Emerging God: theology for a complex universe

Christian Century, Jan 13, 2004 by Philip Clayton

THEOLOGIANS ARE PAYING attention to strange recommendations about theology from financier John Templeton--and not just because Templeton has the resources of a large foundation behind his ideas. Templeton is interested in "spiritual information," or as Christians might express it, information about God and God's actions in the world. His controversial idea is to obtain new spiritual information by linking theology much more closely to natural science. This strategy would lead us to concentrate on areas of the human intellectual quest where new information is becoming available, where knowledge is increasing. In our current situation that means looking to the sciences as allies in theological endeavors. How does this risky, move influence speculation about the nature of God?

The Templeton program involves tracing out the speculative lines suggested by the most recent breakthroughs in natural science. Natural science, or its predecessor natural philosophy, has always sensed as a framework for conceiving God--or for dispensing with the concept of God, as the case may be. Consider a few examples. As Augustine realized, Plato's forms needed to be located somewhere, and the mind of God was the natural place to put them. Thus Augustine could argue that, since any successful science requires the existence of forms, there must be a God to eternally think them. No God, no science.

Aristotelian science, dominant in the West for nearly 1,500 years, also required a God, at least according to St. Thomas's masterful interpretation. Consider the famous doctrine of the "four causes." From Aristotle to (roughly) Galileo, "to do science" meant to discover the four causes of a thing. The forms or "formal causes" require a divine mind in which they can be located. Assuming that matter, or the material cause of a thing, is not eternal, it must be created--and by God, of course. Efficient causes--the sculptor who transforms a block of marble into a statue of Athena--exist as separate from God; but since they are contingent, they too require God as their ultimate cause. The final cause or goal toward which everything develops is God, for God must be the one who brings about the final outcome of the earthly process in accordance with the divine aims. Again, it seemed, if there's no God, there's no science.

Even as late as the 18th century, Isaac Newton offered a compelling line of speculation that appeared to lead from science to God. If it worked, the science of his day would still provide "spiritual information" about the nature of God. Newton's laws seemed to account for the interactions of all bodies in the universe. Yet, as Newton realized applying these laws required an ultimate, unchanging framework of "absolute space" and "absolute time" within which bodies moved. This framework could he located only within God as the eternal object of God's thought--or at least it could exist only with the concurrence of God's will and as a reflection of the divine nature. So Newton's laws, the greatest insight in the history of physics, appeared to communicate something of the nature of God.

Connecting science or "natural philosophy" and theology became progressively more difficult as the modern era progressed, however. Beginning shortly after Newton and continuing until recently, most of the dominant scientific models left little room for the sort of theological connections we have been considering. The explosion of scientific knowledge, the predictive accuracy of mathematical physics, the emergence of evolutionary science based on random variation rather than on purpose, the controlling paradigm of reductionism, the dominance of materialist explanations and assumptions--all of these developments made science-based theological speculations difficult and, in the eyes of many, impossible. (For the story of the modern warfare between science and theology, see the works of John Hedley Brooke.)

But within the past few decades, we have seen an important new opening for science-based reflection on the nature of God. The concept of emergence, and with it the new field of emergence studies, has gathered momentum, giving rise to new speculation about God. What call we conclude about the nature of God based on these new sciences?

In one sense it's a truism to note that things emerge. Once there was no universe and then, after the Big Bang, there was an exploding world of stars and galaxies. Once the earth was unpopulated and later it was teeming with primitive life forms. Once there were apes living in trees and then there were Mozart, Einstein and Gandhi. But the new empirical studies of emergence move far beyond truisms. A growing number of scientists and theorists of science are working to formulate fundamental laws that explain why cosmic evolution produces more and more complex things and behaviors, perhaps even by necessity: Especially significant for religionists, they are also arguing that the resulting sciences of emergence will break the stranglehold that reductionist explanations have bad on science.