The Self-Creating Universe: The Making of a Worldview

By J.J. Clarke

The Self-Creating Universe is a wide-ranging attempt to bring science and spirituality together in a philosophical synthesis. It opens up to the reader exciting new developments in the natural sciences while also showing how these contribute to a worldview which addresses fundamental philosophical and social questions. The key concept is creativity, in both nature and human life. Making use of ideas from the history of philosophy and from recent speculations in sciences including cosmology and evolution, the book offers bold conjectures about the emergence of new forms of order and self-organisation in nature, in consciousness and in human life as a whole. The book is written in an accessible style which is designed to appeal to both the general reader and to specialists interested in the wider implications of their fields.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Aug 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483683935

J.J. Clarke

The writer is an award-winning author of a number of books and articles on a range of subjects including the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of psychoanalysis, the history of science, and intercultural East–West philosophy. His books have been translated into several languages including German, Japanese, and Chinese. After degrees from University College and Birkbeck College, London, he taught philosophy at McGill University, Montreal, at the University of Singapore, and at Kingston University, London where he was professor in the history of ideas. He lives in Tintern, Wales.

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Copyright © 2013 by J.J. Clarke.

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Cover design by Jay Nathan Jore. Cover illustration: Hubble Space Telescope, ‘Perfect Storm of Turbulent Gases in the Omerga/Swan Nebula (M17)’.with acknowledgment to the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSci), Baltimore, U.S.A.

Rev. date: 08/19/2013

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Contents

Preface

1 The Cosmic Riddle

1.1 The Question

1.2 The Context

1.3 The Task

2 In The Beginning

2.1 Emerging Speculations

2.2 From Being To Becoming

2.3 The Coming Of Emergentism

3 The Re-Emergence Of Emergentism

3.1 The Second Coming

3.2 Shifting Paradigms

3.3 Order And Chaos

3.4 Emergent Speculations

4 The Emergence Of Consciousness

4.1 The Problem Of Consciousness

4.2 Why Are We Conscious?

4.3 Before Consciousness

4.4 The Emergence Of Consciousness

4.5 The Further Evolution Of Consciousness

4.6 Extending Consciousness

4.7 Concluding Speculations

5 Acts Of Creation

5.1 Creative Fashions

5.2 Theological Beginnings

5.3 Creative Imagination

5.4 Artists Of The Self

5.5 Language And Self-Creation

5.6 Modern Movements

5.7 Postmodern Creation

6 Making Sense Of Emergentism

6.1 What Is This Thing Called ‘Emergentism’?

6.2 How Does Nature Create?

6.3 Is A Satisfactory Explanation In Sight?

6.4 Questions About Being

6.5 Questions About Nothing

6.6 Questions About God

7 Making Sense Of Human Nature

7.1 Human Being-In-The-World

7.2 Being Free

7.3 How Freedom Might Work

7.4 Having Purposes

7.5 Having Values

8 Making Sense Of Life

8.1 Emergentism As A Worldview

8.2 The Sacred Life

8.3 The Moral Life

8.4 The Spiritual Life

8.5 The Mystical Life

9 Emerging Futures

9.1 Future Shock

9.2 Coming Home

Bibliography

PREFACE

If I had to define life in a word it would be life is creative.

(Claude Bernard)

This book is a response to an endemic crisis of our times. For many of us in the modern age, the urgent question is whether we can live meaningful lives in a world which has no dimensions beyond the purely natural, a finite world which ends in our own death and ultimately in the death of the universe. It is a vital issue for those who have lost all belief in a supernatural or eternal reality and for whom traditional religious faith has ceased to provide satisfying answers, and yet who still crave for an answer to the fundamental questions of life and who believe that it is still possible to live a life of spiritual fulfilment.

This dilemma was dramatically stated in the nineteenth century by Friedrich Nietzsche when he pronounced that ‘God is dead’, and all values and ideals hitherto held dear have died with Him. In consequence, he predicted, we are heading towards an age of nihilism, and as the old certainties fade we inevitably begin to suffer from a sense of exile and of homelessness in a world ‘where the highest values devalue themselves; where the aim is lacking, why? finds no answer’. Even today, when a secularist outlook has become the unquestioned norm for many people, it is common to hear that the tragic consequence of a world without God and devoid of eternal promise is a world ultimately devoid of meaning.

Even earlier during the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment, the question was posed by some courageous thinkers who began openly to challenge traditional religious beliefs, to dispute accepted values, and to debate the inevitable overthrow of well-established social institutions. This debate, largely among intellectuals, broadened out into the culture-wide dimensions of the so-called ‘crisis of faith’ of the Victorian age, expressed memorably by the poet Matthew Arnold who spoke of the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of the once-full tide of the traditional ‘sea of faith’. In the twentieth century, we have become ever more deeply concerned by the rapid evaporation of traditional beliefs and values in the face of secular rationalism, science-based materialism, political revolution, and social disruption. Many of the tragic events of that century have evoked the feeling that there is some fundamental dis-ease at the heart of modern life, a corruption in our deepest assumptions and ways of thinking.

The answer for many lies in science. Since the Enlightenment, the natural sciences have become an increasingly powerful marker of progress and human development in all its fields of endeavour, a new foundation for human hopes and aspirations, and in many minds a substitute for traditional faith. Yet there has also been much questioning about the adequacy of the scientific worldview which we have inherited. In spite of the enormous strides made by modern science, many still believe that something important is missing. They feel that the worldview, based on a purely materialist foundation where the world itself is often depicted as a piece of glorified machinery, has failed to integrate some of the most fundamental issues of life, especially those concerning conscious mind, values, and meaning, leaving us with a world that seems to lack any purpose or destiny beyond itself.

This kind of disquiet has, then, been evident in the West for some time, and there is a long train of intellectual and cultural debate on the issue. In recent times, the voices of concern, often with dark tones of pessimism and nihilism, seem to have become even more dominant, amplified by the various economic and social crises which we are now experiencing, and echoed in the increasingly insistent beat of global threats of ecological disaster. The full implications of these tendencies are becoming increasingly evident, and amidst widespread foreboding that our civilisation, for all its historic achievements, is facing unprecedented catastrophe, there has been much talk of the need for a new worldview. The crises we face run deep, and many now believe that we can only comprehend and overcome them by reconstructing the very basis of our thinking, our values, and our ways of making sense of our being in the world.

Even before the recent economic wake-up call, the cultural mood had begun shifting perceptibly towards the desire for a more comprehensive, integrated approach to thinking about the world’s physical, mental, and spiritual needs. Apocalyptic thinking goes back 2000 years or more, but in recent times, the nuclear threat and environmental issues, combined with a rising scepticism about the benefits of modernity and about scientifically propelled progress, have served to produce a kind of global anxiety concerning humanity’s fate. There has been much talk of a ‘clash of worldviews’, of ‘collisions of consciousness’, which draw attention, not just to specific political, economic, or social issues, but to competing ways of making sense of human existence as a whole. As the futurist writer David Lorimer puts it in his introduction to a recent volume of writings on current thinking about new worldviews, ‘the crisis we face is not just financial, social, ecological and economic… but more profoundly a crisis of values, a crisis of meaning and purpose’. Václav Havel, in his address to the UN General Assembly a few years before his death, gave his voice to this issue in the following words: ‘Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in our being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which our world is headed will be unavoidable.’

There are, of course, many possible responses to the crisis and many new and revived worldviews competing for attention. Amongst these responses, two opposing types stand out. In simple terms, on the one side there are those which stick to scientific materialism, riding on its successes to date and claiming that its evident progress in so many fields offers our best way forward. On the other side there are those who believe that the only satisfactory answers to life’s most fundamental questions must come from traditional religious faith in the eternal origins and destiny of our lives. The worldview I am putting forward in this book avoids both these extremes while, at the same time, drawing the best of them together. My offering is avowedly secular and worldly, with its foundation firmly placed in nature, and in pursuit of this worldliness it draws on some of the most important recent developments in the sciences and in philosophy. At the same time it seeks to integrate these developments into a way of comprehending our world which is open and broad in scope, humanistic and spiritual in outlook, yet declines the support of traditional religious or metaphysical beliefs. It is my hope that bringing these two aspects into harmony will help to heal the traditional split between the outlooks of science and spirituality and between physical and moral perspectives on life.

As the title of the book, along with the epigram from a great nineteenth-century physiologist, indicates, my central theme is the idea of creativity. In broad terms, this involves showing how at all levels, from the cosmological to the human, the world demonstrates a universal inclination towards the emergence of new and unpredictable forms of order. Where once there was a sense of alienation from a world which seemed at bottom no more than the mechanical motion of dead matter, causally determined and in principle completely predictable, the new thinking I draw on here locates us in a world which is open and constantly transforming itself, creating new and astonishingly complex and beautiful forms. And I shall try to show that out of this creative exuberance there arises a plausible response to Nietzsche’s challenge, a worldview which makes much sense in an epoch which is often dominated by scientific thinking yet which yearns for meaning and values and for a spiritual dimension to life.

The perspective which I adopt draws on a variety of sources and disciplines, but especially on developments in the natural sciences, and as I have indicated it represents, in addition, a conscious attempt to reconcile the scientific outlook with matters of human and spiritual concern. In this way I seek to bring together the two great legacies of the Enlightenment—its naturalism and its humanism. I make special use of much recent speculative and experimental works in a whole range of scientific endeavour, drawing on a radical strain of thinking which is advancing in such fields as evolution, complexity, chaos, and self-organising systems, fields which are often located under the wide umbrella of emergentism.

At the same time, however, I avoid elevating science to a position of supreme authority and have sought to embed these recent developments into the wider context of contemporary cultural concerns and debates and to trace their historical roots in various philosophical and cultural traditions. These traditions are mainly Western, but I have also drawn attention to important connections with Asian and other cultures which have often not been given proper recognition in the West but which are essential for any comprehensive, global perspective. This broad historical and cultural approach is necessary, not only because it helps us to grasp the full significance of the worldview I am putting forward, but also in order to emphasise the fact that these ideas themselves are profoundly historical and are continually evolving.

I do not claim originality for the genesis of the central argument of this book. Its basic idea has long been gestating, and important recent developments in the sciences point to a significant convergence of ideas and tendencies in its support. My own contribution is one of synthesis, narration and critical assessment, encouraging discussion of a different way of looking at the world and at our life within it, of explaining the origins and implications of the worldview I am proposing, and weaving into the narrative some of the related philosophical ideas and debates. I have been especially careful to present the ideas in a relatively informal way without jargon and to explain in straightforward language some of the more technical concepts, theories, and controversies involved for the benefit of a wide audience beyond the specialist worlds from which these ideas often arise. By using this accessible approach, I hope to engage a wide readership of people seriously interested, though not necessarily expert, in the issues raised by this book. Specialists in the various fields will also, I hope, find this approach useful and stimulating by placing many of the ideas and arguments drawn upon into the context of contemporary and historical debates across the disciplines. Also, while engaging with the hard talk of philosophy and the tough thinking of science, I want to share with readers a sense of astonishment and wonder at the self-creating universe which is the inspiration for the worldview I am presenting, and hope thereby to arouse an enhanced curiosity about the deepest questions of philosophy.

There is nothing finished or final about the ideas presented in this book. It sketches out a broad canvas on which many details remain to be filled in and engages with ideas which are subject to vigorous controversy. In this sense it takes a predominantly speculative approach, offering a way of looking at and thinking about the world which will not suit or please everyone. The sciences that will play a major part here are, for the most part, relatively new, and their standing and implications are by no means universally understood or accepted. Furthermore, the key ideas presented are subject to a variety of more or less far-reaching alternative conjectures and interpretations. It is a story in the making. The direction of its progress is, as in all good stories, uncertain, but it is a story which, as I shall try to show, displays an accelerating momentum and growing appeal at the present time.

The overall structure of the book reflects the evolving nature of its subject matter. It begins in the first three chapters with an historical account of the emergence over the past 150 years or so of a dynamic concept of nature, in the sciences, philosophy, and other fields, a concept which portrays the world, not as a reflection of an eternal essence or the product of a divine will, but as an ever-changing, evolving cosmos in which new and surprising realities are created through the spontaneous activity of nature itself. This culminates in Chapter 3 with recent speculations about the emergence of complex, self-organising phenomena, and it is in this chapter that the main outlines of emergentism will be sketched. Chapters 4 and 5 examine two key issues arising out of the early chapters, the first concerning the emergence and evolution of consciousness, and the second concerning the rise and importance of the idea of creativity in modern thought and culture. The following three Chapters 6 to 8 look more closely at some of the wider questions and implications concerning emergentism, and lead to a fuller development of the idea of a new worldview by discussing some of the philosophical, ethical, and spiritual issues that arise out of the earlier chapters. Chapter 9 concludes by carrying the ideas forward into the future, asking where this new worldview might be leading us and what hopes we might derive from its continued evolution.

My intellectual debts are many and are given due acknowledgement in the text. The theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman has been a major inspiration in the overall direction and shaping of my thinking, and the following have also been of special importance: astrophysicist Paul Davies, physical chemist Ilya Prigogine, philosopher and theologian Philip Clayton, philosopher Jacob Klapwijk, cosmologist Erich Jantsch, theoretical physicist Lee Smolin, palaeontologist Martin Lockley, philosopher and systems theorist Ervin Laszlo, literature theorist Rob Pope, and psychologist Richard Bird, as well as earlier figures such as Hume, Kant, Schelling, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Nietzsche, William James, Henri Bergson, and A. N. Whitehead.

At a more personal level I wish to record my warm thanks to my sadly departed friend and colleague Ray Billington, to Bob Clarke, Richard Clarke, John Clive, Steve Eddy, Gordon Edwards, Herbert Girardet, Chris Lyons, Michelle Newell, and Gretl Wright who have read some or all of the work in draft and have given me valuable critical comments and generous support. I also wish to thank the Scientific and Medical Network for its inspiration over the years.

I dedicate the book to my wife Vanessa Dodd who, after long and difficult discussions, succeeded in awakening me from my dogmatic slumbers. Her work in consciousness studies at the Universities of Cardiff and of South Wales has been especially important in helping me to clarify my own consciousness on that subject.

Tintern, Wales

May 2013

1

THE COSMIC RIDDLE

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

(Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species)

The greatest riddle of cosmology is that the universe is, in a sense, creative.

(Karl Popper, The Self and Its Brain)

1.1 THE QUESTION

The universe seems to have an irresistible urge to create. From the Big Bang to the smallest flowering plant, from tiny living cells to the mighty human brain, the natural world is a scene of booming, buzzing creation, showing at all levels an extravagant impulse to fashion and refashion things in astonishing abundance and variety. There is, as Charles Darwin reminds us, a ‘grandeur’ in the life of nature which brings forth ‘endless forms’. We witness this, not only in the process of evolution to which Darwin devoted his own creative genius, but in the life of the cosmos as a whole. This is not only a ‘riddle’, as Popper says, but a spectacle ‘most beautiful and most wonderful’.

It is difficult not to marvel in astonishment at this creative profusion, for example, at the way in which a small seed can produce in a few weeks a beautiful flower, and at the way in which a human embryo, which at the first instant of its existence comprises a single microscopic cell, in the space of nine months emerges from the womb as a fully formed infant. As a father, I was deeply moved, not just by the sheer miracle of conception and of birth itself, but by the ways in which my children developed complex capacities to talk, play, create stories endlessly without much drilling from us, their parents. As a garden lover I am perennially amazed at the way in which autumn abandons nature seemingly for dead, denuded of green leaves, flowers, and the vibrant richness of summer, yet within a few months spring announces its resurrection, its rebirth, with a renewed vitality. As a living being, one amongst countless numbers and varieties, I wonder at the billions of cells which cooperate within me to coordinate my life and to integrate it into the great web of living beings. As a self-conscious being, I am awed by the power of the human imagination to compose sublime works of art, of science, and of technology out of simple materials and to create images and thoughts that are infinitely varied and without precedent. As a devotee of the latest cosmological and biological speculations, I am continually astonished at the idea that this whole universe, with all its wonders and its immeasurable variety, emerged out of a single point, smaller even than the head of a pin, and that the creative profusion of life which Darwin so eloquently described has emerged, and continues to emerge, from dead matter.

Darwin, in the course of his lifetime, was torn between two opposing ways of explaining this ever-unfolding spectacle. On the one hand, he saw this creative power as something which is simply inherent in nature, an extraordinary product of the natural everyday order of things. At other times he viewed it as something which reflects divine grandeur, a great cosmic symphony composed by God. Caught between these two visions, his agonising personal struggle over this dilemma stood at an historic turning point for the human mind, and his own crisis was the crisis of his age. Traditional thought, in the West at any rate, has tended to see the created beauty and order of the world as a product and mirror of something even higher and even more prefect, the divine creator, the Pantocrator, from whom nature draws its grandeur. Since Darwin’s time, with the growth of evolutionary thinking and other scientific, philosophical, and cultural developments, the world’s wonders have increasingly been seen to arise at a lower level from nature’s own innate powers, not requiring any higher source.

This book takes the low road. It offers a perspective on nature, not as ‘charged with the Grandeur of God’ in the words of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, but in Darwin’s words as one in which ‘from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful’ have arisen by nature’s power alone. Popper’s riddle, that ‘nature is in a sense creative’, is not thereby ‘solved’ of course, but I hope to show that it can be made sense of in purely naturalistic terms and illuminated in the light of some important ideas that have been in the process of formation for many years and which have lately been emerging in the various sciences. This emergence is not a mark of final truth of course, and I am not setting out to prove anything definitively, nor indeed to disprove anything, but rather to tell a story which is not only increasingly plausible from a scientific and philosophical point of view but which speaks to the concerns and crises of our own age. It is a story which is both intellectually satisfying and is able to address our need for understanding, for meaning, and for well-being. Moreover it is a story which is not a purely theoretical exercise but a project which has important implications for the practical and spiritual needs of our time.

*     *     *

At the heart of this project is the idea of a worldview. Coming from the German word Weltanschauung, this is a rather vague but nevertheless useful term. It means something like this: an overarching perspective, a general picture of the world which provides a framework of ideas, beliefs, and values through which individuals and societies make sense of their world and their existence. I will sometimes link it with the philosopher Husserl’s term lifeworld (Lebenswelt in German), which I take to mean the lived world of human experience and values, the horizon of our immediate human existence. There are indeed many alternative worldviews on offer. The creative potential of the universe has generously endowed the human mind with the capacity to construct a variety of plausible perspectives on the world. I doubt if any of these is capable of being judged true or of finally escaping all personal or historical bias. But I hope to show that the worldview at the heart of this book is reasonable and has much to be said for it philosophically, scientifically, and spiritually.

We will look more closely at the concept of a worldview in Chapter 8 below, but it will be helpful, at this stage, to make clear my own perspective and bias, and to explain that I shall be working from within what I call the naturalist presumption. Crudely summarised for the moment, this is a way of thinking about the world in general which focuses its outlook, its values, and its meaning on the natural world of which we human beings are an integral part. It entails the belief that we are situated within a real, natural world from which we have evolved and are thus intimately bound up with it, yet are able to use our evolved intelligence to make (some) sense of it and (some) sense of our lives. ‘Natural’ is not an easy word to define, of course, but I will take it to refer in the present context to the interconnected totality of things or processes that can be objects of our experience and the forum for our conscious, collective activity. These include the physical realm and the living world of plants and animals as well as the wider cosmos in which these living beings dwell. I also take it to embrace the world of inner sense, namely the conscious mental world of sensations, images, and thoughts, and beyond this the world of human activity, of culture, and of history. All of these I take to be ultimately the outcome of nature’s creative unfolding. It excludes the supernatural and the metaphysical, namely that which goes beyond possible experience, whether of the outer or the inner worlds. I do not want to deny the possibility of a supernatural reality, or that we can speak meaningfully about it, but I adhere to the natural world as the most satisfactory context within which to construct a convincing and serviceable worldview.

I contrast this with the eternalist presumption which, again in rough outline, locates the source of values and meaning in an eternal reality beyond nature, beyond the world we can experience through our sense. Typically, it finds the ever-changing world of nature, and our transient lives within it, to be both intellectually and morally unsatisfactory and to be without any ultimate reality, purpose or meaning, perhaps having the status of a transitory illusion. Such an outlook is classically epitomised in Plato’s dualist distinction between the spiritual and material worlds, and his belief that the natural world is but an imperfect shadow, little more than an unreal reflection of an eternal, perfect, spiritual world beyond.

The eternalist presumption, in a variety of guises, has been of huge significance in human history. It has served as the philosophical foundation of the religious traditions which have descended from Moses and Abraham, from Christ and Muhammad, and beyond these from many of the religious, moral and cultural traditions of the world at large. From myth to science, from theology to philosophy, the idea that the glories of the world that shine about us and within us are reflections of an eternal, transcendent reality has a long history. The details and nuances may vary from one epoch to another and from one religious tradition to another, and its basic assumptions are refined in all sorts of ways to meet criticisms and to take advantage of scientific and philosophical advances, but it retains much of its emotive power and still remains today the basic worldview for many people.

The naturalist presumption has emerged as its great rival. It is not new, of course. It can be identified in types of philosophical thinking which have arisen at many moments in history and in many different cultures. It is explicit in some of the cosmological speculations of ancient Greece, such as those of Anaximander, the Epicureans and the Atomists. It appears in some of the philosophical traditions of India and China, for example in some forms of Buddhism and Taoism. And it can be found in a variety of mythical forms where gods and other superhuman beings are viewed as part of the natural world rather than as transcending it.

Naturalism has of course become increasingly dominant in the modern world. There are intimations of it in the fifteenth-century Renaissance with the rise of humanism, and especially after the rediscovery of the ideas of Epicurus and the Atomists. But it was from the Enlightenment period onwards that the naturalisation of thought became increasingly important. Beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we can observe the emergence, not only of the global expansion of Europe, of modern natural science, and of the empiricist method of discovery, but also of a concerted commitment to the ideals of happiness and social progress as supreme goals of life on earth. Indeed, the Enlightenment could be viewed as the beginnings of a long informal and spontaneous investigation into the viability of a purely secular, naturalist-based view of life. Various forms and formulae have been tried out and debated over the years from that time to the present, and these have woven their way through the cultural fabric of the modern period. The Romantic movement, though in some ways a reaction against Enlightenment ideas, could also be seen as an extension of this project and as helping to turn attention towards the natural world and to the rediscovery of spiritual significance in the life of nature in all its forms. In nineteenth-century Europe, the project was motivated by the great issues arising from evolution theory and from the huge expansion in the natural sciences and in global exploration in general, and continuing into the twentieth century it was propelled even further by the great secular, humanist developments in the social, political, and economic spheres.

Thus it is that over the past few centuries, driven by spectacular developments in the sciences and by a growth in a purely secular outlook in philosophy and the humanities, as well as in society generally, naturalism has increasingly become a major challenge to traditional religious and cultural beliefs. It has played a key role in the battle of ideas which has been fought in recent times over issues of the origin of the universe and of life, of human evolution, of the nature and existence of mind, soul and spirit. As a presumption it is not based on a set of logically coherent principles that can be rationally demonstrated, but as will I hope become clear in the pages that follow, it does gain substance, meaning, and support from a close observation of the natural world and of our relation to it. But I hope that it will also become clear that the kind of naturalism I am working by is not just another version of materialism, for it gives a key role to mind and to spiritual values, not as echoes from a higher world, but as the most remarkable products of nature’s irresistible urge to create.

*     *     *

It is in the context of this great historic encounter between the eternalist and naturalist presumptions that the word emergentism has emerged, a word which plays a central role in the argument to follow. It is not a very attractive word; I would prefer the word ‘creationism’, but that term has been expropriated by a very different worldview, but it is nonetheless a very beautiful idea—complex, protean, and serendipitous. With its partner ‘emergence’, it has been part of philosophical vocabulary for over a century. In its early usage in the late nineteenth century, it was coined in response to challenges posed by developments in the natural sciences, especially by Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and was employed initially as part of an attempt to find a place for human mind and consciousness within a predominantly materialist, evolutionary worldview. In more recent times, it has re-emerged and acquired a wider compass, largely as a result of exciting new speculations and discoveries within the sciences and in continuing debates about the origins of life, mind, and order in nature.

It is not merely a scientific notion, however. A wide variety of disciplines has congregated around this concept, ranging across many fields from physics and biology to economics and psychology. Philosophers and theologians have for sometime been puzzling over its implications, and in recent times, it has evolved into what can best be described as a worldview, one which not only addresses scientific or philosophical problems, but opens up new approaches to some of the most pressing questions of value and meaning.

So what is meant by ‘emergence’? The quotation from Darwin sums it up most succinctly: ‘From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.’ It is a term used nowadays even more broadly than this to sum up a variety of phenomena from many different fields, both living and nonliving, mental as well as physical, which display genuinely novel qualities that are not possessed by their simpler constituent parts or origins. The questions at the back of this notion are: How is it that complex finely ordered forms, not only of living beings but of the physical world at all its different levels from micro to macro dimensions, and indeed of human mind and culture, arise from much simpler origins? In brief, how is it that out of the simple emerges the complex, whether it be molecules, viruses, plants, animals, the human brain, the conscious mind, human society, or the works of science, art, and literature? How are such remarkable things created? How does order come out of chaos?

One long-standing, single-word answer is of course ‘God’. The grandest things in nature arise from ‘the grandeur of God’. This is not just a religious doctrine, but as Isaac Newton himself insisted, the wonderful uniformity he observed in the planetary system ‘can be the effect of nothing less than the wisdom and skill of a powerful ever-living Agent’, a belief which has been expressed down the ages by many voices and has long been the explanation that has satisfied perhaps the large majority of people.

In my early years, I was part of that majority, but I have increasingly found this explanation unsatisfactory and have sought an alternative. Based on the eternalist presumption, God is often characterised in theology as causa sui, namely as self-causing or as self-explanatory, but I have come to see the act of self-causing in this way of thinking as an ultimately incomprehensible mystery, little more than a black box whose contents are not opened for human inspection. Treating the world of nature as causa sui, on the other hand, while still leaving us with many puzzles and unanswered questions, does encourage us to deepen our understanding of the natural world and to explore the ways in which nature’s acts of creation are carried out. We can open the box of nature and look inside. As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead argued, if we remove our perplexities by jumping to some mysterious ultimate reality, we deny our own rationality and its right ‘to search whether nature does not in its very being show itself as self-explanatory’ (Science and the Modern World, p. 116).

For this sort of reason, among others which will emerge later, I prefer not to resort to eternalist explanations. The eternalist presumption is an emotionally powerful attractor which has stood, and continues to stand, many people in good stead. But there is another way, a way which I believe is more satisfactory than the long-established answer. Logical proof has, as I have insisted, no place at this level, but in the chapters which follow, I shall give good reasons why emergentism, based on a naturalist presumption, should command our attention, and I shall attempt to explain how at the present time it is taking an ever-increasing hold on people’s minds and imaginations.

1.2 THE CONTEXT

Many factors, not least the rise of the natural sciences, have conspired to weaken the hold of the traditional answer to our question. And there is no doubt that the loss, or threatened loss, of the traditional explanation in terms of an almighty Creator is for many persons a tragedy. The God-centred story has for long helped to make sense of our being, has placed our moral values on a firm foundation, and has provided us with a feeling of being at home in the universe. ‘The Lord is my shepherd and I shall not want’, ‘In God all things live and move and have their being’, ‘He only is my rock and my salvation’. Sentiments such as these, recited at many religious services, exert a powerful magnetic pull, and the sense of bereavement suffered from their loss can tear the heart out of us. Nietzsche expressed this reaction in the following famous lines:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives (The Gay Science, Section 125).

This calamitous event involves, not just the loss of belief in God, but also of all the certainties and values that go with that belief, the sense that our lives and the meaning they carry are embedded in a universal matrix of eternal significance. We have become orphaned and homeless.

Nietzsche lived in the second half of the nineteenth century which in Europe and America was a period of rising hopes for progress and prosperity. It was a time when the ideals of the Enlightenment seemed to be progressing towards fulfilment. That great revolution, in thought, seemed to offer a compelling prospect for humanity. Driven in part by the power of