The God Who Lives: Investigating the Emergence of Life and the Doctrine of God

By Adam Pryor

Christian theology has affirmed throughout its history that God is a "living" God. But what does it mean that God lives? Why does it matter? Does God live like us? If God does not live like us what is the difference between our living and God's living? These are the questions Adam Pryor addresses in The God Who Lives. The book considers "life" as a conceptual problem, examining how new studies about the emergence of life have critical implications for interpreting the religious symbol "God is living." In particular, Pryor suggests how absence and desire, what is termed "abstential desire," are critical principles of life for scientific and philosophical thinking today. He goes on to develop a constructive theological proposal in which the theological meaning of the symbol "God is living" is interpreted in terms of the insights garnered from the principle of abstential desire, concluding that God can be understood as akin to the role played by absence in living things. Life is an absent but effective whole in relation to the material parts of which it is comprised. God as living is a similarly effective absence in relation to the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Jan 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781630873226

Adam Pryor

Adam Pryor is Associate Professor of Religion and Dean of Academic Affairs at Bethany College. He is the author of two other books: Body of Christ Incarnate for You: Conceptualizing God’s Desire for the Flesh (Lexington, 2016) and The God Who Lives: Investigating the Emergence of Life and the Doctrine of God (Pickwick, 2014).

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The God Who Lives

Investigating the Emergence of Life

and the Doctrine of God

Adam Pryor

19529.png

The God Who Lives

Investigating the Emergence of Life and the Doctrine of God

Copyright © 2014 Adam Pryor. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Pickwick Publications

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ISBN 13: 978-1-62032-934-4

eISBN 13: 978-1-63087-322-6

Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Pryor, Adam

The God who lives : investigating the emergence of life and the doctrine of God

xviii + 202 p. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 13: 978-1-62032-934-4

1. Religion and science. 2. Evolution—Religious aspects—Christianity. 3. God (Christianity). I. Title.

BL240.3 P797 2014

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

For Rachael

Acknowledgments

There are countless people who have helped to make this work possible. I am particularly thankful to the Lab Group at the Center for Theology and Natural Science who prodded me into thinking more deeply about living; to Inese Radzins, Terrence Deacon, and Wentzel van Huyssteen who read and offered invaluable suggestions to early drafts of the work; to David Drebes, Kayko Driedger Hesslein and Rajesh Sampath who challenged me to be clearer about what I really mean; and most especially to Robert Russell. Bob has offered ceaseless encouragement, support, and friendship in addition to invaluable insights. The fault is only my own wherever an argument lacks clarity or remains unpersuasive.

Last but not least, my family has lovingly supported me through all the ups and downs of writing and research. My parents have cheerfully listened to every spandrel of an idea floating through my mind. My wife has unwaveringly had more confidence in me than I do in myself. And our children continually remind me how to be in awe of what we can discover about life all around us.

Introduction

Inter-action

The often used approach in creating dialogue between theology and science (especially as written by theologians) is to map with a cartographer’s care the methodological landscape first and only then begin interdisciplinary research proper. However, each author that embarks on this interdisciplinary journey seems to feel the need to make their own set of pathways. It is as though each author ventures anew into what is believed to be an uncharted continent. At best, seeing ruts in the trails blazed by previous interdisciplinary explorers, new pilgrims on this journey may acknowledge the established roads, but ultimately abandon them. The result is an unwieldy plethora of pathways that all veritably have the same goal in mind.

I hope to not contribute here another method to the rapidly proliferating choices already available; however, I admittedly do not follow one established method with sustained rigor. Instead, my work is guided by three methodological values that appear often in the dialogue between theology and science: narrative, interaction, and transversality. I find these values expressed in a number of different ways through the plurality of methods proffered by other scholars with interdisciplinary aims, but my explication of these values is most explicitly influenced by Wentzel van Huyssteen and Robert Russell.

What is critical about the three methodological values used here is how they begin to press beyond strict interdisciplinarity: where traditional fields are scrupulously separated into specialized areas of discrete research, only subsequently to be in dialogue with one another. Instead, my use of these values is always aimed towards the constructive potential of inter-action: where strict interdisciplinarity gives way to problem-solving that holistically integrates various epistemic approaches.

Let me explain what I mean by beginning with narrative. If our aim is to draw together the insights of many different fields in order to deepen our understanding of the world in some way, we must delve deeply into the thought-world of the disciplines we seek to bring together. I think of this as telling the history of a discipline or offering the biography of a field. This is not an aimless story being told, wandering in many different directions. The story should lead the reader to the way various thinkers address a critical problem. The problem orients the way the story is told. In light of my specific interest in science and theology, the stories I narrate tend to lead to the primary thinker or concept within various disciplinary contexts that best addresses the orienting problem. I find this most akin to Husserl’s sense of the teleology of historical becoming. In his text The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, he insists that to account for the depth of self-understanding that drives philosophical inquiry, one must attempt to discover the unity that runs through the history of philosophical projects. It is an effort to get behind the historical facts and discover a meaningful harmony that can only be established through a critical and over-arching view of the field. This is sometimes referred to as his teleological consideration of history.¹

Methodologically, there ought to be no doubt this is where I begin. With each of the fields of study treated here, the goal is to tell a story about the field that explicates the underlying unity in its development. The story then points to an indispensable thinker, theory, or concept epitomizing this unifying feature. In telling the story of the principles of life and emergence theory, the reader is led towards Terrence Deacon’s model for self-organizing complexity. In terms of ontology, the story leads towards the insights of a phenomenology of life as described by Renaud Barbaras. Finally, in terms of the doctrine of God, the story leads to themes drawn from Paul Tillich, Jan-Olav Henriksen, and Simone Weil.

Telling these stories is only the beginning of this project. Ultimately, these various narratives are weaved together in order to generate a better account of the events in question than any single narrative can provide of its own accord. This represents the goal of an interactionist account of theology and science as articulated by Robert Russell. His method of Creative Mutual Interaction (CMI) builds upon the work of Ian Barbour. Slightly modifying Barbour’s diagrams of religious and scientific reasoning laid out in his Gifford lectures, Russell develops eight paths that connect these analogous modes of reasoning. ² The details of these paths in CMI are not of concern here. It is the to-and-fro movement between theological and scientific research that these paths signify that most influences my approach.³

It is crucial to understand that CMI depicts three distinct approaches to addressing research problems. There is the independent scientific research program, the independent theological research program, and the interaction there between conceived of as a third research program.⁴ There is an epistemic gamble between these three research programs CMI identifies. First, it wagers that interactionist research will address interdisciplinary research questions better than either theology or science alone. Second, it bets that research done by the independent theological and scientific research programs (when answering questions not of interdisciplinary relevance) become more fertile when they consider the insights of the opposite discipline.

What is immensely important about Russell’s approach is the epistemic bet it places on mutual interaction. This to-and-fro motion of his approach inculcates a crucial emendation to the teleological histories I tell. In addition to laying out the narratives of the emergence of life, a phenomenology of life, and an understanding of God as living, I will emphasize points of consonance in the way these distinctive narratives develop the theme of life. By emphasizing these points of consonance in crafting the three narratives, I can weave them together into a whole with an interactive potential. The points of consonance become nodes by which to move back and forth between the various narratives. They are the points at which one narrative can shape the suppositions of another narrative.

In order to integrate moments where the narratives demonstrate interactive potential, I rely on Wentzel van Huyssteen’s use of transversality. For van Huyssteen, transversality is the mode of human rationality by which we integrate diverse and sometimes conflicting narratives into a reasonable whole. It describes a process that gathers and binds; he calls it an extending over, lying across, and intersecting.⁵ van Huyssteen’s account of transversality relies heavily on the work of Calvin Schrag and the rich philosophical tradition that informs his discussion of this concept.⁶ Schrag locates transversal rationality within communication. This is important because it means that transversal rationality never enjoys the security of being a foundationalist, self-constituting, or originating principle. Instead, the sense of transversality, as it is used here, is deeply contextualized both socially and historically.⁷

Thus, making an appeal to transversality as the mode of human rationality by which narratives of various disciplines are woven together is explicitly not to give recourse to a foundationalist supposition. Transversal rationality occurs between people in events of communication. With van Huyssteen, I am emphasizing the praxial quality of transversality. Transversal rationality describes something we do. It entails engaging, enacting, expressing, or otherwise wrestling with the various narratives I am bringing together in a dynamic way. I image this process of transversal reasoning to be like dogs herding sheep. The sheep, our various narratives, are constantly developing and changing; they may wander without abandon and be scattered across a meadow if isolated from one another. The shepherding dogs, akin to transversal rationality, herd the sheep together directing them away from eating planted crops and moving them away from roads or other dangers. Once brought together the herd instinct of the sheep is likely to keep them together and the shepherding dog gathers back the occasional stray. Once the various narratives are gathered together (transversally bound), a natural and productive relation can arise (like the natural herd instinct) that generates better research.

In an effort to bring together these various methodological features of interdisciplinary research under a single heading, I would use the term inter-action. The term is indebted to the recent writings of Mark C. Taylor. In an op-ed for The New York Times, Taylor argues against what he calls the mass-production model of the university, claiming it has led to untenable specialization and fragmentation.⁸

Against this failing model for university and graduate education, Taylor calls for a restructuring that emphasizes cross-disciplinary study and research. His call for restructuring the university reflects a fundamental change he perceives in the structure of knowledge production itself. As we move beyond a modern industrial model of production (both in goods and education) to what he calls an information society, interdisciplinarity is no longer a luxury but a fundamental feature of knowledge production. Instead of generating intra-disciplinary narratives relevant only to members of a given disciplinary subfield, he advocates for a problem oriented approach that allows us to produce knowledge at the interstices of traditionally conceived fields. Taylor advocates for an understanding of areas of inquiry as nodes in a web that are willing to equally draw from various disciplinary resources.⁹ He is issuing a call for scholars to realize how easily disciplinary boundaries can become a hindrance to meaningful inquiry instead of an aid.

This shift in thinking away from fields and towards problem driven inquiry is key to my use of inter-action and how I understand it to be related to the three methodological influences I have outlined above. The inter-action always occurs in the interstitial space between traditionally conceived disciplines. It plays betwixt and between the teleological narratives it constructs, looking for any point of relation even as those narratives are being recounted. The inter-action is a praxis of inquiry. It requires a careful articulation of problems to guide research that transversally binds together the variety of ways and means at our disposal for wrestling with those problems. That praxis of transversal binding is a thoroughly social process: we are reliant on one another in this praxis. Finally, the inter-action harkens us back to Russell’s interactional method in two ways. First, I find the greatest strength of Russell’s method to be its emphasis on a clear and analytically precise approach for relating science and theology. Even as the boundaries between disciplines are becoming more porous, inter-action must not cease to strive for the precision that CMI challenges us to pursue. Second, inter-action must continue to pursue the spirit of the to-and-fro movement previously discussed; a movement constitutive of their mutual interaction. The nodes or areas of inquiry must remain open to being changed and developed in the course of being transversally gathered together.

As an example of inter-action my research uses various areas of inquiry to transversally address a research problem: to begin plumbing the depths of what it means to live. The areas of inquiry are recounted as three narratives. The first narrative will focus on life as an emergent phenomenon. After briefly identifying key developments to a philosophical history of life and identifying the continued impact of this history on contemporary scientific approaches to the principles of life in chapter1, chapter 2 will examine emergence theory as providing an especially promising contemporary approach to articulating principles of life. Specifically, this chapter will focus on the recent work of Terrence Deacon. He develops a three-fold schema of emergence theory with orders of increasing dynamical complexity: homeodynamics, morphodynamics, and teleodynamics.¹⁰

What is most crucial to my work is Deacon’s model of the autogen¹¹ as an example of a basic teleodynamic process. For now, let me simply note that what is most fascinating about his work is that teleodynamics (as in the autogen) provides a rudimentary self that emerges in contrast to its surrounding world. Given Deacon’s model of the autogen, this self is distinct from the rest of its environment and can reproduce. Yet, the autogen may only be called proto-biotic: it does not meet all of the sufficient conditions entailed by contemporary scientific definitions of life—such as engaging in a self-propagating work cycle.¹²

The second narrative considers contemporary work in the philosophy called phenomenology of life. This area of research is beginning to generate new ontological resources and conceptual schemas that call into question some of the sufficient conditions of the strictly biological understanding of life. Asserting that [b]iology speaks not of life but of the mode of functioning of organisms recognized as living,¹³ philosophers such as Renaud Barbaras, free themselves from a commitment to definitions of life as articulated in biology (definitions of life that implicitly rely primarily on identifying specific substances and processes that resist death). Instead, they seek to identify how we recognize something as a living entity in order to better understand what it means to be alive.

Following this line of thinking, chapter 3 will explicate some of the dense philosophical language and history that pervades Barbaras’s writing and subsequently consider Barbaras’s position itself. He finds that living entities are those wholes that are nothing more than the perpetual operation of their parts. This seems so similar to the oft quoted aphorism, "the whole is more than the sum of its parts," that its implications can be easily overlooked. With Barbaras, I will emphasize that the whole is nothing more than its parts, granting a certain reality to the idea of nothingness; nothingness not conceived as the pure negation of being (ouk on) but an essential absence organizing its constitutive parts (akin to the idea of me on).¹⁴ In chapter 4, I will explore how this understanding of a living entity could easily be concomitant with Deacon’s account of emergence, particularly his notion of constitutive absence.¹⁵

The third narrative will focus on theological discourse about the living God. Theology addressing this topic often, though not exclusively, takes its cue from narratives of salvation. Whether God is classically conceived as eternally alive (being without change, completely self-sufficient, and the source of all created things) or as the living empowerment of praxes of justice,¹⁶ this religious symbol is squarely soteriological in its theological explication. Given the insights developed in the narratives about emergence and the phenomenology of life, I intend to shift the course of the theological narrative in a constructive way. Taking seriously the potential value of the inter-action of these diverse modes of inquiry for theological reflection, I will examine what it means to affirm that God is living in terms of the doctrine of God instead of soteriology. To that end, chapter 5 will consider five twentieth-century theologians (Karl Barth, Jürgen Moltmann, John Zizioulas, Sallie McFague, and Paul Tillich) who treat life and God’s living in three distinct ways. What I find is that Tillich is particularly amenable to the highly dynamic account of life I have developed in the other two narratives.

However, the treatment of these theologians also reveals that the relationship between life and absence, so critical to the two previous narratives, remains theologically underdeveloped. As a result, in the final chapter I attempt to imagine what it means to understand the affirmation that God is living in terms of absence and desire—the critical themes developed from Deacon and Barbaras. In this process, the work of Jan-Olav Henriksen and Simone Weil proves to be invaluable. In the end, I find that to affirm that God is living theologically provides a way to imagine God’s absence from the world, but an absence that is far from inert or inactive.

1. Husserl, Die Krisis Der Europäischen Wissenschaften Und Die Transzendentale Phänomenologie, in Husserliana, vol.

6

, §

15

.

2. See Barbour, Religion and Science, chap.

4

.

3. R. Russell, Cosmology—from Alpha to Omega, chap.

10

.

4. Ibid.,

21

.

5. van Huyssteen, The Shaping of Rationality,

135

; see also Schrag, Transversal Rationality,

64

–

66

; and The Resources of Rationality, 149

.

6. The philosophical background behind Schrag’s use of the transversal (and the way it is taken up by van Huyssteen) is beyond the scope of this introduction. I will give only the briefest summary of the relevant points here as an extended aside and direct the reader to key sources for better understanding the philosophical implications of this topic if it is unfamiliar.

Jean-Paul Sartre uses the idea of the transversal to describe the intentionalities that provide for the longitudinal unity of temporal consciousness. His work on this point is a direct response to Edmund Husserl, who argues that the unity of consciousness across time can only be established, according to phenomenological analysis, by positing the transcendental ego as the personal facet of transcendental consciousness that accounts for the uniqueness of our experience phenomenologically reduced. Contra Husserl, Sartre affirms that the unifying play of transversal intentionalities is itself sufficient to account for the flow of temporal consciousness and recourse to a transcendental ego unnecessarily fractures our subjective experience. Thus, the unifying play of transversal intentionalities describes the binding together of past and present moments in the flow of transcendental consciousness.

Two problems arise (according to Schrag) with this account, though only one is particularly significant for my purposes. (

1

) Schrag asserts that the Sartrian philosophy of subjectivity is founded upon the primacy of consciousness and the resultant privileging of the present means Sartre lacks any protentional intentionality towards the future. (

2

) Schrag finds the subject-centered work of Sartre untenable. Instead, he resists the Sartrian emphasis on the primacy of consciousness in order to try to acknowledge both the plurality of interpretations that form interpersonal dialogue of great fecundity and to acknowledge the effects of this form of dialogue on participants in the dialogue. In so doing, he follows Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault in locating transversal rationality within events of communicative praxis.

Key sources to consult on this topic might include Schrag, The Resources of Rationality,

148

–

56

; Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie Des Inneren Zeitbewusstesens (

1893–1917

), in Husserliana, vol.

10

, pt.

1

; Sartre, La Transcendance De L’Ego, pt.

1

; Sartre, L’Être Et Le Néant, pt.

2

, chap.

2

; and Morrison, Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger on Time and the Unity of ‘Consciousness,’

182

–

98

.

7. Schrag, The Resources of Rationality,

152

.

8. Taylor, End the University as We Know It. Taylor provides us with an excellent example of what he means. Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have ten faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems.

9. Taylor and Raschke, "About About Religion: A Conversation with Mark C. Taylor."

10. See Deacon, Emergence: The Hole at the Wheel’s Hub,

111

–

50

; and Incomplete Nature, chaps.

7

–

9

.

11. In work previous to Incomplete Nature, Deacon has called this model an autocell. In his latest work he has made this name change in order to avoid any confusion regarding the fact that the model is not necessarily cellular. Despite the name change, there is not a significant change in the model itself. See Deacon, Incomplete Nature,

307

.

12. For instance, see Kauffman and Clayton, On Emergence, Agency, and Organization,

501

–

21

.

13. Barbaras, Life, Movement, and Desire,

5

; see also A Phenomenology of Life,

206

–

30

.

14. This distinction is well described in Tillich, Systematic Theology,

1

:

253

–

54

.

15. Constitutive absence is the name that Deacon gives to the emergent quality that organizes (not as an additional effective cause but as a teleological end) its constitutive parts.

16. For instance, compare Oden, The Living God,

64

ff.; and Johnson, Quest for the Living God, chap.

4

.

1

What is Life Anyway?

Research into the origins of life has a long and divergent history. A part of this divergence stems from the distinctive challenge of giving an account of the principles of life. These principles are notoriously difficult to define. What separates the living from the non-living? Is it behaviors? Is it the possession of a vitiating substance? Is it the organization of matter? Is life really distinctive and worthy of study or is it just a complex set of mechanical relations?

The answers to these kinds of questions have varied greatly in philosophical and early scientific history. However, in the contemporary scientific study of the origins of life the problems these conceptual challenges might pose is somewhat muted. On the contemporary scene, the question, What is life? seems to have given way to a different question: How does life work? The assumption is that if we know how life works then defining what it is will become obvious. This shift from what to how is really not so surprising. After all, life as we know it involves some very complicated processes even in the simplest of creatures. How do these processes that are essential for life arise? How can we determine what order they develop in? How does the very different environment of the early earth affect this formation and how have living things subsequently transformed that environment?

Detailing the array of answers to these questions from the contemporary scientific scene is not my primary focus. Instead, here the concern is for those muted conceptual questions: identifying core principles of what constitutes a living thing and its identification. Being clear about what is at stake in these philosophical distinctions can reveal where these concerns, though muted, are not entirely silenced in the contemporary scientific scene. In fact, there remains a surprising diversity in recent research programs with regard to these conceptual distinctions, with important ramifications for the way research questions are framed today.

I will begin by outlining the relevant points of three key philosophical thinkers who make essential contributions to identifying what constitutes a living thing: Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant. Let me be clear that my treatment of these three thinkers is not strictly historical. I am weaving together points from each to generate a teleological history of major philosophical efforts to establish principles of life. This history follows a pendulum-like motion regarding the role given to teleology. There is a shift from the critical role played by final and formal causes in the Aristotelian perspective on ensoulment to the abolishment of teleology in the mechanical explanations of the Cartesian account of bodies. Kant’s work represents a distinctive shift back towards the relevance of teleological explication through his account of purposiveness. The lessons garnered from this teleological history will be used in a typological fashion to identify trends within the conceptual foundations of contemporary scientific research programs. My goal is to make clear why emergence theory and its use in principles of life research will be my focus for the rest of this work.

Aristotle and the Soul

Though Aristotle’s work will not feature directly into my typological distinction, his On the Soul remains an essential early work to be consulted in any description of life and its origin. It provides a number of basic insights into what it means to live that shape biology, philosophy, and theology for millennia. Particularly, his work is fundamental to any understanding of the Scholastic development of this concept, the impetus behind the Cartesian approach, and contemporary neo-Thomist theologies. What I will focus on are the basic features of hylomorphism and the various faculties of the soul—especially the nutritive—because these are the features of Aristotle’s work that Descartes most stringently contests.

Understanding where the study of living things falls within the wider corpus of Aristotle’s philosophy gives greater depth of meaning to his account of hylomorphism and the faculties of the soul. With that in mind, it is important to realize that the modern way of understanding biology, as a study of living things in their own right, is quite different from what Aristotle envisions. Instead, Aristotle accounts for the study of biology as a subset of physics; it is not a distinctive study of the domain of living as opposed to non-living things. Why make biology a subset of physics? For Aristotle physics is the study of natural things. Living things are a species of natural things, and the study of biology is most properly understood as a means to understanding how exactly a living thing is a subset within the wider class of natural things.¹

Thus, it is critical to know what Aristotle tells us about natural things: they are a union of matter and form where the nature, or substance, is that which persists through all incidental change.² Living things are understood in this context of natural things. They are those natural things (a union of matter and form) that consist of a more specific union of soul and body.³ In sum, living things are natural things where the soul is that which persists through all incidental forms of change.

However, the soul always shares a special relationship to the body, the form and matter of living things, in Aristotle’s work. The soul is not capable of a separate existence from the body (just as form relates inseparably to matter in natural things). Aristotle reasons that to demonstrate such a separate existence for the soul we would need to find some way by which only the soul acts or is acted upon. However, any such affection of the soul seems to always involve the body.⁴ This is important because we cannot simply dismiss Aristotle’s account of the soul as a kind of vitalistic, other-worldly energy: the soul is not a special ingredient that vitiates otherwise inert matter. Instead, we have a much more nuanced relation between body and soul being developed here in terms of Aristotle’s four causes: material, formal, efficient, and final.⁵

According to Aristotle, proper knowledge of a thing only comes when we have grasped all its causes, of which Aristotle identifies four.⁶ Imagine this in terms of a house. The material cause of the house would be the timbers, bricks, mortar, etc. It is that out of which the thing is made. The formal cause for the house might be the blueprint, since it is the cause of the form of the house or an account of what it is to be. The efficient cause is what we are most familiar with as a cause after the explosion of modern science and the Enlightenment. The efficient cause describes primary sources of change; for the house, this would be the workers who erect it. Lastly, the final cause is that for the sake of which a thing should be. The final cause of the house could be to provide shelter. Just as we might apply these four causes to the complete explanation of any object in Aristotle’s conception of nature, even an inanimate object like the house, the four causes may also be applied to living creatures. A monkey, for example, has matter, its body; form, its soul; an efficient cause, its parent; and a final cause, its function.⁷ Note how body and soul appear in this account of the four causes as applied to a monkey: