Has creation a final goal? And if so, why was it not reached at once? Why was the consummation not realized from the beginning? To these questions there is but one answer: Because God is Life, and not merely Being.
—Friedrich Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom
Let’s face it, theology just isn’t that cool. From the New Atheists to the “spiritual but not religious” to the struggles of the Catholic Church to the emptying of the old mainline Protestant churches, evidence abounds that theism in the twenty-first century isn’t exactly avant-garde. Now, I’m sure it had its heyday once upon a time. Back when the Huns were ransacking the Roman Empire, theism was the very expression of progressive culture. But it’s been a long time since it was quite so hip to be holy. Sure, the megachurch world of Rick Warren and Joel Osteen may have created subcultures in which it’s cool to believe in the Abrahamic God, but that’s different. That’s more about emotional convictions than intellectual conclusions. I’m talking about theism as an “ism”—an idea, a theology, a God-centered worldview, a philosophically coherent structure of beliefs about the way the universe works that is built around a transcendent creator. And that kind of theism isn’t exactly lighting the intellectual universe on fire these days.
Mention cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, or neuroscience and it’s easy to find plenty of New York Times bestsellers examining the fascinating edges of these growing fields. Theology? Not so much. In fact, you might even imagine that nothing particularly significant has happened in theology in decades, if not centuries.
But you would be wrong.
There is, in fact, a cutting edge to contemporary theology, and that was the reason I recently found myself about thirty miles east of L.A., at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, looking for the Claremont School of Theology. It was here, I had learned, on the tectonic border of the nearby Sierra Madre Fault and the massive San Andreas Fault, that a new form of evolutionary theology is being formed. On the active and unstable intellectual fault line between the worlds of science and religion, a new kind of common ground was being sought.
At first glance, Claremont’s small, nondescript campus doesn’t exactly shout “new and different.” There are a number of simple, architecturally average buildings and offices surrounding an impressive-looking chapel that stands out right in the middle of campus. I arrived a few minutes early for my scheduled interview and headed straight for the chapel, curious to get a look at the simple but elegant place of prayer. As I stepped inside and took in the stained-glass windows, the large cross hanging on one side, the simple rows of chairs facing the lectern, the hymnals at the entrance, I felt a hint of Protestant familiarity. It reminded me of my own Presbyterian upbringing, of Sunday school mornings, church socials, and confirmation. The memories are pleasant enough, but my religious upbringing was hardly formative. My family, like the families of many of our contemporaries, was not that serious about the traditional Christian God, and I remember our church much more as a community connector—as a healthy and integral part of the social fabric of a small town, not really a source of religious revelation and even less a source of intellectual engagement. It was very conventional—ordinary and slightly unremarkable in the way that I think only Protestants have truly perfected, as if the mainstream itself had a mainstream. This campus had a bit of that air about it; and sure enough, I found out later, it was founded by Methodists—not exactly God’s most colorful children.
I had come here to meet Philip Clayton, a professor who was making a name for himself as a powerful thinker in the science and religion debates and the nascent field of evolutionary theology. Clayton was affiliated with the Center for Process Studies, a research center connected with the Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University. And here’s where the story gets interesting. The Center for Process Studies is unique in the context of Christian theology: it is the only place in North American academic life that is specifically dedicated to carrying on the thought and work of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne.
Whitehead was a key figure in the first wave of Evolutionaries—those remarkable men and women in the early twentieth century who were trying to find a place for creativity, subjectivity, spirit, and even God in the context of a scientifically revealed, evolutionary universe. Initially a mathematician, he worked closely with Bertrand Russell producing the tome Mathematica Principia in 1900, a thousand-page thesis on the foundations of that field. Russell and Whitehead stayed close friends for life, but their philosophies eventually diverged. Russell, the great analytic philosopher, was ever the careful pragmatist; his philosophy was one of restraint, logic, and careful reason. He steered well clear of what he called the “fog of metaphysics,” as well as more speculative philosophies, the latter being the area where Whitehead would make his mark.
Whitehead left behind his native England in the 1920s and took a post at Harvard in the philosophy department, the same post that had once been held by William James in the 1900s, when Harvard philosophy was a hotbed of evolutionary thinking. Whitehead’s early work in mathematics would morph into a deep inquiry into the foundations of reality, eventually producing a unique body of work called process philosophy, which directly countered the increasingly dominant materialism of his day. Whereas Russell achieved great fame during his career (partially for his politics) and his immediate influence on philosophy was profound, Whitehead’s work remained respected but relatively obscure during his lifetime and for decades hence. But that appears to be changing. Interest has grown significantly over recent years, and like many of his contemporary Evolutionaries, he may well prove to be a voice that speaks more to the concerns of the twenty-first century than the twentieth. We might say that while Russell embodied the mood of a war-weary twentieth century seeking restraint, retreat, and caution in its intellectual outlook, Whitehead embodied the bolder spirit of our own time, where integration, coherence, and meaning hold new prominence.
“Bertie thinks I’m muddleheaded, but I think he’s simple-minded.” That is how Whitehead once described the philosophical relationship between the two friends. Indeed, Russell’s philosophy hewed closely to the currents of the day. He was a logician whose work helped move philosophy toward the careful and considered logic of the sciences. He was the antidote to Hegel and the grand, all-encompassing assertions of the German idealists. Whitehead’s work, on the other hand, was concerned with big ideas—he was exploring fundamental connections between science, philosophy, and religion. In some sense, he followed Bergson and many of the other great evolutionary thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century in carving out a place deep in the foundations of reality for change, process, movement, and creativity. He shattered the spell of solidity, seeing a universe of becoming where others saw only matter and stasis. He was one of the first great philosophers to fully digest the changing landscape of a post-Newtonian world and he created what some have called an ontology of becoming. Often compared to Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher who emphasized the ever-changing nature of reality and declared that a person “cannot step in the same river twice,” Whitehead suggested that reality is an unfolding series of relationships between experiences in the “flux of becoming” rather than a product of the interactions of particles. Like Heraclitus’s river, reality is in motion—always moving, changing, and becoming. In our ignorance, we treat the river as if it were frozen in time, and we completely miss the most critical feature that defines reality as we know it—movement forward—what Whitehead called “creative advance into novelty.” His work encouraged us to see through the illusion that tricks our senses into attributing a kind of static permanence to the material world. He wanted to dispel the materialist haze—“the fallacy of misplaced concreteness”—and add temporality and change to our philosophy. For him, the most basic unit of reality was not bits of matter or physical particles or units of energy but rather “occasions” of experience—moments of subjective existence that fall and flow into one another in a cascade of creative becoming.
One of the reasons for Whitehead’s relative obscurity in today’s pantheon of twentieth-century thinkers is probably the sheer complexity of his work. Even professional philosophers struggle with his writings. But we should not let that deter us from seeking to understand his critical contribution to moving philosophy a little bit closer to an evolutionary worldview and inspiring generations to follow and expand his line of thought.
One person who did appreciate Whitehead’s philosophy was Charles Hartshorne. From his posts at Harvard, the University of Chicago, Emory University, and the University of Texas, he carried on Whitehead’s work, turning process philosophy into process theology, and more fully incorporating God into the picture of an evolving universe. Hartshorne studied with Whitehead for years at Harvard before heading to Chicago, where he broke with his theological contemporaries in attempting to understand God not as a complete and perfect being outside the universe but rather as a deity that was, in some sense, incomplete; a God who was becoming more perfected in the very process of the universe’s becoming. With this new vision of divinity, Hartshorne rejected the ancient vision of omnipotence so common to the traditional understanding of God. He put forth a God who is actually developing as the universe itself moves forward in time. In this sense, process theology would suggest that we all participate to some degree in the being and becoming of God, in the very evolution of divinity. We are part of God’s self, so to speak, and as we participate in the development of this world and this universe, so too do we, in some fundamental way, participate in God’s self-development. Paradoxically, by placing limits on God’s perfection, Hartshorne and Whitehead simultaneously expanded the depth of his or her being. They opened the door to seeing God not simply as an object of distant worship but as an intimate subject in whose ongoing creative self-development we can each participate.
Hartshorne’s book Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes made this break with the past clear, and it was a work that certainly succeeded in riling up his fellow philosophers of spirit. Some have less sympathetically referred to Whitehead and Hartshorne’s God as “God the semi-competent.” But such dismissals miss the important breakthrough that their work represented in the effort to drag theology into the modern world. By drawing powerful connections between the evolutionary dynamics of the universe and the very being of the divine, they helped set the stage for a new evolutionary theology to emerge in our own time, one whose picture of divinity was at least congruent with a scientifically revealed universe. In other words, if people in this day and age are going to believe in God, then they need a God that is believable.
Between the lineages started by Teilhard and Whitehead, there is a surprisingly robust evolutionary tradition living within the walls of the Christian church—more so than in any other major religion. In this chapter I want to explore some aspects of this evolutionary theology and bring to light how the idea of emergence, an idea that comes to us from science, is playing a role in its formation. Whether we call ourselves Christians or not, whether we find our spiritual home in devotion to a higher power or shy away from all such leanings, I’d like to encourage readers to consider that there may be important insights for an evolutionary worldview that are being forged in the rekindled theological furnaces of faith.
FROM EVANGELICAL TO EVOLUTIONARY
“Can you believe that of the people who call themselves Christian, fifty-six percent don’t believe in evolution?! That’s a sign of what we face in terms of denial.” Philip Clayton and I had just sat down in his office at Claremont. Dressed in casual clothes and flushed from riding a bike, Clayton was a down-to-earth kind of guy, a professor who had a natural air about him and an obvious ease with people. Here was a teacher, I thought to myself, who must be well liked by his students. By the end of our meeting, I had reason to qualify that supposition, because the other quality that soon captured my attention was Clayton’s rigorous intellectual intensity. Though he spoke in an open, engaging manner, it was also with a seriousness that conveyed the sense that our thoughts matter deeply, that they carry real consequence.
Clayton’s long journey toward an evolutionary worldview, he explained to me, had prepared him to play a unique role in bridging science and spirit. He had been raised a passionate atheist in Northern California by parents who were professors at one of the most cutting-edge, experimental colleges of the 1960s and ’70s, Sonoma State University. Activists and intellectuals, his parents played a part in the cultural and political movements of the day and their varied interests provided a rich atmosphere for their son’s development.
But when the time came to assert his teenage independence, Clayton faced the same dilemma that so many children of progressive parents would face in the decades to come—there was nothing to rebel against. No declaration of sexual proclivity, drug use, or counterculture loyalties was likely to cause much consternation under the Clayton roof. In retrospect, he realizes that he chose the one thing that could make an impact. He came home one day, sat his parents down, and announced, “I’ve accepted Jesus Christ as my sole Lord and Savior.”
It worked. As the silent tears flowed down his mother’s face, the young Clayton explained how the biblical stories he had learned while at a Christian camp with some local friends—marvelous stories about Christ, Satan, Adam and Eve, redemption, and the Second Coming—had fired up his rich fourteen-year-old imagination and convinced him to commit to Jesus. He resolved to be a minister, and after graduating at the top of his high school class, he headed off to Westmont, an evangelical college in Santa Barbara.
But something critical happened to this extremely bright but spiritually narrow collegiate kid on the way to his Christian destiny. He had his second spiritual epiphany. And this one would lead in the opposite direction to the first. He had chosen philosophy as his major, convinced that it would help him preach more organized sermons. One day, he recalled, “we were in class with our favorite professor, Stanley Obitts. He was launching into this discussion of Leibniz and God, and he had a way of leaning forward in his chair and moving his hand around in the air when he spoke. It was an intense discussion, and every person in class was leaning forward as well, and then suddenly he silenced us with a stare. After a long pregnant pause, he said a four-word sentence that affected the rest of my life. He said, ‘These are the questions!’ At that moment, I had an enlightenment experience. I got it. It’s not about the answers. It’s about the questions. It took a decade for it to fully sink in, but that was the moment I became an evolutionist.”
Within a few months, Clayton had turned his attention to science and was writing about the relationship between science, philosophy, and theology. By the time he graduated a year later in 1978, his conservative evangelical faith was “in shambles” and his plans for the ministry in trouble. Something in him had changed irrevocably, but he was still struggling to come to terms with his loss of theological certainty. Heading to graduate school at Fuller Theological Seminary, he took numerous Bible classes, hoping to salvage the remnants of his shattered faith.
“Daniel Dennett calls Darwinism the universal acid,” Clayton explained to me, reflecting on the way in which his embrace of an open-ended, open-minded inquiry had little by little undermined his religious conservatism. “And once the acid of questions begins interacting with dogmatic beliefs, you can’t stop the acid; it eats through everything.”
Clayton was fast becoming a skeptic in the land of the believers, challenging his professors to explain their biblical interpretations and justify their claims. He read more about science, and the relationship between science and religion, and found himself enthralled by the connections and disconnections between the two. But despite his unsettled heart and uncertain mind, his academic success continued. He earned a master’s in religion from Fuller, and resolved to find the most interesting mind he possibly could in the field of science and religion with whom to study.
The person he chose was Wolfhart Pannenberg, a German theologian, considered to be one of the great religious scholars of the era. Like Clayton, Pannenberg was a convert to the faith—raised outside of any tradition, a spiritual experience of sacred light had changed his life in his teenage years and he became a Lutheran in his twenties. Though inspired by the Christian theologians, he had rejected the exclusive focus on Christian history, putting his attention on a more universal sense of becoming—“the becoming of everything” as Clayton described it.
As I listened, Clayton’s description of Pannenberg called to mind Hegel, who had also understood spirit to be deeply involved with the development of culture and history. Hegel had suggested that God is, in some sense, embedded in the becoming of the entire world. When I asked Clayton about the connection, he recalled that he had suggested the same to his mentor when they first met in 1981. “Herr Pannenberg,” he had ventured, “I recognize that your theology is fundamentally Hegelian.” Pannenberg immediately bristled at the assumption and replied with a scowl to his new student, “Vat do you know of Hegel?”
During Clayton’s time in Germany, the existential confusion created by the break with his theological certitude began to settle and he started to find a rich new vision of spirit in the “becoming of everything.” His emerging recognition that God is found in the very process of history rather than simply at the pinnacle or the beginning was critical. This insight, combined with his fascination with science and his passion for questions, came together to sow the seeds of a new synthesis—an evolutionary theology that he has spent the better part of his life working out.
Soon Clayton sat down to write his first book—The Evolution of the Notion of God in Modern Thought. He wrote in German, and by the time he put pen to paper he had come under the influence of Germany’s rich and enduring philosophical tradition. But it was not Hegel’s evolutionary vision that captured his heart—it was another German idealist, Friedrich Schelling.
“I worked for eight years on the book,” Clayton told me, “and I ended up siding with Schelling. Hegel saw the evolutionary process as controlled by the unfolding of absolute logic . . . absolute spirit is the culmination of the unfolding of that logic. But for Schelling, no law of logic ties together the moments of evolution. That’s absolutely crucial. There are those thinkers who lay evolution out as if it’s preordained in some kind of platonic space. But there are also those of us who think that the creative process is just that—creative, spontaneous, unfolding, unpredictable. The future can’t be known, because the future doesn’t exist. And that’s why I’m a Schelling evolutionist and not a Hegel evolutionist.”
THE EVOLUTION OF THE EVOLUTION DEBATE
Clayton’s point about the open-ended creativity of the evolutionary process struck me, in part, because it brought home and supported one of my own observations regarding the history of evolutionary theory. If you look at the general range of theories about the evolutionary process, beginning in the nineteenth century, and then follow the evolution of the evolution debate, so to speak, over the course of the twentieth century and on into our own time, an important trend stands out. Over time, our understanding of the evolutionary process trends toward theories of development that involve more creativity and agency and that are less deterministic. This is true whether we are talking about a scientific or spiritual interpretation of evolution.
For example, science today is well schooled in the indeterminacies of quantum physics and the unpredictable self-organizing outcomes of complexity theory. There is a growing appreciation for the creative power of nature and how difficult a task it is to peer into the future of the evolutionary process. Yet it has not always been so open-minded. We’ve come a long way from the days when Laplace thought that entire future of the universe could theoretically be predictable if only we knew the exact properties of every last particle.
Theists as well, until recently, have leaned toward a deterministic view of the universe, or at least the view that all of the unpredictability and novelty was attributed to the will of an omnipotent God. And both Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo, while they were far from deterministic and appreciated evolution’s creative power, each described metaphysically specific blueprints and outcomes by which they saw the future of the process unfolding—in Teilhard’s case, the “Omega Point,” and in Aurobindo’s case, an ascending series of higher levels of consciousness, from higher mind to supermind and beyond. Contemporary thinkers like Clayton, however, are rejecting such preset evolutionary scripts in favor of open-ended, creative, evolutionary systems where novelty reigns and the future is unknown. The issue looms large in the formation of a new worldview, because the less predetermined the outcomes, the more human choice plays a role in setting the direction of the future. An evolutionary system that embraces greater determinism—whether from the scientific or spiritual side of the spectrum—would inevitably reflect the disturbing consequences and dispiriting conclusions of that bias. If evolution’s future is already written, our choices become less consequential. But if evolution’s future is unwritten, then all kinds of possibilities remain, and our creative human agency will play no small role in determining the shape of tomorrow. Indeed, as we recognize human choice to be more and more the fulcrum on which the future of evolution depends, the ethical consequences intensify. No higher power or inevitable historical movement can replace the critical importance of human agency.
So we would do well to steer clear of the overconfident certitudes of the past, when the best minds of the day in both science and spirit imagined that evolution played out on a predetermined map. But important questions remain: How far do we go? How free and creative is the evolutionary process? How predictable is our future? Recognizing that nothing is predetermined does not equate to the opposite fallacy—that history is irrelevant and anything at all is possible. Open-ended does not necessarily mean a blank slate, that there is no influence from the past. That’s true whether we talk about nature or culture. Indeed, I have seen too many people marry the doctrine of indeterminacy with the power of human choice and arrive at a strange concoction—convinced that we can create the future however we like, that everything is open and can change on a dime. They imagine that we hold an infinite creative power to shape that unformed future with our own agency. This is the position often espoused in popular spiritually oriented interpretations of quantum mechanics, where quantum indeterminacy has become an excuse to imagine a world of unbridled creativity, a universe in which physics will bend to our personal will. I also see this fallacy played out in the popular idea that human culture is preparing for a massive large-scale evolutionary leap, a ubiquitous transformation in which the whole world reaches a higher level of consciousness—all together, all at once. As we’ve discussed, this kind of thinking is idealism to the point of absurdity, well-intentioned perhaps, but all in service of a misguided understanding of how evolution works in consciousness and within a culture.
So while I agreed with Clayton’s nod to the open-ended nature of evolution, I also had questions. After all, as we have seen repeatedly in the course of this book, there are clear patterns, trends, and principles that inform evolutionary unfolding. The evolution of life and consciousness is not purely random or throw-up-your-hands spontaneous. There are clear maps that provide context for the past and clues to the future. There may be more freedom in the process than we ever realized, but there is also constraint. There is, in other words, some form of logic to the process—an open-ended, contingent, creative form, but a logic nonetheless. Schelling might say that evolution is creative, spontaneous, and unpredictable, but then how do we account for the seemingly nonrandom results in both biology and human culture?
When I asked Clayton this question, he qualified his previous statement in an important way—one that echoes the ideas of Peirce, Wilber, Sheldrake, and indeed, Whitehead, as discussed in chapter 11. “There can be grooves within open processes,” he explained, acknowledging that open-ended doesn’t equate to “anything goes.” There can be what Pannenberg used to call a “ ‘lure from the future that is not determinative.’ ”
Since I was visiting a center dedicated to Whitehead’s philosophy, I reflected further on how he had formulated this issue. In Whitehead’s view, each moment of experience, or “occasion” as he referred to it, is being created by the converging moments or occasions that have come before. He writes that the “whole universe is an advancing assemblage of these processes [of experience].” All of the preceding moments of experience cascade into the present and are integrated. Whitehead described this process with the enigmatic phrase “the many become one and are increased by one.” That means that the many events of the past cascade into the present and converge, creating a new moment, and thereby increase their number by one. According to this perspective, the present and future are constantly being created anew as the “whole antecedent world conspires to produce a new occasion.”
So without question, the present and future are heavily influenced by the past. But for Whitehead, there is another key factor. At every moment, creativity is possible; the potential for novelty exists. In every cascading occasion of experience, there is the opportunity for something new to exert its influence. “The antecedent environment is not wholly efficacious in determining the initial phase of the occasion which springs from it,” writes Whitehead. Believe it or not, that’s actually one of his simpler sentences. Basically, it’s a way of saying that the future is not entirely determined by the past. We don’t live in a deterministic universe. At every moment, potential novelty is present in the struggle to form the future out of the events of history. But notice the dynamic tension between freedom and historical determinism in Whitehead’s view—the unformed potential for novelty is in a constant, active relationship with the weighty influence of what’s come before. It is a dynamic we can easily see in our own lives as the power of our free will interacts with the influential tendencies of our own established psychological, social, and cultural predilections—the result of which shapes the future destiny of our lives.
We could also say that the potential for novelty appears to increase as evolution moves forward. A plant has more potential for novelty than a molecule has. A chimpanzee has more potential for novelty than a plant has. And a human being has more than a chimpanzee has. There is more novelty in biology than in physics, and more in cultural evolution than biological evolution. Science writer John Horgan stumbled on this truth in a 1995 article on complexity theory, noting that scientists were having trouble applying the mathematical standards of physics to the messier world of biology. “Numerical models work particularly well in astronomy and physics because objects and forces conform to their mathematical definitions so precisely,” he writes. “Mathematical theories are less compelling when applied to more complex phenomena, notably anything in the biological realm.” I would suggest that part of the problem isn’t just more complexity; it’s also the increased capacity for novelty and agency that exists in the biological world.9 Mathematical models could tell us with a high degree of accuracy where Jupiter will be in ten thousand years, but might have trouble pinpointing where my cat will be in ten minutes.
As evolution proceeds, agency evolves, choice increases, consciousness and freedom expand, and so does our capacity to act creatively, to influence the flow of becoming. That means that I have more freedom from the dictates of my past than my cat does. I am less predictable; my choices express more freedom. My cat certainly has some freedom, some agency, and some capacity to respond as an independent little being with subjective needs, wants, wishes, and feelings. She is far from an automaton—compared to an earthworm, she is a living bastion of freedom. But her agency is limited. Even though I don’t know where she will be in ten minutes, I do know that she will be doing one of about six or seven things. She has a limited repertoire compared to her human stewards. Human beings have the potential for tremendous creative agency (not that they always use it) and so our capacity to affect the flow of becoming is that much greater.
One message we can glean from Whitehead’s complex thought is this: We always possess the potential to make a leap forward, to liberate our lives from the inertia of the past, to add something new and novel to the march of history, but not to discard it completely. We have a tremendous capacity to mold and shape the future, but not to magically erase what has come before. As we discussed in chapter 3, Evolutionaries must find their way to a deep optimism, grounded in realism. We must steer between a cynical conservatism on one hand, which tells us “there is nothing new under the sun,” and a naïve romantic idealism on the other, which tells us that “anything at all is immediately possible.” Both are untrue, both deny the actual processes of evolution, and both ultimately impede our capacity to respond effectively to the demands of our world.
EMERGENCE AND OTHER THEOLOGICAL CONUNDRUMS
During his time in Germany, and later at Yale and several other schools, Philip Clayton’s interest in the relationship between science and spirit deepened. And the more he understood about the movements of science and philosophy, the more he realized that theology as it was currently constructed was inadequate. Except for a few unconventional thinkers, theology tended to be stuck in the past, unable to engage with contemporary currents of thought and make a coherent case for God that was congruent with the progression of science and philosophy. “Theological reflection on the spirit often contents itself with what is in essence a pre-modern notion of [God],” Clayton writes, “then, when such . . . ways of knowing God prove to be inadequate or lead to skeptical notions, theologians are tempted to just throw up their hands and declare that Spirit just can’t be grasped by the human mind.”
This theological gap, Clayton feels, engenders skepticism with religion, as it seems unable to provide a relevant way of making meaning in our contemporary world. Such concerns have inspired him to search for a notion of God that is flexible enough to embrace the extraordinary development of knowledge of the past two centuries—a theological worldview, in other words, that could peer deeply into the natural world as revealed by science, and not flinch.
William Grassie, the director of the science and spirit foundation Metanexus, likes to say that atheists are not particularly open-minded about God. In fact, they tend to have a very clear idea of exactly what kind of God they don’t believe in. We see this demonstrated in comments made by the New Atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett after seeing a lecture by Clayton: “Clayton astonished me by listing God’s attributes: according to his handsomely naturalistic theology, God is not omnipotent, not even supernatural, and . . . in short Clayton is an atheist who won’t admit it.” I suspect this reveals more about Dennett’s narrow conception of God than it does Clayton’s supposed atheism. Evolutionary spirituality in all its many forms steers well clear of the supernatural, omnipotent old-man-in-the-sky of tradition. And Clayton is no different. He is bringing forth an understanding of God or Spirit that is quite distinct from the omnipotent deity of his Christian forefathers.
One primary aspect of this new theology comes to us from science: the theory of emergence. For Clayton, and many others, the idea of emergence—a concept that has come to us out of the complexity sciences as well as evolutionary philosophy—has the potential to change the way we think about spirit in a scientifically revealed universe. It suggests that in the process of evolution, fundamentally novel and higher levels of complexity with critical new emergent properties come into existence that cannot be reduced to the levels below. The favorite example from chemistry is water. Who could predict water from hydrogen and oxygen? There is nothing contained in those two elements on their own that would lead you to predict such a remarkable offspring from their marriage. It’s like two tone-deaf individuals marrying and producing a Mozart: a dramatic, unpredictable, exciting emergence.
“We see in the natural world an open-ended process of increasing complexity, which leads to qualitatively new forms of existence,” Clayton writes. “Qualitatively” is the key word here. It suggests that novel modes of being come into existence in the process of evolution that are so fundamentally different from what has come before that their properties cannot be reduced to the other qualities present at a lower level of existence.
Let’s again consider my cat, who has been my daily companion in the process of writing this book. When I look at my cat, I see that the matter in her body is quite unique compared to, say, a rock or a molecule or a galaxy or even a tree. But it’s still matter—physical stuff. And yet we can see that the qualities of my cat—the incredible powers of movement, her awareness, some form of sentience and consciousness, the ability to recognize her human companions, her playfulness, her ability to maintain some rudimentary form of relationship—are all emergent properties of life. There is just no way to look at trillions and trillions of various atoms in the early constitution of this planet and conclude, “Eventually, we’re going to get to cat!” At every major stage of evolution, new, unpredictable emergent properties come into existence.
The idea of emergence is all the more attractive because it passes the “common sense” test. It allows for the idea that things we consider rather important in our everyday lives—for example, free will—are not simply fancy illusions that tantalize us into falsely imagining that life has some vital, mental, or spiritual quality when in fact all is reducible to the interactions of physical particles. No, these emergent stages constitute legitimate novelty, categories of existence that operate with new causal powers and properties. And emergence also suggests a universe that is “upwardly open,” as some have referred to it, meaning that there is no reason to think that emergent modes of being will stop at the evolution of human mentality. What new qualities and characteristics does evolution have in store for the next level of emergence? What kind of supramental or transmental categories await us as this unpredictable process unfolds?
At the same time, emergence is one of those ideas that can be exciting one moment and murky the next. It can sometimes be oversold as an answer to the many conundrums that confront us as we look at the trajectory of evolution. I’ve seen it become a sort of pseudoexplanation of a phenomenon, the new and improved version of “God did it.” How did human consciousness evolve? Uh . . . emergence! Great, but have we really explained anything?
So while the idea of emergence should not be confused with an explanation of the novelty of nature, it does help identify actual truths about the evolutionary process that are critical to appreciate. It names the wonderful creativity of our cosmic story—radically new capacities and higher levels of being do emerge in this marvelous universe. And it brings to light realities that have always been important in both theology and science—such as how and why human beings seem to be unique among nature’s inhabitants.
Emergence, then, is one way that we can begin to give legitimacy to the actual qualities present in that awesome sweep of evolutionary unfolding—from matter to life to mind to . . . what? For some theologians, God is the next level in the sequence, the next emergent quality in the natural teleological progression of cosmic evolution in which consciousness, mind, perspective, freedom, agency, and creativity are all deepening in quality and quantity. But clearly, this is not the ancient conception of deity. And it raises more than a few questions. If God exists at the end of the process, what, if anything exists before? If God is being created in the process of evolution, how can he or she be the creator? If God is perfect, as Saint Thomas Aquinas once argued, how can he or she be involved at all in a process that is always less than perfect?
THE PARADOX OF PERFECTION IN AN UNFINISHED UNIVERSE
One of the great theological and mystical conundrums has always revolved around the perfection of God. In fact, part of the actual spiritual power and beauty of a theistic perspective is the worshiper’s experience of a divine presence that is spiritually whole and complete. One might say that much of the intrinsic power of a theistic approach to spirit revolves around that deep relationship between the finite nature of self and the infinite, complete perfection of God “from whom all blessings flow” (as I sang in my childhood church choir). The very essence of the theistic and mystical impulse is expressed in that primordial longing of the individual self for liberation from the limitation, finitude, and partialness of incarnate life. It is a restless longing for completion and perfection, for release from the vicissitudes of opposites in a created world that is always this or that, suffering and striving without ever arriving. Indeed, great religious figures throughout the ages, including Saint Augustine, have cited this very longing as the best evidence of God’s existence. As theologian John Haught expresses so beautifully, “We have a God-shaped hole at the heart of our being.” That longing finds its natural resting point in the encounter with its opposite—the “infinite inexhaustible depth” of God’s being.
I remember a conversation I once had with a Greek Orthodox elder at a church in Boston. At some point during the several hours we spent discussing the holy life, he looked at me with great intensity and said, “You have to understand that God is uncreated.” He was expressing a traditional interpretation of deity, in which the divine perfection of the uncreated is not marred by the relative nature of creation. However, a cosmos that is evolving is, by its very nature, the opposite of that uncreated divinity. The world of creation, of time, space, and causation, is neither perfect nor complete but perpetually unfinished. So the challenge for theologians and all those who care about the fate of deity in a scientific age is to explain what the intrinsic and transcendent perfection of God’s being has to do with the very imperfect, incomplete world of becoming that we all share. In a sense, this has always been the burden placed on a God-centered view of the world. Only now the challenge is not just to account for a world of transience, impermanence, and change but also for a cosmos that is evolving, that is moving, that is going somewhere. And the challenge of that theological conundrum has only become more acute in a world in which our knowledge of the richness and wondrous beauty of nature seems to increase every day whereas our connection with a transcendent theistic presence seems to simultaneously grow more ephemeral and theoretical.
Adding to this challenge for theology is the orthodox theistic model that suggests that the world is a fallen realm, a mere shadow of the divine—a place that we must suffer through and endure, that tests our moral mettle but is far from the bosom of God. Much of Christian theology was originally influenced by Plato and neo-Platonic thought, which held that the material world was imperfect because it exists in a state of unpredictable flux and change, antithetical to the unchanging order and perfection of God. We should not look to the untrustworthy fickleness of the world as our model for divine contemplation but upward toward the “fixity of the heavens.”
These days, instead of inspiring people to contemplate the fixity of the heavens, such a perspective tends to embolden them to leave theism altogether—abandoning the church as a relic, a historical institution that has lost the pulse of spirit in the modern age. And so the theological question remains. What do such notions such as infinity, perfection, and completeness mean in an evolutionary age?
One alternative to the traditional split between God and the world is the outlook of panentheism, a term that Clayton suggests was first used by Schelling. It is the conception that God or divinity is intrinsic to the natural world but is not limited to the natural world. God is both immanent and transcendent. Panentheism should not be confused with pantheism, the idea that nature is God. Many scientists flirt with a pantheistic view of nature, finding a deep sense of reverence and spiritual sustenance in the contemplation of wonders of the natural world. It was Spinoza who said “Deus sive Natura”—God is nonseparate from nature. We hear echoes of this view in the musings of the Romantics but also in scientists such as Einstein who said that he believed in Spinoza’s God. We also hear it in many of the Evolutionaries who have been mentioned in these pages—Sagan, Swimme, Kauffman, and others.
Panentheism, on the other hand, retains the transcendent quality of God while making room for God’s deep mystery to also be revealed in the beauty and majesty of nature. However that still leaves us with a conundrum. How could a world in which God is immanent be imperfect, incomplete, and so full of strife and suffering? Theologians have addressed these questions in many ways over the centuries, but with the dawning of an evolutionary perspective, a much more satisfying understanding of the relationship between an uncreated God and creation reveals itself.
“Something exists as the ground of all things and the ground notion is the most basic metaphysical notion across the world’s traditions,” suggests Clayton. “Something emerges out of it, which is influenced by that ground, but also brings about a fullness of experience that can’t be actualized apart from the evolutionary process.” This notion of “ground” has been championed by many philosophers and theologians over the years, including Schelling, but perhaps most notably twentieth-century protestant theologian Paul Tillich, who said that God was not a being but the ground of all being.
But once we leave behind that perfect ground, we enter into the created realm, into the cosmos of time and space, a finite world of limitation, struggle, pain, and suffering. According to evolutionary theology, we are not stepping down into a lesser, shadowy, fallen world far from the spirit of God but instead are moving forward into a new dimension of divinity. We are entering into a vast process of becoming and emergence that is also not separate from God’s being. God is becoming richer, more complete, more all-embracing through the experience of the universe’s becoming. And so the limitations of this manifest world are not so much an indication of its separation from God, as theology once conceived, but an expression of God’s own internal desire to become greater, richer, more full and complete. Evil, strife, and suffering are not signs of the absence of divinity so much as they point to the unfinished nature of the created universe. And as subjects in this universe, we each have the capacity to participate in the struggle to actualize God’s future being, which transcends and includes our own being, in the emergent, creative processes of evolution. Emergent evolution, we might say, is the trace outline of divinity, successive hints of spirit in the processes of matter, as God’s very being develops along the arc of cosmic becoming.
“The full personality of God didn’t preexist the world, like the traditions used to teach,” Clayton told me. “Rather, I would say that something is not complete in God, the fullness of divine experience is not complete. And so the evolutionary process is launched and God becomes [more] through that process.”
Clayton’s words reminded me of another unusual champion of the theistic God with whom I’d had the pleasure of spending time some months before—John Haught, a Catholic theologian from Georgetown University. Haught easily speaks the language of faith, God, and belief, but he is also a significant player in the larger project of forging an evolutionary spirituality. Like so many of the voices in this book, he was inspired by Teilhard de Chardin. In fact, of all the Evolutionaries I have met, he may be the closest to representing the great Jesuit’s theological vision.
“Teilhard was one of the first scientists in the twentieth century to become aware that the universe is a story,” Haught explained to me. “It’s not just a place of imperfection but a place of creativity and becoming. This meant that we could no longer look spatially somewhere else to find the perfection that we’re looking for. We have to look toward the future. The future became for Teilhard the place where we lift up our eyes and our hearts to have something to aspire to.”
Haught takes the theos part of his theology very seriously. He expressed his disappointment with more pantheistic evolutionary philosophers who are willing to talk about the immanent divinity in nature but shy away from talk of God and the transcendence that such a word implies. But he also made it clear several times that there is nothing old-fashioned about what he means when he uses this ancient term. For Haught, like Clayton, God is intimately involved in the processes of evolution. “Evolutionary theology suggests that the body of Christ, which in a real sense includes the whole cosmos, is still in the process of being formed,” he writes. And mirroring the shift that we saw in the Eastern-inspired traditions of Aurobindo and Cohen, who have similarly redefined the goal of spiritual liberation, he reconfigures the Christian notion of salvation: “Too often, we have thought that Christ’s salvific role is that of liberating our souls from the universe rather than making us part of the great work of renewing and extending God’s creation.”
“The world must have a God; but our concept of God must be extended as the dimensions of our world are extended,” wrote Teilhard, almost a century ago. He predicted that the religions that would survive would be those that were willing to develop forms of their traditions that organically embrace the reality of an evolutionary worldview. After talking with Haught and Clayton, I think I began to better understand the clarity of Teilhard’s foresight. Indeed, just as a God who lives in and through nature might have been the most relevant form of divinity to a hunter-gatherer tribe embedded in the cycles of the natural world thousands of years ago; and just as a transcendent God who offers infinite peace, rest, and redemption, beyond time and the world, might have made perfect sense for the “nasty, brutish, and short” lives of our forefathers; so too does an evolutionary conception of God fit hand-in-glove with the fast-changing, globalizing, rapidly complexifying world of our own time. The consciousness of our age calls out for a divinity that lives not just in the wondrous beauty of nature or the eternal stillness of the present moment but also in the unknown creative potential that exists in the mysterious space of the future. “The future is the primary dwelling place of God,” writes Haught. Expanding on this theme in our conversations, he expressed what is perhaps the core idea of an evolutionary theology: “God is not up above but rather up ahead. In other words, everything that happens in the universe is anticipatory. The world rests on the future. And one could say that God is the one who has future in His very essence.”
Some Evolutionaries may always feel that the notion of a God is no longer necessary—discarding deity as an outdated relic of the old static worldview. But for those who feel the age-old pull toward the infinite still tugging at their hearts, who are stirred by the restless longing for ultimacy, these evolutionary theologians offer a deeply satisfying new vision of the divine. They are drawing new and compelling connections between God, the ground of being, evolutionary emergence, consciousness, telos, and the future. Theirs is a God who does not succumb to the spell of solidity, a deity that is evolutionarily inspired, future oriented, and world embracing. And keeping such a God alive in our hearts might be important in saving evolutionary spirituality from its tendency to collapse into pantheism or, in some cases, naturalism. We can touch this form of divinity, not only in the mystical intuition of a transcendent realm of being but in our own efforts to become, to give birth to something more good, true, and beautiful in the very processes of the universe’s becoming—and ultimately of our own.