12 The sciences of complexity: a new theological resource?
A host of surveys indicate that what Christians, and indeed other religious believers, today affirm as ‘real’ fails to generate
any conviction among many of those who seek spiritual insight and who continue regretfully as wistful agnostics in relation
to the formulations of traditional religions – notably Christianity in Europe, and in intellectual circles in the USA. Many
factors contribute to this state of affairs, but one of these, I would suggest, is that the traditional language in which
much Christian theology, certainly in its Western form, has been and is cast is so saturated with terms that have a supernatural
reference and colour that a culture accustomed to think in naturalistic terms, conditioned by the power and prestige of the
natural sciences, finds it increasingly difficult to attribute any plausibility to it. Be that as it may, there is clearly
a pressing need to describe the realities that Christian belief wishes to articulate in terms that can make sense to that
culture without reducing its content to insignificance.
Correspondingly, there is also a perennial pressure, even among those not given to any form of traditional religiosity, to
integrate the understandings of the natural world afforded by the sciences with very real, ‘spiritual’ experiences, which
include interactions with other people and awareness of the transcendent.
Both of these pressures in contemporary life accentuate the need to find ways of integrating ‘talk about God’ – that is, theology
– with the world view engendered and warranted by the natural sciences. The ‘god of the gaps’ and the whole notion of divine
‘revelation’ are inevitably expelled from such a world view; however, it will be argued that this is not equivalent to the expulsion of
the creator God of the monotheistic religions.
Meanwhile, the scientific world view has itself not been static and has had to come to terms more and more with, inter alia,
the ability of natural complexes to manifest new properties not associated with the components. Such complexes display, for
example, self-organizing properties, and awareness of this and of the general role of the transfer of information in complex
systems has generated a metaphysics to take account of this feature of the natural world: namely, ‘emergentist monism’ (see
section 12.1, below). Furthermore, there has been an impetus under pressure from the scientific world view to revise ideas concerning
God’s relation to the world, described so differently from the past, in terms both of a ‘theistic naturalism’ (see section
12.2) and ‘panentheism’ (see section 12.3). The aim of this chapter is to integrate these developments and to show that this process allows one to formulate the role
of theological language in such a way as to escape the impasse described above and thereby to justify its claim to refer realistically
to the relationships of nature, persons, and God, which are the concern of religious experience and are the focus of intellectual
reflection on it: namely, theology. The following reproduces here, for convenience, some previous expositions of mine on these
three pertinent themes.1
12.1 Emergentist monism
More and more, the natural and human sciences give us a picture of the world as consisting of a complex hierarchy (or hierarchies)
– a series of levels of organization and matter in which each successive member of the series is a whole constituted of parts
preceding it in the series.2 The wholes are organized systems of parts that are dynamically and spatially interrelated – a feature sometimes called a
‘mereological’ relation. Furthermore, all properties also result, directly in isolation or indirectly in larger patterns,
from the properties of microphysical entities. This feature of the world is now widely recognized to be of significance in
relating our knowledge of its various levels of complexity – that is, the sciences that correspond to these levels.3 It also corresponds not only to the world in its present condition, but also to the way complex systems have evolved in time
out of earlier simpler ones.
I shall presume at least this with the ‘physicalists’: all concrete particulars in the world (including human beings), with
all of their properties, are constituted of fundamental physical entities of matter/energy manifest in many layers of complexity
– a ‘layered’ physicalism. This is indeed a monistic view (a constitutively ontologically reductionist one) that everything can be broken down into whatever physicists deem to
constitute matter/energy. No extra entities or forces, other than the basic four forces of physics, are to be deemed to be inserted at higher levels of complexity in order to
account for their properties. However, what is significant about natural processes and about the relation of complex systems
to their constituents now is that the concepts needed to describe and understand – as indeed also the methods needed to investigate
each level in the hierarchy of complexity – are specific to and distinctive of those levels. 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, themselves often also constituted of yet smaller entities. This is an epistemological assertion of a nonreductionist
kind.
When the epistemological nonreducibility of properties, concepts, and explanations applicable to higher levels of complexity
is well established, their employment in scientific discourse can often, but not in all cases, lead to a putative and then to an increasingly confident attribution of reality to that to which the higher-level terms
refer. ‘Reality’ is not confined to the physicochemical alone. One must accept a certain ‘robustness’4 of the entities postulated, or rather discovered, at different levels and resist any attempts to regard them as less real
in comparison with some favoured lower level of ‘reality’. Each level has to be regarded as a cut through the totality of
reality, if you like, in the sense that we have to take account of its mode of operation at that level. 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, synchronically, up the ladder of complexity or, diachronically, through cosmic
and biological evolutionary history.
Much of the discussion of reductionism has concentrated upon the relation between already established theories pertinent to
different levels. This way of examining the question of reductionism is less appropriate when the context is that of the biological
and social sciences, for which knowledge hardly ever resides in theories with distinctive ‘laws’. In these sciences, what
is sought is more usually a model of a complex system that explicates how its components interact to produce the properties and behaviour of the whole system
– organelle, cell, multicellular organism, ecosystem, etc. These models are not presented as sentences involving terms that
might be translated into lower-level terms for reduction to be successful but, rather, as visual systems, structures, or maps,
representing multiple interactions and connecting pathways of causality and determinative influences between entities and processes. When the systems are not simply aggregates of similar units, then it can turn out that the
behaviour of the system is due principally, sometimes entirely, to the distinctive way its parts are put together – which
is what models attempt to make clear. This incorporation into a system constrains the behaviour of the parts and can lead
to behaviour of the systems as a whole that is often unexpected and unpredicted (Richardson, 1992). As W. Bechtel and R. C. Richardson have expressed it: ‘They are emergent in that we did not anticipate the properties exhibited by the whole system given what we knew of the parts’ (Bechtel and
Richardson, 1992, pp. 266–267). They illustrate this from a historical examination of the controversies over yeast fermentation of glucose
and oxidative phosphorylation. What is crucial here is, not so much the unpredictability, but the inadequacy of explanation
if only the parts are focused upon, rather than the whole system. ‘With emergent phenomena, it is the interactive organization,
rather than the component behaviour, that is the critical explanatory feature’ (ibid., p. 285).
There are, therefore, good grounds for utilizing the concept of ‘emergence’ in our interpretation of naturally occurring,
hierarchical, complex systems constituted of parts that themselves are, at the lowest level, made up of the basic units of
the physical world. I shall denote5 this position as that of emergentist monism.
If we do make such an ontological 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. It transpires that 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.
A more substantial ground for attributing reality to higher-level properties and the organized entities associated with them
is the possession of any distinctive causal (I would say, rather, ‘determinative’) efficacy of the complex wholes that has
the effect of making the separated, constituent parts behave in ways they would not do if they were not part of that particular
complex system (that is, in the absence of the interactions that constitute that system). For to be real is to have causal power.6 New causal powers and properties can then properly be said to have emerged when this is so.
Subtler understanding of how higher levels influence the lower levels allows application in this context of the notion of
a determining (‘causal’) relation from whole to part (of system to constituent) – never ignoring, of course, the ‘bottom-up’
effects of parts on the wholes, which depend on their properties for the parts being what they are, albeit now in the new,
holistic, complex, interacting configurations of that whole. A number of related concepts have in recent years been developed
to describe these relations in both synchronic and diachronic systems – that is, both those in some kind of steady state with
stable characteristic emergent features of the whole and those that display an emergence of new features in the course of
time.
In particular, the term ‘downward causation’ or ‘top-down causation’ was employed by Donald Campbell (1974) to denote the way in which the network of an organism’s relationships to its environment and its behaviour patterns together
determine over the course of time the actual DNA sequences at the molecular level present in an evolved organism – even though,
from the ‘bottom-up’ viewpoint of that organism once in existence, a molecular biologist would tend to describe its form and
behaviour as a consequence of those same DNA sequences. Other systems could be cited,7 such as the Bénardand certain autocatalytic reaction systems (for example, the famous Zhabotinsky reaction and glycolysis in yeast extracts),
that display spontaneously, often after a time interval from the point when first mixed, rhythmic temporal and spatial patterns,
the forms of which can even depend on the size of the containing vessel. Harold Morowitz (2002) has indeed identified some 28 emergent levels in the natural world. Many examples are now known also of dissipative systems
which, because they are open, a long way from equilibrium, and nonlinear in certain essential relationships between fluxes
and forces, can display large-scale patterns in spite of random motions of the units – ‘order out of chaos’, as Prigogine
and Stengers (1984) dubbed it.
In these examples, the ordinary physicochemical account of the interactions at the micro level of description simply cannot
account for these phenomena. It is clear that what the parts (molecules and ions, in the Bénard and Zhabotinsky cases) are
doing and the patterns they form are what they are because of their incorporation into the system-as-a-whole – in fact these are patterns within the systems in question. The parts would not be behaving as observed if they were not parts of that particular system (the
‘whole’). The state of the system-as-a-whole is influencing (that is, acting like a ‘cause’ on) what the parts – the constituents
– actually do. Many other examples of this kind could be taken from the literature on, for example, not only self-organizing
and dissipative systems but also economic and social ones. Terrence Deacon (2001) has usefully categorized different kinds of emergent level.8
A wider use of ‘causality’ and ‘causation’ than Humean temporal, linear chains of causality as previously conceived (A
BC
… ) is now needed to include the kind of whole–part, higher- to lower-level, relationships that the sciences have themselves
recently been discovering in complex systems, especially the biological and neurological ones. One should perhaps better speak of ‘determinative influences’ rather than of ‘causation’, as having misleading connotations. Where such determinative influences of the whole of a system
on its parts occurs, one is justified in attributing reality to those emergent properties and features of the whole system
that have those consequences. Real entities have influence and play irreducible roles in adequate explanations of the world.
BC
… ) is now needed to include the kind of whole–part, higher- to lower-level, relationships that the sciences have themselves
recently been discovering in complex systems, especially the biological and neurological ones. One should perhaps better speak of ‘determinative influences’ rather than of ‘causation’, as having misleading connotations. Where such determinative influences of the whole of a system
on its parts occurs, one is justified in attributing reality to those emergent properties and features of the whole system
that have those consequences. Real entities have influence and play irreducible roles in adequate explanations of the world.
Here the term ‘whole–part influence’ will usually 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 determining factor in what happens to its constituent parts at the ‘lower’ level.
A holistic state, in this understanding, is determined by (is ‘caused by’, is ‘a consequence of’) a preceding holistic state
jointly with the effects of its constituents with their individual properties in isolation. Such a ‘joint’ effect may be interpreted
as a transmission of ‘information’ when this is conceived of in its broadest sense as that which influences patterns, forms
of organization of constituents.9 These ways in which interrelationships in complex systems in the natural world have been explicated provide clues, it will
later be urged, to the concepts needed for relating the constituent entities of the God–world–humanity relation. But first
it is necessary to examine two other significant developments, under pressure from scientific perceptions, in expounding the
relation of God and the ‘world’, ‘all-that-is’, ‘nature’: namely, theistic naturalism and panentheism.
12.2 Theistic naturalism
The incessant pressure from the popular, widespread acceptance of the cogency of science has been towards assuming, with little
further consideration, that ‘the world can best be accounted for by means of the categories of natural science (including biology and psychology) without recourse to the super-natural or transcendent
as a means of explanation’, which is a definition of ‘naturalism’10 or, according to the Oxford dictionary, ‘A view of the world, and of man’s relation to it, in which only the operation of
natural (as opposed to supernatural or spiritual) laws and forces is assumed (1750)’.11
Such a stance precludes the divine. However, this is not a necessary consequence of taking account of the scientific knowledge
of the world and its development, for a theistic naturalism may be expounded according to which natural processes, characterized by the laws and regularities discovered by
the natural sciences, are themselves actions of God, who continuously gives them existence.
Contrary emphases have long historical roots since, for a century or more after Newton, creation still tended to be thought
of as an act at a point in time when God created something external to God’s self in a framework of an already existing space
– not unlike the famous Michelangelo depiction of the creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. This led to a
conception of God that was very ‘deistic’: God as external to nature, dwelling in an entirely different kind of ‘space’ and
being of an entirely different ‘substance’ which by definition could not overlap or mix with that of the created order. In
practice, and in spite of earlier theological insights, there was an excessive emphasis on God’s transcendence and on the
separation of God from what is created. However, cracks in this conceptual edifice began to appear in the late eighteenth
century and early nineteenth century, when the age of the Earth inferred from geological studies was being stretched from
4004 BCE, deduced by adding up the ages of the Biblical patriarchs, to a process lasting many hundreds of thousands of years
or more. But it was Darwin’s eventually accepted proposal of a plausible mechanism for the changes in living organisms that
led to the ultimate demise of the external, deistic notion of God’s creative actions. In particular, those Anglican theologians who were recovering a sense of the sacramental
character of the world stressed God’s omnipresent creative activity in that world. Thus Aubrey Moore in 1889:
The one absolutely impossible conception of God, in the present day, is that which represents him as an occasional visitor. Science has pushed the deist’s God further and further away, and at the moment when it seemed as if he would be thrust out all together Darwinism appeared, and, under the disguise of a foe, did the work of a friend. It has conferred upon philosophy and religion an inestimable benefit, by showing us that we must choose between two alternatives. Either God is everywhere present in nature, or He is nowhere.(Moore, 1891, p. 73)
Moore and his co-religionists were not alone – the evangelical Presbyterian Henry Drummond saw God as working all the time
through evolution:
Those who yield to the temptation to reserve a point here and there for special divine interposition are apt to forget that this virtually excludes God from the rest of the process. If God appears periodically, He disappears periodically … Positively, the idea of an immanent God, which is the God of Evolution, is definitely grander than the occasional Wonder-worker, who is the God of an old theology.(Drummond, 1894, p. 428)
Similarly Frederick Temple and also the Anglican Evangelical, Charles Kingsley, in The Water Babies, could affirm that ‘God makes things make themselves’ (Kingsley, 1930, p. 248).
For a theist, God must now be seen as acting to create in the world, often through what we call ‘chance’ operating within the created order, each stage of which constitutes the launching pad for the next.
The Creator unfolds the created potentialities of the universe, in and through a process in which its possibilities and propensities become actualized. God may be said to have ‘gifted’ the
universe, and goes on doing so, with a ‘formational economy’ that ‘is sufficiently robust to make possible the actualization
of all inanimate structures and all life forms that have ever appeared in the course of time’ (van Till, 1998, pp. 349, 351).
So a revived emphasis on the immanence of God as Creator ‘in, with and under’ the natural processes of the world unveiled by the sciences becomes imperative if
theology is to be in accord with all that the sciences have revealed since those debates of the nineteenth century. For a
notable aspect of the scientific account on the natural world in general is the seamless character of the web that has been
spun on the loom of time – at no point do modern natural scientists have to invoke any non-natural causes to explain their
observations and inferences about the past. The processes that have occurred can, as we have just seen, be characterized as
displaying emergence, for new forms of matter, and a hierarchy of organization of these forms themselves, appear in the course of time. New kinds
of reality ‘emerge’ in time.
Hence the scientific perspective of the world, especially the living world, inexorably impresses upon us a dynamic picture of the world of entities, structures and processes involved in continuous and incessant change and in process without
ceasing. This has impelled us to reintroduce into our understanding of God’s creative relation to the world a dynamic element.
This was always implicit in the Hebrew conception of a ‘living God’, dynamic in action, but has been obscured by the tendency
to think of ‘creation’ as an event in the past. God has again to be conceived of as continuously creating, continuously giving
existence to, what is new. God is creating at every moment of the world’s existence in and through the perpetually endowed
creativity of the very stuff of the world.
All of this reinforces the need to reaffirm more strongly than at any other time in the Christian (and Jewish and Islamic)
traditions that in a very strong sense God is the immanent Creator, creating in and through the processes of the natural order. The processes are not themselves God, but the action of God-as-Creator. God gives existence in divinely created time to a process that itself brings forth the new – thereby God
is creating. This means we do not have to look for any extra supposed gaps in which, or mechanisms whereby, God might be supposed to be acting as Creator in the living world.
A musical analogy might help: when we are listening to a musical work – say, a Beethoven piano sonata – then there are times
when we are so deeply absorbed in it that for the moment we are thinking Beethoven’s musical thoughts with him. If, however,
anyone were to ask at that moment (unseemingly interrupting our concentration!), ‘Where is Beethoven now?’, we would have
to reply that Beethoven-as-composer was to be found only in the music itself. Beethoven-as-composer is/was other than the
music (he ‘transcends’ it), but his interaction with and communication to us is entirely subsumed in and represented by the
music itself – he is immanent in it and we need not look elsewhere to meet him in that creative role. The processes revealed
by the sciences are in themselves God acting as Creator, and God is not to be found as some kind of additional influence or factor added on to the processes of the world God is creating. This perspective can properly be called a theistic naturalism.
12.3 Panentheism
The scientific picture of the world points to a perspective on God’s relation to all natural events, entities, structures,
and processes in which they are continuously being given existence by God, who thereby expresses in and through them God’s
own inherent rationality. In principle this should have raised no new problems for Western classical theism when it maintains
the ontological distinction between God and the created world. However, it often conceived of God as a necessary ‘substance’
with attributes and with a space ‘outside’ God in which the realm of the created was, as it were, located. Furthermore, one
entity cannot exist in another and retain its own (ontological) identity if they are regarded as substances. Hence, if God is so regarded, God can only exert influence ‘from outside’ on events in the world. Such ‘intervention’, for that is what
it would be, raised acute problems in the light of our contemporary scientific perception of the causal nexus of the world
being a closed one. Because of such considerations, this substantival way of speaking has become inadequate in my view and
that of many others. It has become increasingly difficult to express the way in which God is present to the world in terms
of ‘substances’, which by definition cannot be internally present to each other. This inadequacy of Western classical theism
is aggravated by the evolutionary perspective which, as we have just seen, requires that natural processes in the world need
to be regarded as such as God’s creative action.
We therefore need a new model for expressing the closeness of God’s presence to finite, natural events, entities, structures,
and processes and we need it to be as close as possible without dissolving the distinction between Creator and what is created.
In response to such considerations and those broad developments in the sciences, already outlined above, which engender a
theistic naturalism , there has indeed been a ‘quiet revolution’ (Brierley, 2004, pp. 1–15)12 in twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century theology by the resuscitation of panentheism – the admittedly inelegant term for 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, 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 has a much stronger stress on the immanence of God in, with, and under the events of the world.
To say, as in the definition of panentheism, that the world is ‘in’ God evokes a spatial model of the God–world relation,
as in Augustine’s picture of the world as a sponge floating on the infinite sea of God (Augustine, 2006, VII, 7). This ‘in’ metaphor has advantages in this context over the ‘separate-but-present-to’ terminology of divine immanence
in Western classical theism. For God is best conceived of as the circumambient Reality enclosing all existing entities, structures,
and processes; and as operating in and through all, while being more than all. Hence, all that is not God has its existence
within God’s operation and Being. The infinity of God includes all other finite entities, structures, and processes – God’s
infinity comprehends and incorporates all. In this model, there is no ‘place outside’ the infinite God in which what is created could exist. God creates all-that-is
within Godself.
One pointer to the cogency of a panentheistic interpretation of God’s relation to the world is the way the different sciences
interrelate to each other and to the world they study. A hierarchy of sciences from particle physics to ecology and sociology
is required to investigate and explicate the embedded hierarchies of natural systems – as we saw, a ‘layered’ physicalism
is implied, for the more complex is constituted of the less complex and all interact and interrelate in systems of systems.
It is to this world so discovered by the sciences that we have to think of God as relating. The ‘external’ God of Western
classical theism can be modelled as acting on such a world only by intervening separately at the various discrete levels.
But if God incorporates both the individual systems and the total System-of-systems within Godself, as in the panentheistic
model, then it is readily conceivable that God could interact with all the complex systems at their own holistic levels. For
God is present within the wholes as such, as well as to the parts.
At the terminus of one of the branching lines of natural hierarchies of complexity stands the human person – the complex of
the human-brain-in-the-human-body-in-society. Persons can have intentions and purposes, which can be implemented by particular
bodily actions. Indeed, the action of the body just is the intended action of the person. The physical action is describable, at the bodily level, in terms of the appropriate physiology,
anatomy, etc., but it is also an expression of the intentions and purposes of the person’s thinking. They are two modalities of the same psychosomatic
event. To be embodied is a necessary condition for persons to have perception, to exert agency, to be free, and to participate
in community. Personal agency has been used both traditionally in the Biblical literature and in contemporary theology as
being an appropriate model for God’s action in the world. Our intentions and purposes seem to transcend our bodies, yet in
fact are closely related to brain events and can be implemented in the world only through our bodies. Our bodies are indeed
ourselves under one description and from another perspective. In personal agency there is an intimate and essential link between
what we intend and what happens to our bodies. Yet ‘we’ as thinking, conscious persons appear to transcend our bodies while
nevertheless being immanent in them. This ‘psychosomatic’, unified understanding of human personhood reinforces the use of
a panentheistic model for God’s relation to the world. For, according to that model, God is internally present to all of its entities, structures, and processes in a way that can be regarded as analogous to the way we as persons
are present and act in our bodies. This model, in the light of current concepts of the person as a psychosomatic unity, is
then an apt way of modelling God’s personal agency in the world.
As with all analogies, models, and metaphors, qualifications are needed before we too readily draw a parallel between God’s
relation to the world and our relation as persons to our bodies. The first is that the God who, we are postulating, relates
to the world like a personal agent, is also the one who creates it, gives it existence, and infinitely transcends it. Indeed,
the panentheistic model emphasizes this in its ‘more than the world’. Moreover we do not create our own bodies. The second qualification of the model is that as human persons, we are not conscious of most
of what goes on in our bodies in autonomous functions such as breathing, digestion, heart beating. Yet other events in our
bodies are conscious and deliberate, as we have just been considering. So we have to distinguish between these; but this can
scarcely apply to an omniscient God’s relation to the world. The third qualification of the model is that, in so using human personal agency as similar to the way God interacts
with the world, we are not implying that God is ‘a person’ – rather that God is more coherently thought of as ‘at least personal’,
indeed as ‘more than personal’ (recall the ‘more than’ of panentheism). Perhaps we could even say that God is ‘supra-personal’
or ‘trans-personal’, for there are some essential aspects to God’s nature that cannot be subsumed under the categories applicable
to human persons. In my view, the panentheistic model allows one to combine a renewed and stronger emphasis on the immanence
of God in the world with God’s ultimate transcendence over it. It does so in a way that makes the analogy of personal agency
both more pertinent and less vulnerable than the Western, externalist model to the distortions corrected by the above qualifications
of the model of the world-as-God’s-body.
The fact of natural (as distinct from human, moral) evil continues to be a challenge to belief in a benevolent God. In the
classical perception of God as transcendent and as existing in a ‘space’ distinct from that of the world, there is an implied
detachment from the world in its suffering. This thereby renders the ‘problem of evil’ particularly acute. For God can do
something about evil only by an intervention from outside, which provokes the classical dilemma of either God can and will
not, or would but cannot: God is either not good or not omnipotent. But an ineliminable hard core of offence remains, especially
when encountered directly, and often tragically, in personal experience. For the God of classical theism witnesses, but is
not involved in, the sufferings of the world – even when closely ‘present to’ and ‘alongside’ them.
Hence, when faced with this ubiquity of pain, suffering, and death in the evolution of the living world, we are impelled to
infer that God, to be anything like the God who is Love in Christian belief, must be understood to be suffering in, with, and under the creative processes of the world. Creation
is costly to God, we concluded. Now, when the natural world, with all its suffering, is panentheistically conceived of as ‘in God’, it follows
that the evils of pain, suffering, and death in the world are internal to God’s own self. So God must have experience of the natural. This intimate
and actual experience of God must also include all those events that constitute the evil intentions of human beings and their
implementation – that is, the ‘moral evil’ of the world of human society. God is creating the world from within and, the world
being ‘in’ God, God experiences its sufferings directly as God’s own and not from the outside.
12.4 The consequences for theology of the reappraisal of the natural
It is clear from the foregoing that the sciences have led during the last few decades to a fundamental reassessment of the
nature and history of the world, which now, it has been argued above, has to be characterized in terms of an emergentist monism. The world is a hierarchy of interlocking complex systems and it has come to be recognized that these complex systems have
a determinative effect, an exercising therefore of causal powers, on their components – a whole–part influence. This in itself
implied an attribution of reality to the complexes and to their properties that undermines any purely reductionist understanding
and suggested that the determinative power of complex systems on their components can often best be understood as a flow of
‘information’, understood in its most general sense as a pattern-forming influence. Successive states of a complex (and most
natural entities are complexes) are what they are as a result of a joint effect of the state of the complexes-as-a-whole and of the properties of the individual components. The wholes and parts
are intimately interlocked regarding their properties, and so in the very existence that a creator God gives them.
Furthermore, the evolutionary perspective of the sciences, cosmological and biological, entails an understanding of creation
by God as a continuous activity – dynamic models and metaphors of divine creation become necessary. The work of God as Creator
is manifested all the time in the natural processes, which are revealed in all their regularities by the sciences. These processes
have now to be seen as both natural and divine, so that a theistic naturalism has had to be affirmed according to which God is at work creating and maintaining the natural order and is not conceived
of as external to it, occasionally intervening and disrupting its regularities. This involves a much tighter linkage between
the divine and the natural, and so of the immanence of the divine, than has prevailed in much Western Christian theology.
These developments in the understanding of God’s relation to the natural, albeit created, order, which have arisen from pressure
from the new scientific perspectives on the world and its history, are integrated in the model of panentheism. This model also attempts to restore the necessary balance between God’s transcendence and God’s immanence, which, in this
context, had become overweighted in favour of the former because the relation between God and the world had too often been
couched in terms of substances. The panentheistic model is, in fact, closer to an older tradition within theology than has
usually been realized. For the Eastern Christian tradition has been explicitly panentheistic in holding together God’s transcendence
and immanence.13 For example, Gregory Palamas (c.1296–1359 CE) made a distinction-in-unity between God’s essence and his energies; and Maximus
the Confessor (c.580–662 CE) regarded the Creator-Logos as being characteristically present in each created thing as God’s intention for it, its inner essence (its logoi), which makes it distinctively itself and draws it towards God.
What is transmitted across the ‘interface’ between God and the world may perhaps best be conceived of as something like a
flow of information – a pattern-forming influence. However, one has to admit that, because of the ‘ontological gap(s)’ between
God and the world, which must always exist in any theistic model, this is only an attempt at making intelligible that which
we can postulate as being the effect of God seen, as it were, from the human side of the boundary. Whether or not this use
of the notion of information flow proves helpful in this context, we do need some way of indicating that the effect of God at all levels is that of pattern-shaping
in its most general sense. I am encouraged in this kind of exploration by the recognition that the Johannine concept of the
Logos, the Word, of God may be taken to emphasize God’s creative patterning of the world and so as God’s self-expression in the world.
An overwhelming impression is given by these developments, in both the philosophy of science (emergentist monism) and in theology
(theistic naturalism and panentheism), of the world as an interlocking System-of-systems saturated, as it were, with the presence
of God shaping patterns at all levels. This enhanced emphasis on divine immanence in natural events warrants, I suggest, the
application of the same interpretative concepts used for them in those complex events {God + nature + persons} that constitute
the human experience of God and that are the usual focus of theological discourse. In the following, an attempt is made to
employ theological language about the relevant relationships and properties in various contexts in an emergentist monist manner,
as in the interpretation of natural systems – themselves now conceived of as exemplifying the activity of God, according to
theistic naturalism, and as being ‘in’ God, according to panentheism. For brevity, we will, in the following, denote this
fusion of these horizons as EPN (= emergentist/monist–panentheistic–naturalist).
Hence, in examining religious experiences requiring distinctive theological interpretation – putative ‘complexes’ of {God
+ nature + persons} – we might hope to find, if only partially, aspects that are: ontological with respect to the emergence of new kinds of reality requiring distinctive language and concepts and referring to what is there; and causal14 with respect to the description of whole–part influences of ‘higher’ levels (God, in these instances) on the ‘lower’ ones and referring to what is being effected and transmitted in it (and thereby paralleling the pattern-forming associated with the transmission of information in natural systems).
We examine now some of those areas of discourse concerning theological themes that might be illuminated by the recognition
that belief in God as Creator involves the recognition, which I have been describing, of the character of the processes whereby
God actually creates new forms, new entities, structures, and processes. They emerge with new capabilities, requiring distinctive
language on our part to distinguish them. If God is now recognized as present in, with, and under this whole process, then
our theology should be able to recognize those same ontological and causal-influential features that are expressed in the
concepts of emergent monism, theistic naturalism, and panentheism (the whole EPN perspective) as also evident in these other modes of God’s presence.
12.4.1 Incarnation
Nearly three decades have elapsed since the publication of The Myth of God Incarnate (Hick, 1977) and the consequent flurry of books it evinced. A range of ‘Christologies’ continue to represent the beliefs of Christians
of various colours, with the more orthodox appealing to the Definition of Chalcedon of 451 CE as the basis of the formulation
of their faith, while others, less concerned for conformity, seek other more dynamic modes of expression to describe how they
believe ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself’.15 It is, at least, widely recognized that that famous Definition, with its uncompromising ‘two natures’ in ‘one person’, afforded
only boundaries within which Christian discourse was urged to range. The paradox implicit in this assertion has continued
to be a theological gadfly – an unavoidable assertion, apparently, but with no satisfying resolution of its paradox.
The recognition of the all-pervasiveness of emergence as a feature of the world provides now, I would suggest, a way of drawing
the sting of this paradox. For complex systems, as we saw, themselves display properties that are the joint outcomes of those of its components and of the system-as-a-whole. This allows one to refer to the new reality constituted
by the whole without any contradiction of the different reality of the components. Applying this way of thinking to the person
of the historical Jesus leads to the following proposal. The creation of the human personhood of Jesus, born of Mary and fully
human, is in this EPN perspective in itself a divine action16 at the biological level, corresponding to the component element of a system. At the level of the historical Jesus – the macro
level, as it were – Jesus’ will was fully open in submission to the divine will, so that in his total person there emerged
a unique manifestation of the divine being insofar as that is expressible in human form – the manifestation of self-offering
love. There is, in this EPN perspective, no basic contradiction between the human level of Jesus’ existence (‘born of Mary, etc.’), itself a divine expression,
and the expression of the divine in the total personhood of Jesus, those features of the encounter with him that led his followers
to perceive a dimension of transcendence characteristic only of the divine. The relation between the two is that of emergence:
the way God creates new entities in the natural world, it has transpired.
Jesus’ Jewish followers encountered in him (especially in his Resurrection) a dimension of divine transcendence that, as devout
monotheists, they had attributed to God alone. But they also encountered him as a complete human being, and so experienced
an intensity of God’s immanence in the world different from anything else in their experience or tradition. Thus it was that
the fusion of these two aspects of their awareness – that it was God acting in and through Jesus the Christ – gave rise to the conviction that something new had appeared in the world of immense
significance for humanity. A new emergent had appeared within created humanity. Thus it was, too, that they ransacked their cultural stock of available images and models (for example ‘Christ’ = ‘Messiah’ ( = ‘Anointed’),
‘son of God’, ‘Lord’, ‘Wisdom’, ‘Logos’), at first Hebraic and later Hellenistic, to give expression to this new, nonreducible, distinctive mode of being and becoming,
instantiated in Jesus the Christ. One might say that God ‘informs’ the human personhood of Jesus such that God’s self-expression
occurs in and through Jesus’ humanity.
When we reflect on the significance of what the early witnesses reported as their experience of Jesus the Christ, we find
ourselves implicitly emphasizing both the continuity of Jesus with the rest of humanity, and so with the rest of nature within which Homo sapiens evolved, and, at the same time, the apparent discontinuity constituted by what is distinctive in his relation to God and what, through him (his teaching, life, death, and Resurrection),
the early witnesses experienced of God. This combination of continuity with discontinuity is just what we have come to recognize
in the emergent character of the natural world, and it seems appropriate to apply this to the cluster of notions concerning
the person of Jesus. In Jesus the Christ a new reality has emerged and a new ontology is necessitated – hence the classical imagery just cited.
How then, in the light of this, might we interpret the experience of God that was mediated to his disciples and to the New
Testament church through Jesus? That is, how can we understand the Christ-event as God’s self-communication and interaction
with the world such that it is intelligible in the light of today’s natural and human sciences? We need to explicate in these
terms the conclusions of scholars about the understanding in New Testament times of Jesus the Christ. Note, for example, J.
G. Dunn’s conclusion that: ‘Initially Christ was thought of … as the climactic embodiment of God’s power and purpose God himself
reaching out to men … God’s creative wisdom … God’s revelatory word … God’s clearest self-expression, God’s last word’ (Dunn,
1980, p. 262, emphasis omitted).
These descriptions of what Jesus the Christ was to those who encountered him and the early church are all, in their various
ways, about God communicating to humanity. In the broad sense in which we have been using the terms, they are about an ‘input of information’. This process
of ‘input of information’ from God conforms with the actual content of human experience, as the conveying of ‘meaning’ from
God to humanity.17 God can convey divine meanings through events and patterns of events in the created world – those in question here are the
life, teaching, death, and Resurrection of the human person, Jesus of Nazareth, as reported by these early witnesses. As the
investigations of the New Testament show, they experienced in Jesus, in his very person and personal history, a communication
from God, a revelation of God’s meanings for humanity. So it is no wonder that, in the later stages of reflection in the New
Testament period, John conflated the concept of divine Wisdom with that of the Logos, the ‘Word’ of God, in order to say what he intended about the meaning of Jesus the Christ for the early witnesses and their
immediate successors. The locus classicus of this exposition is, of course, the prologue to the gospel of John. John Macquarrie (1990, pp. 43–44, 106–108) notes that the expression ‘Word’ or Logos, when applied to Jesus, not only carries undertones of the image of ‘Wisdom’, it also conflates two other concepts: the Hebrew
idea of the ‘word of the Lord’ for the will of God expressed in utterance, especially to the prophets, and in creative activity;
and that of ‘logos’ in Hellenistic Judaism, especially in Philo – the Divine Logos, the creative principle of rationality operative in the universe,
especially manifest in human reason, formed within the mind of God, and projected into objectivity. He suggests substituting
‘Meaning’ for Word–Logos, as it helps to convey better the Gospel’s affirmation of what happened in creation and in Jesus the Christ, since the conveying
of meaning, in the ordinary sense, is implemented initially by an input of ‘information’ – that new reality, the Incarnation,
involves distinctive causal influences.
The ideas that generated the EPN perspective do indeed seem to illuminate what Christians wish today to affirm about Jesus the Christ as a unique revelation
from God about humanity and about God’s own self.
12.4.2 The Eucharist
The relations of humanity to God may also be illuminated by our understanding of the emergence of new realities in complex,
especially self-organizing, systems. For 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 that are 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?
I am thinking,18 for example, of the Church’s Eucharist (Holy Communion, the Mass, ‘The Lord’s Supper’) in which there exists a distinctive
complex of interrelations between its constituents. These latter could be identified inter alia (for it is many-layered in
the richness of its meanings and symbols) as follows.
(1) Individual Christians are motivated by a sense of obedience to the ancient, well-authenticated historically, command of Jesus, the Founder of their faith, at the actual Last Supper
to ‘Do this … ’, that is to eat the bread and to drink the wine in the same way he did on that occasion and so to identify themselves with
his project in the world.
(2) Christians of all denominations have been concerned that their communal act is properly authorized as being in continuity with that original act of Jesus and its repetition, recorded in the New Testament, in the first community
of Christians. Churches have differed about the character of this authorization but not about its importance.
(3) The physical ‘elements’, as they are often called, of bread and wine are, of course, part of the matter of the world and so
representative, in this regard, of the created order. So Christians perceive in these actions, in this context and with the
words of Jesus in mind, that a new significance and valuation of the very stuff of the world is being expressed in this action.
(4) Because it is bread, and not corn, wine, and not grapes, that are consecrated, this act has come to be experienced also as
a new evaluation of the work of humanity in co-creating with God in ordinary work.
(5) The broken bread and poured-out wine was explicitly linked by Jesus with his anticipated self-sacrificial offering of himself
on the cross in which his body was broken and blood shed to draw all towards unity of human life with God. Christians in this
act consciously acknowledge and identify themselves with Jesus’ self-sacrifice, thereby offering to reproduce the same self-emptying love for others in their own lives and so to further his purposes of bringing in the Reign of God in the world.
(6) They are also aware of the promise of Jesus to be present again in their re-calling and re-making of the historical events
of his death and resurrection. This ‘making present’ (anamnesis) of the Jesus who is regarded as now fully in the presence of – and is, in some sense, identified with – God is a unique
and spiritually powerful feature of this communal act.
(7) The creative presence of God, as transcendent, incarnate, and immanent.
12.4.3 God’s interaction with the world
In a world that is a closed causal nexus, increasingly explicated by the sciences, how might God be conceived of as influencing
particular events, or patterns of events, in the world without interrupting the regularities observed at the various levels
studied by the sciences? A model I have proposed20 is based on the recognition that the omniscient God uniquely knows, over all frameworks of reference of time and space, everything
that it is possible to know about the state(s) of all-that-is, including the interconnectedness and interdependence of the
world’s entities, structures, and processes. This is a panentheistic perspective, for it conceives of the world as, in some sense, being ‘in’ God, who is also ‘more’ than the world.
It also follows that the world would be subject to any divine determinative influences that do not involve matter or energy
(or forces). Thus, mediated by such whole–part influences on the world-as-a-whole (as a System-of-systems) and thereby on its constituents, God could cause particular events and patterns of events, which express God’s
intentions, to occur. These would then be the result of ‘special, divine action’, as distinct from the divine holding in existence
of all-that-is, and so would not otherwise have happened had God not so intended. By analogy with the exercise of whole–part
influence in the natural systems already discussed, such a unitive, holistic effect of God on the world could occur without abrogating21 any of the laws (regularities) that apply to the levels of the world’s constituents. This influence would be distinguished
from God’s universal creative action, in that particular intentions of God for particular patterns of events to occur are
thereby effected; inter alia, patterns of events could be intended by God in response to human actions or prayers.
The ontological ‘interface’ at which God must be deemed to be influencing the world is, on this model, that which occurs between
God and the totality of the world (= all-that-is), and this may be conceived of panentheistically as within God’s own self.
What passes across this ‘interface’, I have also suggested (Peacocke, 1993, pp. 161, 164),22 may perhaps be conceived of as something like a flow of information – a pattern-forming influence. Of course, one has to
admit that, because of the ‘ontological gap(s)’ between God and the world that must always exist in any theistic model, this
is only an attempt at making intelligible that which we can postulate as being the initial effect of God experienced from,
as it were, our side of the ontological boundary.23 Whether or not this use of the notion of information flow proves helpful in this context, we do need some way of indicating
that the effect of God at this, and hence at all levels, is that of pattern-shaping in its most general sense. I am again
encouraged in this kind of exploration by the recognition that the Johannine concept of the Logos, the Word of God, may be taken to emphasize God’s creative patterning of the world and also God’s self-expression in the world.
On this model, the question arises at what level or levels in the world such divine influences might be coherently conceived
as acting. By analogy with the operation of whole–part influence in natural systems, I have in the past suggested that, because
the ‘ontological gap(s)’ between the world and God is/are located simply everywhere in space and time, God could affect holistically the state of the world (the whole in this context) at all levels. Understood
in this way, the proposal implies that patterns of events at the physical, biological, human, and even social levels could
be influenced by divine intention without abrogating natural regularities at any of these levels. In this form it poses in
a particularly acute form the challenge of ‘special divine action’ to current scientific understandings of the world as a
closed nexus of webs of causes and whole–part influences. The sharpness of this challenge is arguably less if the top-down
influence of God is conceived as operating mainly, or even exclusively, at the level of the human person, the emergent reality
of which can be located at the apex of the systems-based complexities of the world. God would then be thought of as acting
in the world in a whole–part, top-down manner by shaping human personal experience, which thereby effects events at the physical,
biological, and social levels.
These two limiting forms of the proposal of special divine action by top-down divine influence are not mutually exclusive.
However, divine action in a form that is confined to the personal level is less challenged by (has more ‘traction’ with) the
general scientific account of the world than when such divine action is proposed to be at all levels. At this stage in my formulating this proposal, I am inclined to postulate divine top-down influences at all levels,
but with an increasing intensity and precision of location in time from the lowest physical levels up to the personal level,
where it could be at its most intense and most focused. More general theological considerations need to be brought to bear
on how to formulate this model of special divine action. One relevant consideration might be developed as follows.
I hope the model as described so far has a degree of plausibility in that it depends only on an analogy with complex natural
systems in general and on the way whole–part influence operates in them. It is, however, clearly too impersonal to do justice to the personal character of many (but not all) of the profoundest human experiences of God. So there is little doubt that it needs to be
rendered more cogent by recognizing, as I have argued above, that among natural systems the instance par excellence of whole–part
influence in a complex system is that of personal agency. Indeed, I could not avoid speaking above of God’s ‘intentions’ and
implying that, like human persons, God had purposes to be implemented in the world. For if God is going to affect events and
patterns of events in the world, we cannot avoid attributing personal predicates such as intentions and purposes to God –
inadequate and easily misunderstood as they are. So we have to say that, although God is ineffable and ultimately unknowable
in essence, yet God ‘is at least personal’, and personal language attributed to God is less misleading than saying nothing!
That being so, we can now legitimately turn to the exemplification of whole–part influence in the mind–brain–body relation
as a resource for modelling God’s interaction with the world. When we do so, the cogency of the ‘personal’ as a category for
explicating the wholeness of human agency reasserts itself and the traditional, indeed Biblical, model of God as in some sense
a ‘personal’ agent in the world, acting especially on persons, is rehabilitated – but now in that quite different metaphysical,
non-dualist framework of the EPN perspective, which is itself coherent with the world view that the sciences engender.
12.5 Conclusion
I propose that the principles involved in trying to make clear what is special about these and other spiritual situations
involving {God + nature + persons} is broadly applicable24 to many other experiences of theological concern and interest, both historical and contemporary. Thus ‘grace’ may be conceived
as a causally influential and transformative effect of God on a human being that operates when a person comes into an intimate relation
with God under the particular circumstances that characterize its different forms.25 Transformation is a key feature of the effects of grace, so there is always an ontological aspect to the experience as well
as a causal-influential one. These principles are also applicable to the understanding of intercessory prayer in which the
‘complex’ under consideration involves more than one person, although one in particular is the object of the prayer(s). The
whole complex of {God + persons} can be conceived of as constituting a new kind of reality with new causal-influential capacities
that are sui generis.
The EPN perspective I have been trying to expound, in conjunction with the new sciences of complexity and of self-organization, provide,
it seems, a fruitful and illuminating release for theology from the oppression of excessively reductionist interpretations
of the hierarchy of the sciences, and a making accessible of theological language and concepts to the general exchanges of
the intellectual life of our times, a milieu from which it has been woefully and misguidedly excluded for too long.
The new insights into the complexifying and information-bearing capacity of matter have generated a metaphysic in emergentist
monism that, as interpreted in a panentheistic and natural-theistic framework, allows one to see a congruence and contiguity
between the nature of matter and the experiences that theology seeks to articulate. Hence, in responding to one of the questions
this volume poses – What is ultimate? – one does, now, not have to choose between ‘God, matter, and information’ but can hold them altogether in a new kind of synthesis that obviates the false dichotomies
of the sciences/humanities, matter/spirit, and science/religion that have plagued Western culture for too long.
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2 Conventionally said to run from the ‘lower’, less complex, to the ‘higher’, more complex systems, from parts to wholes, so
that these wholes themselves constitute parts of more complex entities – rather like a series of Russian dolls. In the complex
systems I have in mind here, the parts retain their identity and properties as isolated individual entities (Peacocke, 1994).
5 As does Philip Clayton, the author of Chapter 3 in this volume. Note that the term ‘monism’ is emphatically not intended (as is apparent from the nonreductive approach adopted here) in the sense in which it is taken to mean that physics
will eventually explain everything (which is what ‘physicalism’ is usually taken to mean).
9 J. C. Puddefoot has carefully clarified the relation between the different uses of ‘information’ (Puddefoot, 1991, pp. 7–25). First, physicists, communication engineers, and neuroscientists use it in referring to the probability of one
outcome among many possible outcomes of a situation; second, there is the meaning of ‘to give shape or form to’ (stemming
from the Latin informare); finally, the ordinary sense of information as knowledge, so, broadly, ‘meaning’.
12 The whole volume constitutes a survey of the various understandings, and misunderstandings, of the concept of panentheism.
14 It cannot be too strongly emphasized that ‘causal’ does not here, and elsewhere in this chapter, refer to a Humean succession
of cause/effect events, but to the influence of the state of the whole of a complex on the properties and behaviour of its
constituent parts.
15 See 2 Corinthians 5, 19.
16 Whether or not one affirms the virginal conception.
21 The same may be said of human agency in the world. Note also that this proposal recognizes more explicitly than is usually expressed that the ‘laws’ and
regularities that constitute the sciences usually apply only to certain perceived, if ill-defined, levels within the complex
hierarchies of nature.
23 I would not wish to tie the proposed model too tightly to a ‘flow of information’ interpretation of the mind–brain–body problem.
25 Grace has been variously, and somewhat over-formally, classified as inter alia ‘extrinsic’, ‘uncreated’, ‘created’, ‘habitual’,
‘sanctifying’, ‘actual’, ‘elevating’, ‘prevenient’, ‘efficacious’, ‘sufficient’, etc.