ‘world’ = all-that-is, all-that-is-created). Talk of the ‘supernatural’ as a level of being in the world, other than God, therefore becomes superfluous and misleading, and a genuine naturalism is thus entirely compatible with theism – for God is the only supernatural entity or being. In spite of ‘naturalism’ often being associated with a reductive materialism and opposed to belief in God, a theistic naturalism is entirely defensible. Nouns such as ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’ are best replaced by adjectives (or the corresponding adverbs) such as ‘spiritual’ and ‘mental’ predicating activities and functions of whole persons. For example, in this perspective human beings do not possess some special apparatus, some antenna, which has a non-natural way of interacting with God – some special wavelengths for divine communication – but nevertheless they do naturally have a holistic capacity, a ‘spiritual’ one, to relate to and be aware of God. Similar remarks apply to their possession of the capacity for mental activity.
We saw above the need for more subtle understanding of how higher levels relate to lower levels in the complex systems that constitute natural reality and we hinted that this could still allow application of the notion of a ‘causal’ relation from whole to part (of system to constituent) – never ignoring, of course, the bottom-up effects of parts on wholes, which depend on their properties for the parts being what they are.
A number of terms have in recent years been applied to this effect of the higher level whole on the behaviour of its constituents, for example ‘downward causation’, or ‘top-down causation’ or, my preferred term, ‘whole–part influence’. A classic example is that of the Bénard phenomenon: at a critical point a fluid heated uniformly from below in a vessel ceases to manifest the entirely random motion of its molecules, but displays up and down convective currents in columns of hexagonal cross-section. Certain autocatalytic reactions display spontaneously rhythmic temporal and spatial patterns in the concentrations of the reacting molecules. Many examples are now known of such dissipative systems which can self-organise into large-scale patterns in spite of the random motions of the units – ‘order out of chaos’, it has been dubbed.
The ordinary physico-chemical account of the interactions at the micro level of description is not adequate to explain these phenomena. It is clear that the activities of the parts and the patterns they form are what they are because of their incorporation into the system-as-a-whole. In fact they are patterns within the systems in question. In the chemical and biochemical cases they incorporate feedback influences that affect other stages in the process. This occurs also in the much more complex, and only partly understood, systems of genes switching on and off and their interplay with cell metabolism and specific protein production in the development of biological forms. The parts would not behave as observed if they were not parts of that particular system (the whole). The state of the system-as-a-whole is influencing (i.e. acting like a cause on) what the parts, the constituents, actually do. Many such examples of self-organising and dissipative chemical and biochemical systems have now been recorded and the literature extends also into the economic and social arenas.
We do not have available for such systems any account of events in terms of temporal, linear chains of causality as previously conceived (ABC...). Here the term whole–part influence will be used to represent the net effect of all those ways in which a system-as-a-whole, operating from its higher level, is a causal factor in what happens to its constituent parts, the lower level. This feature of the world provides a significant clue to how we might conceive of God affecting events in an entirely naturalistic, non-supernatural world (see pp.108ff.). At this point, however, I want to mention another general concept that has often been found applicable to understanding the relation between higher and lower levels.
There is a flow of information from higher to lower levels in a single, hierarchically stratified complex. The higher level is seen as constraining and shaping the patterns of events occurring among the constituent units of the lower one. Although ‘information’ is a concept distinct from matter and energy yet, in real systems, no information flows without some exchange of energy and/or matter. As an interpretative concept it is useful not only in the more obvious context of the mind–brain–body relation but also in considering the relation of environment to biological processes, including evolution. In this context, a temporal flow of information about the environment is over a long period of time impressed indirectly (via the effect of the environment on the viability of organisms possessing mutated DNA) on the organism’s DNA. This DNA then shapes the functioning of the organism in such a way as to aid its production of viable progeny. The concept of information is indeed very apt for situations in which a form at one level influences forms at lower levels – a process that can then be conceived of as a transfer of information, as distinct from energy or matter. One can usefully distinguish,8 in this context:
Information (1) is necessary to shape or give form, as information (2), to a receptor. If that receptor is the brain of a human being, then information (3) is conveyed. Here the term ‘information’ is being used broadly to represent this whole process of (1) becoming (2) – and only modulating to (3) when there is a specific reference to human brain processes in which (1) acquires meaning for human beings. I am not intending here to imply that (3) is reducible to (1), only that (1) is the necessary precondition for the manifestation and emergence of (3).
Information (1) and (2) are often applicable to the higher- to lower-level interactions in hierarchically stratified physical and biological systems. The transition from information (1) and (2) to (3) is somewhat ambivalently related to the opaque mind–brain–body relation, though it has been widely employed in that context. Although attempts have been made to use the concept of information (1) to define living entities, biologists have often been sceptical about it its usefulness in, for example, understanding development. (It had a historically significant application in interpreting the relation between the structure of DNA and the proteins whose structure it controls and thus for providing the molecular basis for heredity, that is, for genetic information.) The notion of flow of information is a conceptual tool ready to hand to interpret the relation of higher to lower levels in a particular hierarchically stratified complex but it must be used warily. We shall later (see pp.121ff.) consider whether it can be utilised in relation to how God might communicate with humanity ‘naturally’, that is, through the natural.
The world consists of myriads of individual systems, which are often themselves hierarchically stratified complex systems of stable parts. We have been exploring their internal (whole–part) relationships. However, these individual systems can themselves interact in a highly ramified manner across space and time. Distant events (e.g. flaring spots on the Sun showering cosmic rays on the Earth; the elliptical orbits of the planets about the Sun) can affect the Earth’s climate and biological evolution. The individual systems of the world are increasingly demonstrated by the sciences to be interconnected and interdependent in multiple ways, with great variations in the strengths of mutual coupling. On the Earth’s surface, the ecological interconnectedness of all forms of life and their matter and energy cycles, themselves related to atmospheric and geological ones, has in recent years become increasingly apparent in all its baffling intricacies. These interactions between individual systems over space and time cannot be ignored in our reflections on the nature of the world and God’s relation to it, simply because we can never have one comprehensive theory of them. This character of the world-as-a-whole suggests that it is metaphysically plausible to perceive it as an interconnected and interdependent System-of-systems, the ‘systems’ being now of different types. Such an assertion about all-that-is, based on what we know (so epistemological), would have, as always when this is so, a putative significance concerning its nature (and so an ontological reference). In that case, the ‘world-as-a-whole’ is not simply a concept or an abstract description, but could, at least provisionally, be regarded as a holistic reality at its own level – even if the coupling between systems is much looser and more diffuse, and therefore less classifiable, than it is within a particular system. The apprehension of all-that-is in its holistic unity as a System-of-systems is not obviously apparent to the limited horizons and capacities of humanity, though every advance in the sciences serves to reveal further cross-connections between its component systems. Moreover, such interconnectedness would be transparent to the omniscient Creator God who continuously gives its constituents and its processes existence.
Earlier we noted that when a particular hierarchical system is considered, a flow of information can be envisaged from higher to lower levels. Is this notion of the flow of information any help in thinking of the multiple, highly variegated and overlapping interactions between individual systems in the world system?
The world may be thought of as an interconnected network of different types of systems interacting in specific ways and mutually influencing each other. A common factor then discernible in the multiple interactions between such systems (in the whole cosmic System) is the transfer of information whereby patterns of events in one system affect patterns of events in another. The interchanges between the myriad systems of energy and/or matter are, of course, variegated beyond the possibility of generalisation. Use of the concept of information is thus particularly apt for elucidating these interactions, since it is independent of the concepts of matter and energy – though in nature it never occurs without involving their exchange. These considerations are relevant (see pp.111–12) to how one might conceive of an interaction of God with the world which could influence particular events in it.
The successes of the sciences in unravelling the intricate, often complex, yet beautifully articulated web of relationships between structures, processes and entities in the world have made it increasingly problematic to regard God as ‘intervening’ in the world to bring about events that are not in accordance with these divinely created patterns and regularities that the sciences are unravelling. Indeed the very belief of most scientifically educated monotheists in the existence and nature of the Creator God depends on this character of the world. The transcendence of God, God’s essential otherness and distinct kind of being from everything else, always allows in principle the possibility that God could act to overrule the very regularities to which God has given existence. However, setting aside the immense moral issues about why God does not intervene to prevent rampant evil, this could give rise, more fundamentally, to an incoherence in our understanding of God’s nature. It suggests an arbitrary and magic-making Agent far removed from the concept of the One who created and is creating the world that science reveals. That world now appears convincingly closed to external causal interventions of the kind that classical philosophical theism postulated, e.g. in the idea of a ‘miracle’ as a breaking of the laws of nature.
Furthermore, one has to recognise, with Hume, that adequate historical evidence for any supposed interventions by God in the natural, created, causal nexus – and thus contravention of the divinely established regularities – could never, as a matter of fact, be available. One would need vastly more evidence for any event supposed to have departed from the multiply observed regularities than for one thought to be consistent with them. Yet it is of the nature of our fragmentary evidence (even today) that this cannot be forthcoming. Assessment of the supposed historical evidence for such a divine intervention depends critically on the assessor’s presuppositions about their possibility. I have already argued that the scientist who is a theist infers the existence of a Creator God as the best explanation of the existence of the world and of its inbuilt rationality. For such a theist it is incoherent ever to accept the presupposition that God intervenes in the created processes of the world, in the divinely created fabric of existence, of which human beings are an integral and emergent part. A God who intervenes could only be regarded, by all who adopt a scientific perspective on the world, as being a kind of semi-magical arbitrary Great Fixer or occasional Meddler in the divinely created, natural and historical networks of causes and effects.
So the problem is: how can one conceive of the God who is the Creator of this world affecting events in it without abrogating the very laws and regularities to which God has given existence and continuously sustains in existence? The problem has been intensified by the general scepticism among philosophers, theologians and scientists (if not the general public) about the existence of a ‘supernatural’ world. That supposed world, by manifesting an ontological category of immaterial ‘spirit’, appeared to provide a channel along which divine influences could supposedly operate to manipulate matter and human beings. Such dualism is not intellectually defensible today, and has few supporters, not least with respect to human nature. We have seen that theists find themselves having to assert that the only dualism to which they are committed is that between God and the world – that is, to the absolute difference between an infinite and necessary Being and the contingency of existence of the entire created order. This inevitably leads, in all hypotheses concerning how God might bring about particular events, to the problem of what has (infelicitously) been called the ‘ontological gap at the causal joint’. For if God in God’s own Being is distinct from anything we can possibly know in the world, then God’s nature is ineffable and will always be inaccessible to us so that we have only the resources of analogy to depict how God might influence events in the world.
This question will occupy us more fully later (see pp.93–4) but at this stage the relevance of the idea of panentheism must be mentioned. Panentheism is the belief that the Being of God includes and penetrates all-that-is, so that every part of it exists in God and (as against pantheism) that God’s Being is more than it and is not exhausted by it. In contrast to classical philosophical theism, with its reliance on the concept of necessary substance, panentheism takes embodied personhood for its model of God and so places much greater stress on the immanence of God in, with and under the events of the world.
The problem of God’s interaction with the world, if not the intractable problem of evil, is illuminated by such a panentheistic understanding of God’s relation to the world. The total network of regular, natural events, in this perspective, is viewed as in itself the creative and sustaining action of God. Of course, this network of events is not identical with God and is not God’s body, for it is not in any sense a ‘part’ of God as such. God is the immanent creator creating in and through the processes of the natural order. This points us in the direction of postulating that the ontological gap(s) between the world and God is/are located simply everywhere – or, more precisely, because the world is ‘in God’, God can influence the world in its totality, as a System-of-systems.
In the context of the preceding discussion, it must be recognised that the description of the world as being lawlike requires qualification. For the regularities in relationships between events occurring at the level of the smallest entities in the world, at the subatomic and quantum levels, are often only statistical and probabilistic. For example, in any given interval, however small, we know accurately only the proportion of an assembly of radium atoms that will break up and not what will happen to any given individual atom. Moreover, if such a micro-event occurs in a system (for example, some ‘chaotic’ ones) in which its outcome could be amplified to the macroscopic level, then events readily observable at the human level might also then become unpredictable. The predominant view among practising physicists – to abbreviate ludicrously a sharp and unsettled question – is that this unpredictability of the effect of measurement on quantum-level systems is inherent. If one takes this view, then there is no definite knowledge of which, say, radium atom will split up in the next smallest possible time interval – only probabilistic knowledge is available. In that case there is no definite fact of the matter even for God to know, so God logically cannot know it, for omniscience is the ability to know all that it is logically possible to know. One would have to conclude that God has so made the world that God knows the outcome of such events only in a probabilistic manner. That is, God is omniscient, with only a probabilistic knowledge of the outcomes of some events. Clearly this postulate depends on the belief that God also does not know the future (see pp.43ff). These considerations do not apply to so-called ‘chaotic’ processes, which are fully deterministic, even if unpredictable by us because of our inadequately precise knowledge of the initial conditions to which they are so sensitive in their outcomes. But an omniscient God could always know those conditions with any precision required to predict their outcome at some future time.
In parallel with this qualification of God’s omniscience is the cognate proposal of God’s self-limited omnipotence. Christian theology has always affirmed that God’s omnipotence is that of divine Love: God can do only what is consistent with God’s nature as Love. The will of created human beings is free so that, in particular, God has let Godself not have coercive power over human actions. So in the Christian understanding, divine omnipotence has always been regarded as limited by the very nature of God. That is, God is omnipotent, but self-limited by God’s nature as Love.
These considerations would appear also to extend the notion of divine self-limited omnipotence in relation to measurement of quantum-level events the outcomes of which are probabilistic. To have power over the outcomes, God would need to predict what they would be if God did not act specifically in that context and we have seen that that is impossible for quantum events. This is still a fraught issue in the debates concerning how God could act in the world consistently with the regularities observed by the sciences and without law-breaking interventions and will need to be considered again later (see pp.104ff.).
Self-conscious persons have emerged naturally in the world by the processes of evolution, as we shall discuss more fully in the next chapter. Here, continuing to take a ‘still shot’ of the world as it is, we shall consider what kind of being is manifest in Homo sapiens, and in particular the basis of consciousness.
Much discussion of the relation of higher to lower levels in hierarchically stratified systems has centred on the mind–brain–body relation, on how mental events are related to neurophysiological ones in the human-brain-in-the-human-body – in effect the whole question of human agency and what we mean by it. A hierarchy of levels in the brain can be delineated, each of which is the focus of a corresponding scientific study, from neuroanatomy and neurophysiology to psychology. Those involved in studying how the brain works have come to recognise that properties not found in components of a lower level can emerge from the organisation and interaction of these components at a higher level. For example, rhythmic pattern generation in some neural circuits is a property of the circuit, not of isolated pacemaker neurons. Explanations coexist at all levels, as they do in other sciences.
The still intense philosophical discussion of the mind–brain–body relation has been broadly concerned with attempting to elucidate the relation between the ‘top’ level of human mental experience and the lowest, physical levels. The question of what kind of causation, if any, may be said to be operating from a top-down, as well as the obvious and generally accepted bottom-up, direction is still much debated in this context. Earlier, I used ‘whole–part influence’ to describe the general relation of wholes to parts in complex systems and maintained that a non-reductionist view of the predicates, concepts, laws, etc. applicable to the higher level could be coherent. Reality could, it was argued, putatively be attributable to that to which these non-reducible, higher-level predicates, concepts, laws, etc., applied; and these new realities, with their distinctive properties, could properly be called ‘emergent’. When this emergentist monist approach is applied to the mental activity of the human-brain-in-the-human-body, to elucidate its nature we find we have to look to vernacular (‘folk’) psychology and its characteristic ways of expressing beliefs, desires and so forth. Mental properties are now widely regarded by philosophers as irreducible to their physical ones, indeed as emergent from them, for mentalistic terms cannot logically be translated into neurophysiological ones. However, mental events are nevertheless interlocked with the lower-level events. In the wider range of physical, biological and other complex systems, the causative effects of the higher levels are real but different in kind from the effects the parts had on each other operating at the lower level. What happens in these systems at each level is the result of the joint operation of both higher- and lower-level influences – the higher and lower levels could be said to be jointly sufficient, type-different causes of the lower level events. When the higher-lower relation is that of mind/brain-body, it seems to me that similar considerations should apply.
Up to this point, I have been taking the term ‘mind’, and its cognate ‘mental’, to refer to the emergent reality distinctive especially of human beings. But in many wider contexts, not least that of philosophical theology, a more appropriate term for this emergent reality would be ‘person’, and its cognate ‘personal’, to represent the total psychosomatic, holistic experience of the human being in all its modalities – conscious and unconscious, rational and emotional, intellectual and aesthetic, active and passive, individual and social, etc. We must recognise that we have thoughts, wishes and desires that together constitute our character and we express these mental states through our bodies. Our very embodiedness appears to be the precondition for perception and action, moral agency, community and freedom.
There is therefore a strong case for designating the highest level, the whole, in that unique system which is the human-brain-in-the-human-body-in-social-relations as that of the ‘person’. Persons are inter alia causal agents with respect to their own bodies and to the surrounding world, including other people. They can, moreover, report with varying degrees of accuracy on aspects of their internal states concomitant with their actions. Hence the exercise of personal agency by individuals transpires to be a paradigm case and supreme exemplar of whole–part influence – in this case exerted by persons on the bodies that constitute them and on their surroundings. The details of the relation between cerebral neurological activity and consciousness cannot in principle detract from the causal efficacy of the content of the latter on the former and thus on behaviour. In other words, ‘folk psychology’, imprecise though it is, cannot be cavalierly dismissed, for the real reference of the language of personhood is both justified and necessary. The thrust of all this is that in the case of Homo sapiens we have to explore God’s relation with persons and can expect distinctive features in that relation different from those of God’s relation with the non-personal world.
The nature of such relationships of persons with God may also be illuminated by our understanding of the emergence of new realities in complex, especially self-organising, systems. In many situations where God is experienced by human persons we have by intention and according to well-winnowed experience and tradition complexes of interacting personal entities, material things and historical circumstances which are epistemologically not reducible to concepts applicable to these individual components. Could not new realities – and so new experiences of God for humanity – be seen to emerge in such complexes and even to be causally effective? (The Eucharist can be so interpreted; see pp.151–2.)
It is profitable at this point to remind ourselves how human persons communicate with each other. How do we get to know each other, not only by description but also by acquaintance – that is get to know what is, as we say, ‘in each other’s mind’?
All communication at its most basic level is mediated through the senses – hearing, sight, touch, taste, smell. The physical intermediaries are vibrations in pressure in the air, electromagnetic waves, physical pressure, changes of temperature, molecules, etc. – this is the one world of our monistic scientific perception. Our genes, culture, nurture and education have enabled us to decode patterns of these physical intermediaries so as to convey information about the content of the consciousness of the one attempting to communicate. These patterns can be immensely complex (associated with long histories for example) in language and mediated by the objective carriers of a cultural heritage, such as books, tapes, paintings, sculptures, CDs, etc. They can be woven in time, as in music, drama, language; and they can be more bodily based, as we now know from research into body language and communication through eye contact. In all these ways individual persons communicate with each other and also with the wider human community, both past and present.
The receptor of this information in the individual person is the individual human brain, which stores this variegated information that constitutes knowledge of another’s state of consciousness (corresponding to the state of another’s brain). This occurs at different levels and is integrated into a perception of the other person. Such knowledge of the other person can be recalled, with varying degrees of rapidity and accuracy, into consciousness. From a non-dualist viewpoint, this process can be regarded as a reactivation of the brain to reproduce the original patterns that previously constituted this conscious awareness of the other person – as long as it continues to be recognised that these conscious mental events are a non-reducible reality that is distinctive of the human-brain-in-the-human-body.
It seems that all the processes involved in communication between human persons can be investigated and described at different levels by the methods and concepts appropriate to the level in question without invoking any special, ontologically distinct ‘psychic’ medium, unknown to the natural sciences, as the means of communication. This is not to say that the meaning of what is communicated can be reduced simply to physical patterns in the media in question, for the interpretation of these necessitates a recognition of their distinctive kind of reality. But it is to stress that all communication between human beings, even at the most intimate and personal level, is mediated by the entities, structures and processes – that is, by the constituents – of the world. The subtly integrated patterns of these means of communication do in fact allow mutual comprehension between two human individuals of each other’s distinctive personhood. This knowledge of two persons of each other, this knowledge by acquaintance, is notoriously not fully expressible in any of the frameworks of interpretation appropriate to the various modalities of the interaction process. There remains an inalienable uniqueness and indeed mystery concerning the nature of the individual person and of the nature of the interaction between two persons. The sense of personhood, of being a person, and awareness of interpersonal relations are unique, irreducible emergents in humanity.
Recognition of the rootedness of the means of interpersonal communication in the monistic constituents of the world does not diminish or derogate from the special kind of reality that constitutes persons and their mutual interactions. For in such communication between persons there occurs a subtle and complex integration of the received sense data with previous memories of that person. This is itself shaped by a long-learnt cultural framework of interpretation which provides the language and imagery with which to articulate the relation in consciousness. So recognition of the physical nature of the means of communication between persons in no way diminishes the uniqueness and in-depth character that can pertain to personal relationships at their most profound level for the individuals concerned – indeed often the most real and significant experiences of people’s lives.