Self-Creating Universe 6: Making Sense of Emergentism

What is emergentism? Is it a Theory of Everything or a "ghostly last stand for metaphysical mysteries?" Paul Davies thinks that "emergentism is a new scientific paradigm;" Imre Lakatos thinks of it a "progressive research programme," meaning that it is fruitfully combining together in various fields that is "going somewhere and it gaining support on the way."

Clark's notion is that, while emergentism falls short of a unified model of science, at least provides a consistent language "applicable to a whole range of phenomena" with concepts such as "dynamic systems, chaos, complexity, and self organization." It seems to be a comfortable compromise between unified theory and Paul Feyerabend's notion of "anything goes." And that influences the experience of scientific enterprise: not as crystalline, but a human discourse "involving a converging practice and mutual influence between our best theories in science."

And perhaps its very uncertainty and unpredictability brings into question the eternal dream of "ultimate certainties and universal foundational principles" and that is a good thing.

But how emergent and creative is emergence? There are two explanations: the weak explanation is that "living beings [only] appear to be relatively independent of their chemical constituents." Living things are just a consequence of their complexity. The strong explanation is that, say, in the emergence of life, there is something that is "irreducible" to "nonliving entities." Some thinkers limit this to consciousness versus non-consciousness. But Clarke prefers a general idea that we can't reduce new phenomena to its constituents. It is just useful to "make sense of nature as being driven by... a creative principle."

There's a problem with this, that it seems to contradict the idea of entropy, that the universe is running down from order to chaos. The argument is that living things are not like steam engines, but can export disorder into the environment and import order from it. They "dissipate" entropy, or used-up energy, into the environment. According to Ilya Prigogine

such processes of transformation, of self-organization and self-creation, lead to the formation of new system which are not apparently or readily explainable in terms of preceding conditions or constituent microscopic processes.

Thus, "small fluctuations may iterate and kick-start an entirely new transformational process. Such "turbulence" may lead to new organization or to "disintegration and disorder," e.g., creation of a new species or extinction of an existing species. This goes beyond traditional Darwinian natural selection theory to propose change by random mutation and adaptation to propose "self-creative, emergent processes," for random mutation by itself should lead to disorder.

Another way to think of this is in the notion of "play" or "playful variation on old ideas," a breaking out of "rule-bound or goal-directed behavior." The point of it all is that it accounts for chaos and creation in purely naturalistic terms. No need for something higher or supernatural.

Another speculation is that "the spontaneous formation of new kinds of order might be explainable in terms of quantum coherence" as suggested by quantum theory. But Clarke doubts whether this applies or explains emergence. Self-organizing phenomena -- especially humans -- "are not strange in the way that quantum processes can be strange."

But is an explanation of emergence in sight? Probably not. It is likely that the current "unpredictability of emergent complexity" demonstrates the primitive state of our state of knowledge, or ignorance, rather than the way nature works.

Clarke raises the question whether emergence is "description" rather than "explanation," but then decides, with references to Newton and Einstein and Wittgenstein, that all science is description, the "how" rather than the "why." The "why" is for theology.

How does emergence relate to fundamental concepts of philsophy like "being?" Does emergence mean new levels of knowlege, or new levels of being. Clarke argues that emergence doesn't really fit any of the previous accounts of reality. It does not assume all the world is "matter," nor does it divide the world into two, material and mental. Clarke argues that

[Emergentism] runs counter to both monistic and dualist philosophies, and in their place offers instead a dynamic, process model in which being comes to be understood, not in terms of unchanging qualities or features or essences, nut rather of continual change punctuated by relative equilibrium.

But is he saying that emergence means something coming out of nothing? Not quite, he suggests: not "a "something for nothing" but a "more from less,"that the potential is there, but not yet realized.

What about God? Does not the concept of emergence suggest the present of a creative intelligence in the universe? Recently, the concept of "intelligent design" in nature has been advanced, and a number of people have questioned the adequacy of Darwinian evolution to accont for the "'irreducible complexity' of living beings." But Clarke would rather not go down that path.

We can now see that the astonishing coherence of the universe, clearly evident at many levels, is not a static or eternal one, but is a highly complex dynamic process, one in which harmony, disharmony, order, and chaos are complementary performers and transformers over deep time.

In other words, we don't know. 

 Next: Making Sense of Human Nature

Self-Creating Universe 5: Acts of Creation

"Creativity is a key idea in all facets of emergentism." Something new and unexpected occurs.

Out of chaos comes order and out of order comes life, and out of life come the "ten thousand things".

Karl Popper speaks of creativity as the greatest riddle of cosmology, "that the universe is in a sense creative." 

Creativity, the word, first appeared in English in 1875. Now it is a fashion: everything has to do with creativity. On the one hand it is associated with accelerating changes in science and business competition and in responding to challenges. On the other hand it is criticized by the left as being elitist and imperialist. Philosopher Roger Scruton called it "a fad for self-indulgent exhibitionism".

But Clarke wants to connect the interest in creativity with the relevance of emergentism.

In the old days, only God could be creative, and to talk about humans as creative was to trespass upon God's work. But then Spinoza suggested that maybe nature could be a "self-activating agent," and Coleridge proposed that nature was "one connected whole... a living being rather than a collection of parts... with creative powers within itself." 

This ties in with Kant, who wrote about each part of an organism producing the other parts, "so that it will be both an organized and self-organized being. And in his Critique of Pure Reason he "painted a picture of human knowledge in which the mind actively constructs the world" with the rational mind involved "in the shaping of knowledge." Thus, also, the artist in not "primarily an imitator, but a creator." Thus Wackeroder who portrayed "the artist as a priest who cooperates in the divine creative act"; Schelling pronouncing art as "a holy, creative, elemental power of the world." Then Fichte and the idea of self-creation: "I am wholly my own creation."

Thinkers in the 19th century developed the notion of self-creation. Marx argued that we create history with our labor; John Stuart Mill wrote that we are like a tree that grows and develops itself. Even Samuel Smiles that "self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual." Then there is Nietzsche: we "must take upon ourselves the task of self-creation" as man "become a work of art." Thus the physicist M. Mitchell Waldrop who sees us opening ourselves to "a kind of deep, inner creativity that is woven into the very fabric of nature."

In the 20th century thinkers have zeroed in on the idea that language is the agent of creation. Thus Noam Chomsky wrote that "The normal use of language is... a creative activity." Thus Freud and later psychologists looked at the potential for understanding "irrational forces locked up in the unconscious" through the talking cure. Or Jung proposing "transformation of the self" through the "creative dialogue" that leads to individuation. We can alter our states of mind by working on the brain, So, with Fromm, man's existence is "a problem he has to solve." Or Foucault considering that "one's life become a work of art." And this is experienced by some as a "democratization of the spirit" with people creating their own spiritual goals and methods. Thus the ex-Dominican priest Matthew Fox who moves theology towards the "cultivation of the sacredness of creation." And the celebration of the creative work of women down the ages, "whether as mothers, workers, or artists."

The idea of creativity moves from individual minds into movements. Thus Toynbee saw a civilization as "a dynamic, self-organizing entity" and revolutionary movements took the ideas of Marx and attempted "the creation of a new kind of humanity. The counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s sought to create a new kind of consciousness, "to wake up and discover, even to create, our new selves." The point is that they experience creativity as not just for God or a "few privileged individuals" but something in which everyone can participate.

Natural science is experienced as "one of the great cooperative creations of modern times" and in Thomas Kuhn as revolutions when a prevailing paradigm is transformed by "a new set of assumptions and terminologies." In Karl Popper the paradigm notion becomes the social interaction of evaluation and the possibility of the "falsifiability" of a theory by others.

The postmodern movement has a different take on creativity, reacting perhaps against a "totalizing" notion of the creative individual as a "transcendental subject." One way to approach creativity differently is to experience creativity as "play," and out of play come stories and narratives, "not as a mirror of the world but as something extra and unpredictable emerging from it," as Derrida puts it. So, "meaning is never closed but always deferred." And this is allied to the notion of reality as socially constructed that goes back to Kant. Thus creativity is a "conversation of mankind" rather than the brilliant "all-embracing world view."

Of course, some thinkers want to "depreciate the idea of creativity." But at least emergentism allows for the creation of new ideas without "divine mysteries" and other authoritarian structures.

Next: Making Sense of Emergentism

Self-creating Universe 4: Emergence of Consciousness

Although we take it for granted, the "conscious human mind" is "perhaps the most complex of emergent phenomena": our "conscious inner self." And the "origin and nature of consciousness" has been continually debated in the modern world. Materialism and positivism tend to want to marginalize consciousness as "an epiphenomenon, a rather odd by-product of the brain."

Whatever it is, human consciousness includes awareness of the external world of "colors, sounds, smells," shapes, pleasures and pains. And the inner world of "sensations and images." Then arises "the world of mind and thought and spirit, the sense of self".

William James introduced the notion of "stream of consciousness," the constant flow of "thought, feeling, sensation". And he pointed out that our "rational consciousness" is but one form of consciousness. We now understand "altered states of consciousness, including visions, hallucinations, trances, lucid dreams, and mystical and near-death experiences" that were once thought of as manifestations of God or the devil or madness.

Yet we think of ourselves as a "unitary self," the whole universe of experience that we reduce to "I am." William James called this the "essential unity" of consciousness, and Kant wrote of "a transcendental unity of apperception."

[W]hile the doors of ours senses open up to a plural world of sights, sounds, and feelings, our minds make sense of these by drawing them together and synthesizing them into a unified whole.

This sense of unity is linked to the notion of "agency", the capacity we seem to have to "steer and direct our actions." At the same time we tell a story about ourselves and seem to be "self-creating."

We need a "natural history of consciousness" to link the "unique qualities of consciousness... with its origins in the womb of nature."  But meanwhile, we seem unable to connect the fact of our material selves with the experience of our conscious selves. Why do we have consciousness? In other words, what role does consciousness have in evolution?

Clarke proposes four characteristics of consciousness:

1. Although it's not material, it is still a natural phenomenon.
2. Animals have consciousness, not just humans.
3. The brain and consciousness are connected.
4. But brain and consciousness are not identical.

The question then arises: where did consciousness come from? Does everything have a "mind-like quality" be it ever so primitive. Clarke finds the idea hard to square with the notion of creation in the Big Bang. Still, it certainly seems that consciousness emerges out of something less developed, as vision is present in some animals as "light-sensitive cells," and then develops into more improved and specific vision. Perhaps consciousness is like that. 

Clarke divide consciousness into two: sensibility, the "power of sensation" of the world and also "the internal world of the body." For instance, pain, for pain is not "one of life's misfortunes" but the way that we avoid and minimize injury. And then there is the sensation of sex.

But consciousness is also integrative.

[V]arious primitive sensations are collected and integrated into the faculty of extended awareness in a way that is beneficial to the whole organism.

One obvious advantage of integrated consciousness is the ability of an animal to deal with "hostile threats". And it is self-organizing. 

But how does consciousness evolve? Clarke looks at "typically human forms of consciousness" and how they evolve as "self-organizing phenomena" and how there seems to be a "growing autonomy of consciousness."

First, there is creativity. Karl Popper calls this the ability to deal with new and unexpected situations: flexibility.

Then there is language. And we are not just talking about human language, but the ways in which other animals, such as ants and bees, communicate to one another.

Then there is self-awareness. And humans seem to have a radically different kind than animals, and involves the ability to construct a narrative about ourselves, past, present, and future.

And then the question arises: how far can consciousness go? Clarke proposes the idea of an extended mind that reaches out and makes contact with the rest of the world out there. He means "altered states of consciousness" and out-of-body experiences: "a sense of being at home in the universe." Can this extension of consciousness be comprehended by science? We shall see.

Next: Acts of Creation

The Tea Party and Misinformation. And COVID

Everybody knows that the worst thing in the world is misinformation about the science of COVID. And misinformation should be firmly suppressed. Because people will die.

So I got a bit of a surprise reading a piece by Melissa Mackenzie on Donald Trump and the Tea Party. Trump is generating the same kind of energy as the Tea Party, she writes.  And Mackenzie was there for the Tea Party: "I covered the Tea Party for years all across the country... Tea Party rallies are where I met and covered Andrew Breitbart, Sarah Palin, and many other notables." 

What was the Tea Party?

Tea Partiers basically divided along two lines: There were the small government types who wanted to be left alone. This faction was made up of small business owners. Women started the Tea Party organizations on behalf of the businesses they and their husbands ran. They protested taxes and big bailouts of banks. They thought the bailouts were grossly unfair since small businesses weren’t rescued. They wanted no rescues. They wanted fewer taxes and regulations.

The second part of the Tea Party was folks who hated the big bank bailouts because they felt that if the government was going to help anyone, it should be the individual. These are the populists. They felt Social Security was a right. They often believed in socialized medicine. They were many times socially liberal. 

I want back and checked my blog posts in 2009 to 2010 when the Tea Party was in the ascendant. First of all, the movement was organic. Second, there certainly were a lot of women organizers. Third, Tea Partiers were definitely against reform of Social Security and Medicare. 

But you may have notions that the Tea Party was racist and funded by the Koch Brothers. Interestingly, I didn't mention race or Koch until well into 2010, when Tea Partiers were accused of shouting racist epithets at John Lewis as he and other black congressmen walked to the Capitol for a key vote on Obamacare. Later on I mentioned the Koch brothers. So you can see that "someone" was injecting race and Koch into the political square. Then there was the accusation of "astroturf" that I wrote about first in June 2009. Actually, it's likely that by June 2009 the Koch brothers had got involved.

Who do you think is doing the misinformation on the Tea Party origins? I wonder.

On the other hand, I'd say, the Tea Partiers were misinformed on the bailouts for bankers. Sorry kids; it's the science. The central bank is the lender of last resort and we really can't allow a cascade of banks to go broke. And we know why: 1929. In a biography of Andrew Mellon, David Cannadine write that:

In 1929, there had been 659 bank suspensions, a figure easily within the normal range for the decade, and through October 1930, there were a similar number of collapses. But in the last sixty days of the year, 600 banks closed their doors, beginning with Louisville's National Bank of Kentucky, and culminating in New York, where the Bank of the United States closed its doors o December 11.

Hmm. let's check the St. Louis Fed. It has the following table.

Year	Bank Suspensions
1928	498
1929	659
1930	1,350
1931	2,293
1932	1,453
1933	4,000
1934	57

Dear God. I had no idea how bad it got. Notice 1933: I call that a suspiciously round number.

Whaddya want? Stop bank bailouts or lose all your savings? By the way, one of the reasons for the bank failures was that people were allowed to borrow up to 90 percent of stock purchases on margin. In the 1930s they changed the rules so that you could only borrow 50 percent of a stock's purchase value.

But then they created Fannie Mae so that people could borrow lots of money on houses.

Let's look at bank failures in the 2000s, with data from FDIC so we can compare the Great Depression with the Great Recession.

Year	Bank Failures
2007	3
2008	25
2009	140
2010	157
2011	94
2012	51
2013	24

But, of course, the depositors in the Great Recession were covered by FDIC. And I presume that failing banks were usually picked by another bank in a nice cuddly deal with the regulators.

Only one problem: silly little Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke let Lehman Brothers fail in September 2008 because he whined that he didn't have the legal authority to bail 'em out. Ben, oh Ben.

So whaddya want? Banks bailed out or lose your savings? Plus, of course, in the 2000s, in accordance with government policy, people could borrow up to 100 percent of the value of a home. And the government was particularly interested in the number of loans granted to people of color: got that you racists?

But here's my point. What is the truth about the Tea Party, and about the issues that Tea Partiers rallied to protest? What's information and what's misinformation?

Yes, it was monstrous that the government bailed out the banks and not mom-and-pop businesses. Only, the government really needs to bail out failing banks otherwise the credit system collapses. So the Tea Partiers didn't really understand what was going down.

It is monstrous that the government encouraged low-down mortgages. But if it does then it must, it absolutely must, bail out failing banks.

But where are the social media searching for misinformation on the Great Recession and on government subsidies for mortgages?

And where, dear media and social media, are you on the constantly changing party line from government on COVID science versus COVID misinformation? Do you have timelines on your fact-checking sites to keep track of all that? Or is it all too hard? Because math.

See, the way I look at government and banks and government and pandemics is that in both cases government makes gigantic mistakes that it tries to cover up.

And the problem with that is that when things go wrong the truth never gets out. Because it is too painful for the ruling class to admit to.

Self-Creating Universe: 3. Re-emergence of Emergentism

After the 1920s emergentism went into retreat, because of the success of mechanistic approaches to genetics following the discovery of genes and the molecular structure of DNA with Watson and Crick in the 1950s.  Also it was thought that psychology should be based on behaviorism, a mechanical approach emulating the method of physics.

But in the 1960s emergentism revived with neuroscientist Roger Sperry who

rejected a purely reductionist view of human consciousness and argued that mind emerges from, though is not identical with, brain function and, moreover, it possesses causal powers and so is not a mere epiphenomenon, or inactive by-product, of the brain.

Then Karl Popper and John Eccles argued that many of the properties of the living world are emergent.

Consciousness itself was characterized as 'an emergent property of animals arising under the pressure of natural selection', and the self-conscious mind of human beings was... 'an emergent product of the brain.'

But biology maintained a reductionist orthodoxy that everything was chemistry. But then C.H.Waddington proposed that "organisms must be studied as whole beings" and his student Brian Goodwin proposed that "order in living beings emerges by a process of self-organization and that new and more complex beings which emerge possess capacities that are not reducible."

Thus Terrence Deason writes that the atoms in our body may once been inanimate bits of matter.

Nevertheless together in your living body they now share a mode of existence that is quite distinctive and discontinuous from their separated inanimate existences.

This holism, that organisms are more than the sum of their parts, went nuclear in 1975 with physicist Fritjof Capra and The Tao of Physics. He argued that the basis of quantum theory had been anticipated in "Eastern philosophical traditions." In The Turning Point Capra asked us "to see the world, not as a collection of particles, but as a seamlessly connected whole."

This sort of paradigm shift had been anticipated in 1962 by Thomas Kuhn and his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He argued that science advances not just by incremental discovery but also sudden transformation, an "unpredictable emergence of something new."

Reductionism and determinism still have their place, but meanwhile the holistic approach is becoming dynamic, expanding from the static analysis of how "complex wholes are constituted but with the ways they evolve, adapt, self-organize" and emerge. Not that anyone has come up with a "science of complexity."

And emerging from this is the notion of "self-organization." For a living system is self-organizing. And adaptive.

Another facet of the idea of emergence is a revision of understanding of chaos. The traditional meaning is Platonic, that order is the consequence of the impostion of order on chaos. But in the emergence era, it has shifted, that

a complex phenomenon such as a weather system or a living organism may be intrisincally deterministic and will demonstrate orderly patterns of behavior overall, but in detail, their behavior in undecidable.

They "are suspended uncertainly between order and chaos" and it is "this randomness which gives to chaotic systems a creative potential". This provides a way to explain nature's "remarkable capacity for producing an infinitely varied world of great, if fragile, order and beauty."

Canonical examples of emergence as explanation include the Big Bang creation story, and the day-to-day experience of "fluidity, color, temperature and friction", the differences in behavior between elements and chemical compounds, and the creation of life, the economy, and language. However, present science has established that the properties of chemical compounds "can be explained by the properties of electrons" as established by quantum mechanics.

Next: Emergence of Consciousness

Self-Creating Universe: 2. In the Beginning

Emerging Speculations

Emergentism has a long history. Humans have been thinking about "creation, order, evolution, and chaos" for a while. There was the ancient Greek Anaximander

who suggested a kind of evolutionary cosmology in which things emerge spontaneously from a single primal substance and through a cyclical process of generation and destruction give rise to an infinity of worlds of which our own is but one.

Then Heraclitus, who "believed that nature must be understood as a process of ever-changing flux and change." The Roman Lucretius proposed that "Nature is free and uncontrolled by proud masters, and runs the universe by herself without the aid of gods."

But then came Plato. Influenced by Pythagoras, he "sought to demonstrate that the order, beauty, and harmony of the cosmos could be explained in terms of a set of relatively simple mathematical principles" and the "perfection of eternal Ideas or Forms."

Here we can see the opposition between the naturalist presumption and the eternalist presumption, between emergence and eternal order. Then Aristotle came along and split the difference. He believed in a First Cause, but also in "the dynamic processes of the natural world." Aristotle was interested in biology. However, Aristotle still believed in a world in which Nature "is a cause that operates for a purpose."

The Renaissance began the process of 

a long struggle to establish a purely naturalistic way of understanding the world and of making sense of human existence without the presumptions of an eternalist cosmology.

First, it rediscovered ancients like Epicurus, and also, through the age of exploration, the philosophies of India and China. Brahmin thinking allows for "spontaneous evolution out of unconscious being;" Buddhism allows for a universe "undergoing constant change, eternally renewing itself"; Taoism allows things to "create themselves from their own inward reflection."

Initially, the Renaissance was eternalist, with Newton advertising "the wonderful uniformity of the natural world... 'the effect of... a powerful ever-living Agent." But then came Kant. First,

he constructed... a dynamic cosmology which pictured the universe arising through purely natural causes from an original vortex of material particles.

Then, in his Critique of Judgment, Kant proposed a way to differentiate "organisms and mechanisms." Organisms are self-organizing entities.

A living thing thus displays purposes, but unlike the watch, it has no purposes beyond itself... Moreover, the order within a living being, for example between its various organs, is not imposed from without either but emerges through the interrelationship of its parts and between the parts and the whole.  

Kant inspired Schelling to develop his Naturphilosophie, driven by an immanent spirit, Geist.

Geist emerges and becomes actual through the self-organizing, time-bound processes of nature itself. "We must think of the emergence of the world" was his manifesto for a new evolutionary philosophy of nature.

This immanent process was emphasized by Goethe, "for whom... life... was seen as a matter of striving, movement, development and growth. Darwin developed the idea of the "evolution of species," and Hegel developed "a philosophy of universal becoming in which the world self-creates out of dynamic, ever-changing processes".

From Being to Becoming

Richard Baumer, historian of ideas, sums this shift as "a transformation from being to becoming, from a static to a dynamic view of nature". And this is reflected in understanding politics, science, technology, and culture as "a tale of transformation... full of strife, ingenuity and change." Schopenhauer, of course, experienced all this change as the "source of our woes" and Spencer as an evolution to more complex forms. But Marx saw evolution as a struggle between opposing forces, "the struggle of real people and real social classes."

While philosophy and politics and evolutionary science all experienced a universe of change, in physics as late as 1900, William Thompson could say that "there is nothing new to be discovered in physics now." Newton's mechanism reigned supreme. But then Roentgen's x-rays and Marie Curie's radioactivity showed that "atomic elements were not immutable." And then came relativity and quantum mechanics. Paul Davies:

When quantum theory was properly developed in the 1920s it turned science upside down and swept aside many deeply entrenched assumptions about the nature of reality.

And yet Nietzsche had already prophesied "nature as a continuum of energies and as 'a play of forces and waves of forces... a sea of forces flowing and rushing together'". Thus in the 1920s Whitehead would "place the flow of time and process at the centre of his philosophy." And Heidegger proposed that being was not timeless, but "being-in-the-world of conscious human persons who... are thrown into the world." Thus reality is not eternal, but temporal.

These revolutions in science, culture, and society were, in turn, leading towards completely new worldviews... that penetrated deeply into the fabric of everyday lives.

The Coming of Emergentism

It was G.H. Lewes who coined the term "emergence" in his 1875 book Problems of Life and Mind.

[H]\e held that more complex phenomena such as minds and living beings could not be explained solely in terms of less complex, nonliving things but represented new emergent phenomena which he took to be more than the sum of their simpler component parts. 

John Stuart Mill had already noted that poisonous substances such as sodium and chlorine combine into table salt, which is "life-supporting."

Henri Bergson in his 1907 Creative Evolution:

It emphasized the temporal and ever-changing, constantly flowing nature of the world, and the continuous creation in nature of new life forms.

Bergson influenced three British thinkers, including C.D. Broad. Broad proposed physical reality composed of levels of ascending complexity, where the higher cannot be deduced from the lower. In particular "the properties of the conscious mind cannot be deduced from physical processes." Consciousness is an emergent property. 

The zoologist C. Lloyd Morgan rejected the Darwinian notion that "nature makes no jumps." He

took the view that evolution is relatively discontinuous, making irregular jumps rather than by regular and smooth transitions.

Against Wallace, who believed in a supernatural cause for evolution, Morgan called for "evolutionary naturalism." Meanwhile Samuel Alexander proposed that God is the goal of history, rather than its prime mover. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin proposed the "progressive emergence of ever higher, yet more integrated and more perfect levels of being" with each level a new synthesis in which human thought, the noosphere, emerges from the living world, the biosphere.

Next: Re-emergence of Emergentism.

Self-Creating Universe: 1. The Cosmic Riddle

Can there be meaning in the universe without God? Modern science has seemed to invalidate the notion of God as the creator and minder of the universe; it has increased knowledge about the universe enormously, but it has not achieved much in explaining the meaning of life. Many people have tried and are trying to rectify this problem.

It is difficult not to be amazed at the creativity of the universe, how a "seed that can produce in a few weeks a beautiful flower." How human children "can develop complex capacities... without much drilling from... parents."

But is this miracle the work of a "divine creator" or something that arises "at a lower level from nature's own innate powers"? And if it comes out of nature, then how?

Clarke proposes a worldview he calls the

naturalist presumption... that we are situated within a real, natural world from which we have evolved... yet are able to use our evolved intelligence to make (some) sense of it and (some) sense of our lives.

The old way is the

 eternalist presumption which... locates the source of values and meaning in an eternal reality beyond nature, beyond the world that we can experience through our sense.

But Clarke is not proposing mere materialism, for the the materialism that dominated in the Enlightenment has not seemed to work out so well.

More recently, the terrible wars and human suffering and the perpetuation of poverty, inequality, injustice, and prejudice into and beyond the twentieth century have led to an increasing sense of disillusionment in spite of the enormous social and political benefits that the Enlightenment has bestowed on the modern world.

So his naturalist presumption

gives a key role to mind and to spiritual values, not as echoes from a higher world, but as... nature's irresistible urge to create.

The encounter between naturalism and eternalism has spawned the idea of emergentism; it asks the question

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 does order come out of chaos?

Traditionally, humans have answered this question with "God." But Clarke proposes to answer it with a naturalist presumption. But the problem is that if "God is dead" as advertised by Nietzsche, how do we recover meaning, from the materialist worldview that replaced the God-centered world?

In Clarke's emergentism there is something else. For instance, in biology. A "living organism" is made out of chemical elements, to "complex constituents... cells... organs... living beings... living communities."

At each level , new properties and laws emerge that cannot be understood or predicted from a full knowledge of the lower levels.

 Clarke experiences this as a paradigm of self-organization. Thus, according to Stuart Kauffman,

the creative power of nature and of the universe around us is 'so overwhelming, so worthy of awe, gratitude, and respect, that it is God enough for many of us.'

It is as if the "'sacred' can be brought down from heaven to earth.. without projecting the source of this creativity on to... [an] eternal realm of being."

Next:In the Beginning.