A Scientist “Gets Religion”

 Edward J. Steffes
2009

Spiritual naturalism
Creativity in art and nature
Reductionism vs. emergence
The nonergodic universe
Agency and self-organization
Evolution
A self-organizing universe?
Philosophical interlude
Creativity and the sacred
Is nature's creativity good?

Spiritual naturalism

Back in 2006 I gave a talk called “Spirit of Life: Philosophic and Scientific Reflections.” There I recommended a perspective I described as “spiritual naturalism,” which locates the sacred within nature instead of in the realm of the supernatural. It is a perspective that invites us to look at nature a little differently, and also reevaluate humanity’s relationship to nature. In this view, “spirit” no longer refers to a supernatural being like a transcendent God or an immortal soul, but to a creativity that lies at the heart of reality itself.

I came to this admittedly radical conclusion primarily through the study of process philosophers such as David Ray Griffin and Charles Hartshorne. For them, every moment of time is a little creation, a becoming in which a multitude of things that already are (beings) are synthesized into a new whole that has never existed before. Incorporating this essay into your reality is how you are becoming right now (scary thought!).

Now you may say, “It’s all very well for philosophers to talk about creativity, especially when they’re talking about a human experience like reading an essay. But scientists have the best handle on what’s going on in nature, and they say it’s nothing but a bunch of objects moved by forces in conformity to scientific laws. What’s creative or sacred about that?” Spiritual naturalism may trouble not only the religious supernaturalists, but also the scientific secularists, with their mechanistic and reductionist ideas about how the universe really works. As I have wrestled with these issues, I’ve had to turn from the humanities and social sciences to confront the physical sciences, looking to see if they provide any support whatsoever for a new perspective on nature. I find that although mechanistic and reductionist views of nature still predominate, a surprising number of scientists are trying to see beyond those views.

One leading scientist with a new perspective is biologist Stuart Kauffman. (He is the founding director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary.) In the course of his career, he has gone from the study of evolution to the study of complex self-organizing systems, and from there to a reconsideration of the fundamental assumptions of science.  When I drew heavily on his work in my 2006 talk, he had not yet had much to say about religion. But in his 2008 book, Reinventing the Sacred, he is far more explicit in stating the religious implications of his thinking.[1] Now he proposes that we use the word “God” to refer not to a supernatural being, but to—guess what—the creativity of nature. He does not do so lightly, but only after seriously questioning a lot of what scientists thought they understood about nature.

Creativity in art and nature

Before Kauffman “got religion,” he “got art.” In his earlier book, Investigations, he was already calling for a new synthesis of science and art.[2] So I start my account of Kauffman’s ideas with an artistic metaphor.

Could Beethoven have composed Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm”? Well, why not? From the standpoint of physics, he could have sounded the right notes at the right intervals on some instrument. From the standpoint of mathematical probability, he could have happened upon the right combination of notes by chance. But of course, that’s not how creative people work. What is physically and mathematically possible is not always creatively possible, since creativity involves more than mechanism and chance. Like any musician, Beethoven worked within a certain space of possibilities defined by the cultural milieu of his place and time. Some of the musical resources he would have needed didn’t exist yet. The only way to get from Beethoven to Gershwin was to expand the musical workspace itself, which also required major changes in Western culture, not the least of which was the development of an African-American culture. Beethoven made his own major contributions, of course, but only in the twentieth century would the cultural workspace be large enough to embrace jazz.

Artists and appreciators of art know that art develops in a mysterious way, in a process that is not strictly logical, deductive or algorithmic. So does science actually, since the process of getting from Newton to Einstein isn’t strictly deductive either. Scientists acknowledge creativity in both art and science, but for the most part keep it out of the substance of their theories. They marginalize it by regarding it as a peculiarity of humans, and even there they may assume that it is in principle reducible to something that is not creative.

Are only humans, and perhaps a few other intelligent animals, creative? How can we be sure? How do we know that the natural things that came before us don’t participate in their own creative process? What if the universe itself unfolds in a creative way, constructing new categories of reality and expanding its space of possibilities as it goes? Kauffman believes that exploring these possibilities can lead to a better understanding of nature, especially an understanding of how complex systems such as the biosphere and human societies can emerge and develop themselves.

Reductionism vs. emergence

An artifact such as a musical composition can be reduced through analysis to its generic parts. As a score it is just notes on a page; as a performance it is just sound waves; on a CD, it is just digital information. Looking at it that way places it in very broad, abstract categories by abstracting from its fullness as a unique thing. This analytic approach identifies musical compositions as a tiny subcategory of things of interest to physics, a category that seems to include music and a whole lot more. That leads to the widespread assumption that the laws of physics ought to explain everything. On the other hand, a more synthetic approach to reality notices that a great deal of additional information is needed to define a musical composition. In addition to knowing the physics of sound, one needs to know about music, and about specific kinds of music within specific cultures.

From this more synthetic perspective, it is the concrete that is more inclusive than the abstract, in the sense of being richer in information content. As reality unfolds from the abstractions of physics and mathematics to the concreteness of ecosystems, organisms and societies, each new context or workspace gives new meaning and function to the generic parts, so that truly new entities emerge.

Appropriately then, Kauffman begins his book about the creativity of nature with a critique of scientific reductionism. Reductionists claim that the actions of any whole can be fully explained by the actions and interactions of its parts. In Kauffman’s words,

Reductionism is the view that society is to be explained in terms of people, people in terms of organs, organs by cells, cells by biochemistry, biochemistry by chemistry, and chemistry by physics To put it even more crudely, it is the view that in the end, all of reality is nothing but whatever is “down there” at the current base of physics: quarks or the famous strings of string theory, plus the interactions among these entities.[3]

This has been the dominant approach of science, and it has told us a great deal about how things work. I would say that it’s a very useful simplification of reality, as when physics explains music as consisting of sound waves. But reductionism has always been troubling for the humanities and for religion, because it has trouble accommodating things that human beings take pretty seriously, such as free will, consciousness, meaning, purpose and value. How can I claim to have made a free and conscious decision to do something because it is good for the world? The reductionist view is that my action consists of nothing but the actions of many mindless parts, acted upon by forces in accordance with scientific laws, and moving randomly to the extent that those laws are probabilistic.  My conscious intentions or values have no causal or explanatory relevance at all. As one of the most well-known physicists, Stephen Weinberg, has stated, “The more we comprehend the universe, the more pointless it seems.”[4]

Accepting reductionism leaves us with several philosophical options, all of them unsatisfactory. We can assert that freedom, consciousness, meaning, purpose and value are illusory or irrelevant, since they don’t really account for anything we do. We can continue to insist that these things are real, but existentially absurd, since we have no idea what they are doing in our universe. Or we can attribute these human qualities to supernatural intervention: God has given us a supernatural soul that enables us to transcend the laws of nature in order to carry out our good intentions—and hopefully God’s.

Fortunately, we have strong reasons to believe that reductionism is an incomplete view of reality. Reductionism assigns the most explanatory power to laws of the greatest generality, the laws of physics. General laws have the advantage of applying to everything, but they have the difficulty of being so abstract that they don’t tell the whole story about anything. The laws of physics don’t predict that life will exist at all, let alone how a particular organism will be organized. Physical laws allow a vast array of possibilities: many kinds of chemicals, many kinds of organic molecules, many kinds of species, persons and human societies. They permit the appearance of many different higher-level systems, none of which are specifically called for by the lower-level laws, and each of which requires study on its own level to be fully understood. The anti-reductionist position that asserts this is usually called “emergence.” Kauffman also uses the term “constructivism.” Not only does it take a creative process for musicians to get from the physics of sound to “I Got Rhythm,” it also takes a creative process for the universe to get from physics to chemistry to biology and beyond. At each stage, what already exists must be able to construct something new by creating and organizing new workspaces. Reductionism always takes things at least partially out of context, and so loses part of the explanation of why they do what they do.

I recently saw a video of a bear breaking into a parked car. The bear was determined to get into the car and eventually found a way, by smashing in a window. A reductionist would say that the statement, “The bear broke into the car,” is only a shorthand for a description of what’s really happening, a complete account of the lower-level events that resulted in moving the large set of atoms and molecules we call a “bear” into the large set of atoms and molecules we call a “car.” Kauffman, however, cites the philosopher Wittgenstein’s objection that “one cannot, in general, reduce statements at a higher level to a finitely specified set of necessary and sufficient statements at a lower level.”[5] The problem is that many different chains of causal events could have gotten the bear into the car, no one of which is necessary or sufficient in all contexts. A whole entity such as an organism is an interconnected network of causes that can generate a vast number of events. An organized act is a subset of those possible events assembled for a reason that makes sense in the context of this bear in this environment at this time. The bear wanted to get into the car and organized its bodily activity to do so, searching for and finding some combination of events that would accomplish it. It is the bear that acts; the specific causal mechanisms by which the action is carried out are secondary.

Although bears are less reflective than musicians, the bear’s ability to find a way into a car is not so different from a musician’s ability to find a pleasing transition to a new theme or a way of expressing a particular emotion. Kauffman says that organisms have a “know how” that can be distinguished from the more conscious human “know that.” Isaac Asimov once argued to a physicist that any dog who can catch a Frisbee must in some sense “know” Newton’s laws of motion.[6]

A world of continuing emergence is a creative world. It doesn’t unfold logically, in a way that is deducible from abstract laws. It unfolds historically, as existing realities combine to create possibilities for new realities, and as emergent realities rely on preexisting realities while using them in new ways. If what nature is doing is art, then the appropriate human response is appreciation and creative participation. Reductionist science risks missing the art and seeing only the mechanisms. It risks missing the symphony by focusing on the mechanics of the instruments.

The nonergodic universe

Kauffman’s emphasis on emergence and historical process is related to his understanding of the universe as “nonergodic.” An ergodic system is one with a lot of repetition; the system can enter every possible state many times. A simple example is a digital clock which can show 12 different hours and 60 different minutes, so its “configuration space” includes 720 different states which occur repeatedly. A more interesting example is a slot machine. The original mechanical slot machines had three reels and only ten different symbols per reel. That allowed for only 1,000 (10³) possible states, which would obviously recur again and again as gamblers continued to use the machine. Repetition permits statistical generalizations about how often the system will be in each state. Since the symbols match up on only 10 of the 1000 states, we can say that the odds against getting a match on any one try are 990-to-10, or 99-to-1. Today the machines are electronic, and the odds can be whatever the programmers want them to be, or at least whatever the law will allow.

When the number of objects is very large, and new kinds of objects are constructed out of combinations of existing objects, the configuration space becomes vast. For example, typical proteins within the human body are about 300 amino acids long. Even using the more conservative figure of 200, the number of possible proteins of that length is about 10²⁶⁰.  Allowing a tiny fraction of a second to make each protein, it would take 10³⁹ times the amount of time since the Big Bang to explore all the combinations even once. When the number of possible states is vast compared to the number of states that can be explored in a finite time, a system has a unique history. “History enters when the space of the possible is vastly larger than the space of the actual.”[7] The universe as a whole is a nonergodic system, and so is the biosphere:

At levels of complexity above atoms, the universe is on a pathway, or trajectory, that will never repeat. For example, in the evolution of the biosphere, from molecules to species, what arises is almost always unique in the history of the universe. Using the physicist’s technical term, the evolution of molecules and species in the biosphere is vastly nonrepeating, or nonergodic.[8]

Any ecosystem or organism can occupy only a tiny fraction of the universe of possibilities. It operates within a limited workspace, like the musician operating within a cultural milieu. The workspace can expand, however, as what already exists creates possibilities for new forms of interaction and organization. Systems evolve by moving into what Kauffman calls the “adjacent possible.” This might also be called the “creative possible,” as opposed to the vastly larger physically or mathematically possible. The biosphere doesn’t suddenly jump from a configuration with no vertebrates to a configuration with humans, any more than the musical world jumps from Beethoven to Gershwin.

Lawful explanations in the form of “y is a function of x, under condition z” don’t explain historical realities completely. New conditions emerge; new values and types of x emerge; and how a multiplicity of causes will combine to produce an effect in a given context isn't knowable in advance. Kauffman says that we must break the “Galilean spell,” the traditional scientific assumption that everything in nature is governed by laws.

Scientists haven’t ignored history, and in some fields, such as evolutionary biology, it plays a major role. But the standard way of dealing with novelty has been to consider it an accident, something that just happens to happen, and then perhaps endures. The focus of reductionist science remains on the laws that govern the underlying machinery. What isn’t explained by those laws, especially the emergence of more complex systems that use the existing machinery in novel ways, is attributed to chance. Physicist Murray Gell-Mann is taking that position when he says, “The evolution of the Earth, of the weather on its surface, of the prebiotic chemical reactions that led to the emergence of life, and of life itself, all illustrate the accumulation of frozen accidents that have become regularities for restricted regions of space and time.”[9] The idea that all innovations are accidents is certainly not true for humans; even having a new conversation is an art! Kauffman would like us to see the art in the rest of nature as well. (Gell-Mann is a Nobel prize-winning physicist. With all due respect for his major contributions to particle physics, I will often contrast his more traditional scientific views with Kauffman’s newer ones.)

Kauffman's constructivism gives history a role that is more—well—constructive! The most fundamental laws are general enough to allow for a vast range of possibilities. The rest isn’t left just to chance, but to a comprehensible—although not predictable—creative process. Interactions among existing things create new historical contexts within which novel ways of being can emerge.  Such innovations are not just accidents, but creative events that makes sense in that context, although they couldn’t have been predicted by applying a pre-existing law.  The universe complexifies naturally, as innovations expand the workspaces within which further innovations can arise. Interpretation of events in context becomes a legitimate method of investigation in science, as it has long been in the humanities.

Agency and self-organization

Kauffman’s approach to biology is not just to study organisms from the bottom up, using the laws governing the parts to explain the whole, but to study them from the top down, using the organization of the organism within larger biological systems as the context to understand what the parts are doing. Kauffman has devoted his career to trying to understand organization, which he thinks is a much more mysterious matter than most people realize. He regards it as a fundamental concept in science, along with matter, energy and information.

Kauffman describes organisms as autonomous, self-organizing agents. This is part of what he means by the creativity of nature. At the heart of his concept of agency is the ability to carry out thermodynamic work cycles. An organism must keep itself far enough away from thermal equilibrium to make use of spontaneous energy flows; it must constrain energy to perform work; and some of that work must serve to maintain the conditions under which further work can occur, especially the continued availability of energy sources. He calls this a “terribly important circle,” where “work is the constrained release of energy, but it often takes work to construct the constraints.”[10]

In order to identify sources of food or other favorable conditions for maintaining its work cycles, an organism must be able to detect properties of its environment that are relevant to its organized activities. Where there is agency, there is meaningful information, or semantics. The distinction between semantics and syntax is crucial to the distinction between self-organizing agents and mechanisms. In the study of language, semantics concerns the meaning of words, while syntax concerns the rules for arranging words into phrases or sentences. (Noam Chomsky illustrated the difference with the sentence, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” which is syntactically correct but semantically meaningless.) Meaning involves relevance to a context. What I mean by raising my hand depends on the social context in which I do it. Computers process information, but the information is meaningless to them because they have no context, no organization of their own to which it could be relevant. The information is only relevant to outsiders, the designers and users of the computer. They provide the context when they tell the machine what to do.

The physical sciences have generally proceeded on the assumption that the systems they study are just like computers in this respect and therefore can be simulated by computers. While recognizing that many systems process information, scientists don’t acknowledge that the information is any more meaningful to the system itself than a program is to a computer. Semantics need play no role in the analysis of a system, and context needn't be studied in its own right because the parts of the machine are assumed to be insensitive to it. Science, it is claimed, can build an accurate description of reality by constructing a purely syntactical model, usually in mathematical form. All one needs are symbols to represent the objects and rules to represent their interactions. Such a model is called a formalization. Biologist Robert Rosen says, “The formalist position, that the universe of discourse needs to consist of nothing more than meaningless symbols pushed around by definite rules of manipulation, is exactly parallel to the mechanical picture of the phenomenal world as consisting of nothing more than configurations of structureless particles, pushed around by impressed forces.”[11] Rosen was one of the first biologists to argue that something is lost when complex natural realities are reduced to mechanical models. “It makes the question ‘What is life?’ unanswerable; the initial presupposition that we are dealing with mechanism already excludes most of what we need to arrive at an answer.”[12]

Kauffman’s description of an autonomous agent is more than syntactical, as can be seen from one of his favorite examples, a bacterium swimming in a direction:

The technical word for meaning is semiosis, where a sign means something. Here, the bacterium detects a local glucose gradient, which is a sign of more glucose in some direction. By altering its behavior and swimming up the gradient, the bacterium is interpreting the sign. The bacterium may, of course, be mistaken….Neither “signs,” “interpretation,” nor “mistakes” are logically possible in physics, where only happenings occur. Thus meaning has entered the universe.[13]

Not only that, but “glucose has value to the bacterium,” and “getting food is the purpose of the activity,” two more big differences between an agent and a mechanical system. When explaining a mechanism, the scientist quite properly replaces teleological language with the language of efficient causation. “The furnace came on for the purpose of heating the room” becomes “The temperature drop in the room triggered the thermostat, which turned on the furnace.” Purpose refers only to the human context that explains why we created the heating system in the first place, but it is irrelevant to explaining the operation of the system itself. Traditionally, scientists have believed that all assertions of purpose are, in principle, replaceable by such mechanistic statements. But this is exactly the kind of reduction that Kauffman, following Wittgenstein, believes is impossible for organisms, since they have organizational contexts of their own. The purposive act does not equate to any particular mechanism, since no one mechanism is both necessary and sufficient to carry it out. The art of living is the design of purposive action, using whatever mechanisms are available.

Kauffman’s concept of self-organization is both very old and very new. In the late eighteenth century, philosopher Immanuel Kant first described living things as self-organizing: “An organized being is then not a mere machine, for that has merely moving power, but it possesses in itself formative power of a self-propagating kind which it communicates to its materials though they have it not of themselves; it organizes them, in fact, and this cannot be explained by the mere mechanical faculty of motion.”[14] After the synthesis of Darwinian evolutionism and genetics in the twentieth century, biologists forgot about Kant and largely adopted genetic determinism, trying to explain biological functioning as a straightforward consequence of biochemical programming. Now some biologists are concluding that Kant may have been right after all. They are discovering that the effects of genes depend on the cellular context. In The Century of the Gene, Evelyn Fox Keller describes the change of thinking:

The gene has lost a good deal of both its specificity and its agency. Which protein should a gene make, and under what circumstances? And how does it choose?

            In fact, it doesn’t. Responsibility for this decision lies elsewhere, in the complex regulatory dynamics of the cell as a whole. It is from these regulatory dynamics, and not from the gene itself, that the signal (or signals) determining the specific pattern in which the final transcript is to be formed actually comes….

            A musical analogy might be helpful here: the problem is not only that the music inscribed in the score does not exist until it is played, but that the players rewrite the score…in their very execution of it.[15]

The cellular context within which genes function is part of a larger organic context within which cells function. This in turn functions within a still larger context of ecosystems and the biosphere as a whole. When two or more species of organism interact within an ecosystem, one of them can do things that are functionally significant for another. Legume root systems and fungi feed each other. “The root and its plant capture sunlight and water and carbon dioxide and supply sugars to the fungi, while the fungi capture nitrogen from the air and fix it into amino acids and supply amino acids to the plant.”[16] An ecosystem is an emergent context of interaction with its own organization. How one species lives creates possibilities for how other species may live. By exploring these possibilities, species create new niches and expand the workspace of the ecosystem and the biosphere. The evolution of ecosystems and the biosphere is also a natural process of complexification, a creative expansion into the "adjacent possible."

Evolution

Self-organization plays a key role in Kauffman’s conception of evolution. He believes in natural selection, of course, but he doesn’t believe that natural selection alone can account for the order in nature. Natural selection doesn't create new form; it only favors one form over another. So Kauffman makes a major break with orthodox Darwinism:

Most biologists, heritors of the Darwinian tradition, suppose that the order of ontogeny is due to the grinding away of a molecular Rube Goldberg machine, slapped together piece by piece by evolution. I present a countering thesis: most of the beautiful order seen in ontogeny is spontaneous, a natural expression of the stunning self-organization that abounds in very complex regulatory networks. We appear to have been profoundly wrong. Order, vast and generative arises naturally.[17]

Kauffman refers to natural selection as a “poster child for reductionist thinking.” Since the modern synthesis of Darwinian evolution and genetics, biologists have assumed that small accidental changes in the genome can, through natural selection, produce gradual increases in fitness. The system changes from the bottom up, through accidental changes in the parts. A new understanding of genetic interconnections is challenging this view. "The complexity of living systems is largely due to networks of genes rather than the sum of independent effects of individual genes."[18] The effect of any one gene depends on how it is linked to and regulated by other genes. Kauffman believes that the capacity of species to evolve depends on the organization of genetic networks.  If they are too tightly organized, with the effects of every gene highly dependent on the effects of many others, then changes in any one gene are almost certain to be catastrophic for the functioning of the whole organism. He points out that one could not expect to improve something as tightly organized as a computer program by varying bits at random. This would set off a cascade of malfunctions from lines of code to subroutines and on upward. The odds are astronomically against improving a program this way in any realistic length of time.[19] If, on the other hand, networks are too loosely organized, with too few genetic linkages, then it will assemble variations into working wholes too slowly to keep up with the rate of mutation. The population then cannot advance in fitness, and will probably just become less fit over time as harmful mutations accumulate.

What complex systems need is a particular kind of organization called “self-organized criticality.” They need to be near a critical threshold between being too tightly organized, where changes are catastrophic, and too loosely organized, where changes are minor but cumulatively maladaptive. They need to have a resilient organization, able to be molded by change without being destroyed by it. Then they can move into the “adjacent possible” in a regulated way rather than trying to jump around the “fitness landscape” randomly, a procedure that would have little chance of moving toward a higher peak of fitness.[20]

This general principle of organization has application to human groups as well. The too tightly organized group is highly regimented and threatened by change. It can suppress innovation or be seriously disrupted by it, but it can’t evolve smoothly. The too loosely organized group doesn’t cooperate well enough to make good use of any innovations, so it may just gradually lose whatever order and adaptedness it has.

Kauffman is not the only critic to conclude that orthodox Darwinism pays too little attention to organized—as opposed to purely random—innovation. But Kauffman certainly does not agree with the advocates of “Intelligent Design,” who look for the source of that order outside of species themselves.  They describe structures like the bacterium’s flagellar motor as “irreducibly complex,” since it requires the coordination of many parts in order to work. How could variation and natural selection create any one of these parts, they ask, if no one part had a positive functional effect without the others? Doesn’t there have to be an Intelligent Designer to create the parts together?

Kauffman’s concept of self-organization provides for him the solution. He starts with the familiar Darwinian idea that the same structure can have many possible uses, not all of which are functional and selectively significant in a particular environment. “An incidental feature with no selective significance in one environment might turn out to have selective significance in another environment.”[21] Such a feature is called a preadaptation. An example is swim bladders in fish, which can adjust the fish’s buoyancy by adjusting the bladder’s mixture of air and water. They evolved from lungs that absorbed a mixture of air and water in oxygen-poor water. The true function of a biological feature depends on its organizational context, as does the meaning of a human action. New function can also emerge when existing parts are combined in new ways, as when bones that were originally in the jaws of early fish combined to form a structure in the ear with a functional contribution to hearing. What is necessary for evolution to work is not an external intelligent designer, but a capacity of organisms to use parts in new, functionally meaningful ways. Without this capacity for self-organization, accidental variations in parts would not create new functional wholes on which natural selection could work.

Although they don't use the term "self-organization," Jablonka and Lamb present a compatible view of evolution in their book Evolution in Four Dimensions.[21b] They argue that evolution involves not one but four kinds of inheritance systems: genetic, epigenetic, behavioral and (in humans) symbolic. Epigenetic systems involve variations in the ways that cells use genetic information in the course of development, so that cells with the same DNA can develop in many different directions. Since this information is preserved when cells divide, it can also be inherited in the reproduction of unicellular or asexually reproducing multicellular organisms. (Inheritance by sexually reproducing organisms is trickier but also possible.) Behavioral inheritance occurs through the transfer of behavior-influencing substances like mother's milk, and through imitative and non-imitative learning. Symbolic inheritance occurs through linguistic and other symbolic forms of communication. The important point is that cells and organisms can use the same DNA in a multitude of ways, giving them a "surplus of possibilities." These uses are not blind to outcomes, but can be more targeted, arising in responses to signals from the environment. Not only can these uses be inherited nongenetically, but they can affect the course of gene selection itself by altering the context in which natural selection works. For example, if a human population domesticates cows and starts relying on dairy products, genetic variations in the ability to digest lactose become relevant to survival, and so gene frequencies can change as a result of the change in customs.

Not every causal consequence is a function. A heart does many things, including making noise while it pumps, but making noise is not its function. Causal effects take on functional significance in the context of an organism in an environment in an ecosystem. New functions emerge as that context changes. The number of possible biological forms is vast, but most of them wouldn’t be functional except in certain organizational contexts. Reductionist science can provide no law that predetermines which of the many possibilities will be actualized because it cannot anticipate all of the possible contexts in which an organism might function.

We have not the faintest idea of what all possible selective environments might be….Virtually any feature or interconnected sets of features in an organism might, in the right selective environment, turn out to be a preadaptation and give rise to a novel functionality. Thus the evolution of the biosphere is radically often unprestatable and unpredictable in its invasion of the adjacent possible on the unique trajectory that is its own biological evolution.[22]

How one species makes a living creates opportunities for other species to make a living, as noted earlier. So species and ecological niches evolve together, with innovation on one level encouraging innovation on another. Ecosystems as well as organisms have to be “self-organized critical” so that they can be resilient enough to allow change without being disorganized by it. Nature consists of a hierarchy of nested self-organizing systems, just as human society does. Kauffman suggests a general principle of organization applying to organisms, ecosystems, human societies, the biosphere, and even the universe as a whole:

As an average trend, biospheres and the universe create novelty and diversity as fast as they can manage to do so without destroying the accumulated propagating organization that is the basis and nexus from which further novelty is discovered and incorporated into the propagating organization.[23]

By diversifying without destroying order, living things actually create a larger workspace for themselves, in which the total amount and variety of work performed increases in the course of evolution. Humans are carrying on this larger creative process by diversifying their own societies.

Biological evolution is the best—although maybe not the only—example of a unique trajectory through the nonergodic universe. The biosphere doesn’t just pass from state to state by law or accident, but it constructs new states as they become possible, a process that fully deserves to be called creative.  Scientists have been trying to simulate the process with computers, with only limited success. They can get a computer to vary parts of its code at random in order to improve performance of a fixed task specified by the programmer, but they have not succeeded in generating increasingly complex organization as Kauffman understands it. He believes that this is not due to the limitations of particular algorithms, but to the limitations of algorithms in general. Rosen made the same point many years ago, arguing that complex organization is precisely what cannot be simulated by a computing machine. That makes sense if complex organization is self-organization, while machine organization is organization by an external intelligent designer, which is exactly what biologists say evolution is not.

A self-organizing universe?

Is self-organization confined to living things, or is the entire universe self-organizing? Kauffman certainly leans toward the latter view, although his statements in this area are somewhat more tentative. I would like to discuss both his ideas and those of a theoretical physicist with whom he has collaborated, Lee Smolin. Smolin too has proposed that the universe is self-organizing.

I began my discussion of Kauffman’s ideas with his attack on reductionist science. The ultimate reduction would be to explain everything as the action of absolutely elementary particles obeying absolute laws of the greatest generality. Although Smolin is himself a theoretical physicist, he is afraid that such a quest is leading physics astray. He believes that physics remains under the influence of a Newtonian worldview, despite the departures from Newtonian mechanics represented by relativity theory and quantum theory. Some of this worldview’s assumptions are actually rooted in early modern religion. Many early scientists were deists who believed that God set the world in motion and made laws to give it its order. Later scientists took God out of the picture, but continued the quest for the eternal laws. They continued to treat nature as a creation or artifact, even as they turned away from the idea of supernatural Creator.

The ambition to construct a scientific theory that could explain the world, as conceived from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, shares a great deal with the search to know God. Both of them are a search for the absolute, for an understanding of the world that attributes its beauty and order to an eternal and transcendent reality ‘behind’ the world.[24]

Smolin questions several core ideas of twentieth-century physics that reflect this perspective: the idea of universal laws existing beyond time, the “radical atomism” that tries to reduce reality to elementary particles with fixed properties, and the “single-observer objectivity” that aspires to a God-like knowledge of the universe.

Physics has made enormous progress in its search for the most elementary particles and the most unifying laws. Yet it has run up against the same problem that besets all reductionist approaches. The more general and unifying the laws that are formulated, the less completely they account for anything in particular. This is especially true now that the most general laws only generate probabilities.  Gell-Mann says, “The fundamental laws of physics allow, in principle, only the calculation of probabilities for various alternative histories of the universe.”[25] The general laws of physics allow a vast multitude of possible realities, but they don’t explain the realities of our particular universe. Most of concern to Kauffman, “We do not have a theory for why the universe is complex.”[26] The laws of physics do not predict that a universe will necessarily contain stars and galaxies or heavy elements, let alone organic molecules and living things. These things only appear under the most precisely defined conditions, the precise values of about twenty physical parameters. A universe with the values of the parameters drawn at random would have an infinitesimal chance of being as complex as ours. Smolin says, “Everything is unified, but there are tens of thousands of choices for the configuration of the universe as a whole, each of which results in a world of different dimension, with different numbers of fundamental particles, interacting with different fundamental forces.”[27] Or as Stephen Hawking asks, “Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?”[28]

The search for elementary particles with fixed properties has led in surprising directions. Three hundred years ago, Leibniz argued for a more relational view, that no two things existing separately in space or time could be identical. Each thing had its own unique identity reflecting its unique relationships with other things. Smolin believes that Leibniz is turning out to be right. Elementary particles seem to have no absolute properties, but take on different properties depending on their relationships with other particles. For example, “As far as the laws of nature are concerned the electron and neutrino are identical. They are different only because the environment in which they move distinguishes them….The properties of the elementary particles are in the end influenced by the history and state of the whole universe.”[29] Like people, particles develop their identity in a context of interaction:

To the extent that each of our social identities are defined by our intimate and family relationships, one can say that each of us has as we grow up a large number of different potential identities only one of which may be realized in a stable community. In the same sense, each elementary particle has a set of different potential properties, only one of which can be realized in a stable universe.[30] 

Most astonishing of all, the quest to get to the bottom of things has led to quantum physics, which finds only possibilities rather than real properties in any ordinary sense of the term “real”.  Quantum physics says that small objects like atoms, electrons and photons of light have no definite properties at all when they are not being observed.  In the words of John Archibald Wheeler, “No microscopic property is a property until it is an observed property.”[31] This sounds a lot like the fundamental tenet of Berkeley’s idealist philosophy: “To be is to be perceived.” Thus quantum physics challenges the most basic realist assumption of science, that things exist independently of our observation of them. Depending on the interpretation, which is vigorously debated, quantum physics could have enormous relevance to the discussion of creativity.

If I am a realist, I don’t doubt that a light switch in my home is really either on or off, even if I’m not looking at it right now. But if the "switch" were a particle in a quantum experiment, I would have to say that until I observe it, it is in a state of “superposition,” spread out like a wave across both possible positions. The “wave” here is not a physical wave like a wave of water, but a mathematical “wave function” that gives the probability of an object's being observed in each possible state. But we can’t say that the object is really in any one state until we observe it there. And because of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, for every property we can pin down by observation, there is another property that must remain in superposition. We seem to choose which properties an object can definitely have when we choose which properties to measure! And there’s more. Objects get entangled with other objects in superposition states that involve all of them at once. A measurement on one such object not only seems to define its properties, but simultaneously to define properties of the others as well, even if they are some distance away.

As a practical matter, physicists can do a lot of good work without worrying about the philosophical implications of these findings. Quantum physics has a lot of technological applications, in areas such as lasers, transistors, cryptography, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). And classical, large-scale physics can proceed with its realist assumptions, since the classical description of big things is approximately correct, and quantum mechanics only becomes relevant when big things interact with little things. The standard way of dealing with the philosophical problems has been described as “Shut up and calculate!” Just do the physics and let the philosophers worry about the implications. But those who are interested in more than just solving technical problems can’t help asking what’s really going on.

The traditional “Copenhagen” interpretation of quantum physics draws a sharp line between the micro and macro worlds. Think of this line as a window pane through which big observers look at little wave/particles. Beyond the pane lies the quantum world of wave functions, the realm of possibility. Inside the pane are the scientists and other observers in the macroscopic, classical realm of actuality. When entities from the macroscopic world observe or interact with microscopic objects beyond the pane, they actualize some of their possibilities, moving them from the realm of the merely probable to the realm of the definite. (This is called “collapsing the wave function.”) This interpretation assigns a creative role to at least part of nature, the scientists who construct such experiments.

But there are problems. The theory describes an encounter between the micro and macro worlds without explaining how the macro world emerges in the first place. How does any actuality arise out of the realm of abstract possibilities? And where does one draw the line between the macro and the micro? Since large numbers of particles can be entangled, no absolute limit exists on the size of an object in a superposition. “Quantum mechanics is increasingly applied to larger and larger objects. Even a one-ton bar proposed to detect gravity waves must be analyzed quantum mechanically. Cosmologists write a wave function for the whole universe to study the Big Bang.”[32] And on the other side, what constitutes a macroscopic “observer” is unclear. Since humans are relative latecomers to the universe, surely we can’t be responsible for actualizing all of its possibilities! As Gell-Mann says, “The universe presumably couldn’t care less whether human beings have evolved on some obscure planet to study its history; it goes on obeying the quantum-mechanical laws of physics irrespective of observation by physicists.”[33] The choice seems clear: Either interpret quantum physics in such a way as to eliminate the apparent creativity of the observer, or else extend that creativity far beyond humans. Gell-Mann takes the first route, while Smolin and Kauffman take the second. Interestingly, process philosophy also points to the second solution by arguing for a subject-object distinction as a metaphysical necessity related to the nature of time.

In Gell-Mann’s interpretation, the universe is a quantum system in which the states of all the different particles are entangled. If what we mean by a “state of the universe” is the state of every particle, we cannot say that the universe must be in either this state or that state, or that it must have either this history or that history, or even that the possible histories have distinct probabilities that add up to 1. However, we can focus our attention on “coarse-grained” histories, “following only certain things at certain times and only to a certain level of detail,” such as only following a ball rolling across a floor instead of worrying about the precise paths of its constituent particles. For technical reasons beyond the scope of this paper, these possible coarse-grained histories can “decohere,” meaning that they can constitute a set of distinct histories with probabilities that do sum to 1. (And for larger objects, one of the possible histories may have a probability approaching 1, resulting in approximately predictable classical behavior, such as the ball’s conformity to Newton’s laws of motion.) But in Gell-Mann’s interpretation, decoherence does not collapse possibilities into a single reality; it only creates separate branches on which each possible history continues, branching again and again as it goes. So the universe has multiple histories, and only some of them contain enough complexity to produce observers such as ourselves. Our particular observations don’t actualize anything, but simply record the facts of whatever branch of history we happen to be on.[34] Gell-Mann thus eliminates the creativity of the observer, but replaces it with a world of multiple histories. It doesn’t so much explain our particular world as describe a multitude of possible worlds we might observe. This strikes me as another reduction, in this case reducing the actual to the merely possible.

Smolin complains that Gell-Mann’s kind of physics is still trying to describe the universe as if it could be seen from the perspective of a single God-like, objective observer. But now, that scientific observer can’t choose among the different possibilities allowed by quantum mechanics, so the result is different histories treated as equally real. Smolin wants physics to take the opposite route, recognizing that it’s the multiple observers within the universe that work together to construct a single history. Each observer is in a state of limited information and uncertainty, as required by quantum mechanics. The single window pane that separated the scientific observer from the quantum reality in the Copenhagen interpretation is replaced by multiple panes. To explain how the multiple perspectives can be harmonized in a single history, physics needs a new kind of mathematics, which is being developed through work in topological quantum field theory. “Topological quantum field theory…tells us how to construct a theory in which there is a quantum description associated to every possible surface that separates a system from the rest of the world. [In this theory] the principles of physics are expressed as relationships that constrain how the information different observers hold about the universe may be related to each other.”[35]

The inspiration for Smolin’s approach comes from the philosophy of Liebniz:

In The Monadology, Leibniz posits a world that is constituted by a large number of entities, which he called monads. These monads do not live in space; rather, space is an aspect of their relations. Nor can there be any observer of the universe who is not one of the monads. Instead, in Leibniz’s vision, reality is contained in the views, or perceptions, that each monad has about the others. As there is nothing but the monads, what one of them can perceive about the others is only relations. A complete description of Leibniz’s universe cannot be obtained from the outside, and there is no monad who sees completely the whole of reality. Rather, reality is contained in the sum of the views of all the monads.[36]

Kauffman too wants to broaden the notion of observer to include more than the Copenhagen interpretation’s scientific observer actualizing quantum possibilities through measurement.  He speaks of quantum systems such as molecules constructing classical actualities by measuring each other. Larger systems more readily decohere when they interact, producing classical actualities as opposed to remaining in a joint quantum state.  Classical systems cause further decoherence when they interact with other quantum systems, so the process toward a classical world is irreversible. “If comeasuring yields classicity, and classicity is irreversible, the classical universe begins to appear to coconstruct itself.”[37]

Kauffman has also made suggestions for a kind of process in which the universe could “self-tune” its fundamental constants, so that the parameters on which the universe as we know it depends are not set purely by chance. Here his arguments are especially complicated and speculative.

If we were to regard the universe as a well-designed—but not self-organizing—machine, then we would have to look outside of the system for an explanation of its design, either to a supernatural intelligent designer or to eternal laws existing in a kind of Platonic realm of ideal forms. The fundamental laws of physics do not explain why there should be anything as complex as galaxies, because they describe disorganized states as far more statistically likely than organized states. Only a self-organizing evolutionary process can account naturally for complex organization. In contrast to the metaphor of the machine, Smolin proposes the metaphor of the city, which he describes as “an endless negotiation, an endless construction of the new out of the old….If a city can make itself, without a maker, why can the same not be true of the universe?”[38]

Philosophical interlude

These new scientific ideas fit readily into a process philosophy, so I’ll briefly make that connection before addressing the religious question.

Hartshorne says that certain “ultimate contrasts” are relevant to every experience; here is a partial list:

later vs. earlier
becoming (being created) vs. in being (already created)
subject (experience) vs. object (things experienced)
whole (inclusive) vs. constituents (included)
complex vs. simple
effect vs. cause
concrete vs. abstract
actual vs. potential

In each pair of terms, the first term is dependent upon, relative to, and inclusive of the second term. In some cases this is obvious, as when a whole includes but depends on its constituent parts. In other cases, it’s a more profound insight. Each unique present moment depends for its uniqueness on what has preceded it. Similarly, the concrete includes and depends on the abstract, in that a concrete thing needs many more general things to define it. Before there could be “I Got Rhythm” there had to be sounds and music and jazz. As I hope the discussion of reductionism made clear, abstracting from a concrete thing loses information about a whole in order to concentrate on one aspect of the whole.

In each pair, the first term emerges as a creative synthesis from the multitude of things described by the second term: this moment from previous moments, becoming from beings, subject from objects, and so forth. Since the relationship between categories in every pair is essentially the same, many interesting analogies result, such as: “Subject is to object as becoming is to being.” That indicates that a subject is not a distinct being, but an ongoing process of self-organization through the creation of new experience from what is already in being.

Two philosophical errors, dualism and reductionism, arise from misunderstanding these categories and their relationships. Dualism tries to place the two categories in a set into two distinct realms of reality. If one separates subject and object too radically, one believes that a person is two beings, with a mind distinct from the body.  If one separates becoming and being too radically, one believes in two worlds, a temporal world of becoming and an eternal world of changeless being.

Scientific thinkers who correctly object to dualism often fall into the other error, reductionism. They try to eliminate the more inclusive category by reducing it to the less inclusive, but they always lose something important in the reduction. Seeing the whole as nothing but the sum of the parts loses the process of self-organization. Seeing the later as nothing but an implication computable from the earlier loses the uniqueness of each present moment. Seeing becoming as nothing but a transition between two known states of being precludes the emergence of truly novel states in the nonergodic universe. Seeing subject as nothing but a special kind of object (a computing machine) eliminates the self-transformative process of experiencing. Seeing the concrete as nothing but an example of the abstract overlooks the process of definition (literally, becoming more definite) that puts flesh on the abstraction. Seeing the actual as nothing but the manifestation of a potential leaves out any reason for actualizing this possibility in preference to all others. Seeing the effect as just a logical implication of the cause excludes purposive action, the coordination of causes to achieve a relevant result in a particular context.

What is missing in each of these reductions is the synthesis, the organization, the creative process that brings something truly new into existence, the creativity that is “at once preservative and enriching of reality.”[39]

Hartshorne’s categories are wonderfully illuminating. They clarify what reductionist science is doing as it seeks the truth in objectivity, abstraction, parts, causal mechanisms, and pre-existing laws. What is found is some of the truth, but not the whole truth. Smolin’s critique of the search for eternal laws and changeless particles makes more sense in this philosophical context. If there is no eternal being existing apart from the realm of becoming, then “everything that exists must exist inside of time,” and “to exist something must be created by processes that act in time to create the novel out of what existed before.”[40] 

In contrast, Gell-Mann’s brand of physics continues the more static, Newtonian tradition. Newton looked to the past for the ultimate explanation for his mechanical system, tracing the mechanical chain of causes back to a “first Cause,” the eternal Creator. Gell-Mann makes much more room for probability and accident in his worldview, but ultimately looks to the past for order. In a section of his book titled “The Ultimate Explanation: Order in the Past,” he says:

Most large-scale order in the universe arises from order in the past and ultimately from the initial condition. That is why the transition from order to the statistically much more probable disorder tends to proceed everywhere from past to future and not the other way around.

            We can think of the universe metaphorically as an old-fashioned watch that is fully wound at the beginning of its expansion and then gradually runs down while spawning smaller, partially wound watches that slowly run down in their turn, and so on.[40b]

Gell-Mann’s universe remains similar to Newton’s, a gigantic clock whose order was laid down once and for all at the beginning, and that can only wind down as time goes on. Put that together with his conception of emergence as mere accident, and you see a worldview that takes being more seriously than becoming, and thus has a blind spot with regard to creativity.

Kauffman has a different conception of time, one that emphasizes a building up rather than a winding down. Scientists use the term “arrow of time” to refer to fact that time seems to run in only one direction, despite the fact that the equations of physics are symmetrical with respect to time, and can be solved either forwards or backwards. Scientists like Gell-Mann understand the arrow of time as a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, the tendency of closed physical systems to move from order to disorder (or entropy, also understood as loss of information). Kauffman disagrees:

One intriguing hypothesis about the arrow of time is that the nonergodic universe as a whole constructs itself persistently into an expanding adjacent possible, persistently expanding its workspace. This is in sharp contrast to the familiar idea that the persistent increase in entropy of the second law of thermodynamics is the cause of the arrow of time. But the second law only makes sense for systems and timescales for which the ergodic hypothesis holds.[41]

In the universe described by many physicists, humans are not only improbable, they are sadly out of place, trying to construct meaning and order in a cosmos whose ultimate tendency is toward disorder and information loss. In the universe described by Kauffman, humans take their place as constructive builders continuing the universe’s work of constructing itself.

Creativity and the sacred

In Hartshorne’s philosophy, the first category in each pair is clearly valued over the second: “On my principle, the dependent is more and better than the merely independent, effects than mere causes, results than conditions, the complex than the simple.”[42] This is consistent with the idea that the creative process is enriching of reality, and therefore to be held sacred. Creativity is also what is most mysterious. Becoming in the present is much more mysterious than the objects already familiar to us from the past.

The two philosophical errors of dualism and reductionism do violence to what is truly sacred, but in different ways. Dualism divides becoming and being into two separate realms, the temporal and the eternal. It then sanctifies the eternal over and above the “merely” temporal or secular. Since natural things are temporal, the eternal realm must be beyond nature--supernatural. The ultimate reality is a Supreme Being, existing beyond and before the fallen world of becoming.

Reductionism often reacts against supernaturalism, but reacts too radically by trying to eliminate what is sacred and mysterious altogether.  It tries to reduce each pair of categories to the one category that reductionist science can understand. There is just one world, a secular world, but it is a world of simple objects, causal mechanisms, and abstract possibilities. At best, there is a kind of pseudo-religion where abstract, eternal laws are treated with the reverence formerly reserved for a lawgiver God.

By refocusing attention on what reductionist science neglects—the whole, the complex, becoming, the self-organizing agent—Kauffman not only preserves and enriches scientific discourse, but also reinvents the sacred in a non-supernaturalist form. What is sacred is not a Supreme Being or immortal soul or eternal afterlife. What Kauffman holds sacred is the creativity of nature, its capacity to generate emergent realities that are not predetermined by law. Among those emergent realities are the creative qualities of living things: agency, meaning and purpose. Our most creative qualities as human beings are not illusions or anomalies, but arise naturally from the creativity of the biosphere as a whole.

In our scientific era, any religious perspective must avoid asserting a “god of the gaps,” a religious explanation for gaps in our knowledge that could be filled by advances in science. Kauffman is certainly not invoking the supernatural to account for the wonders of nature. But what he is doing is calling attention to a gap that science as we know it cannot entirely fill, a mysterious process that is not reducible to logical and predictive laws. If it were reducible, we could hope to eliminate any remaining mystery by “getting to the bottom” of nature and achieving a “final theory” or “theory of everything.” But when we try that, we find abstractions and possibilities, not a complete explanation for the concrete world we live in. The constructivist method he recommends encourages us to think more holistically, interpreting actions in a context of creative organization on multiple levels. By acknowledging complexity, becoming and subjectivity, it embraces mystery. It doesn’t evade it by simplifying the problem and then mistaking the simplification for the whole reality. It acknowledges that no one group of observers with their own limited context can have more than a partial view of the universe’s creative process.

The creativity Kauffman describes is within nature, not above it, but it is still deeply mysterious.  It is Hartshorne’s “creative synthesis”: the emergence of the whole from many parts, the actual from many possibilities, the concrete from many abstractions, the effect from many causes, the complex from the simple, and the present moment from many past moments. It is not just something humans do, but the awe-inspiring creativity at the core of reality. That’s why I think Kauffman can legitimately call it “God”.

Is it, then, more amazing to think that an Abrahamic transcendent, omnipotent God created everything around us, all that we participate in, in six days, or that it all arose with no transcendent Creator God, all on its own? I believe the latter is so stunning, so overwhelming, so worthy of awe, gratitude, and respect, that it is God enough for many of us.  God, a fully natural God, is the very creativity of the universe.[43]

Humanists may find this more palatable if they think of Kauffman’s approach to religion as an enhanced humanism. It places our reverence for humanity on a solid foundation of reverence for nature, avoiding on the one hand an idolization of our particular species as standing above nature, and on the other hand a reduction of our species to nothing but a robot mindlessly generating behaviors with an algorithm. I find traditional humanism philosophically disjointed because it vacillates between those two incompatible alternatives of idolization and reduction.

Whether we choose to use the “G word” or not, what is important is that something is sacred to us. And what is sacred must be more fundamental and enduring than a human institution, or our own species in isolation from others, or the current state of the world. A better focus of reverence is the underlying creative process that has given rise to all of these things. Certainly we should value ourselves as human beings. But we can humbly acknowledge that we are at our best when we participate in processes of creative organization within human society and the biosphere, connecting our own creativity to something larger.

Is nature’s creativity good?

A recent letter to the UU World objected to spiritual naturalism on ethical grounds:

As a UU working in the field of biology, I am frequently distressed by the one-sided views of nature often espoused by those in our faith who conceive of god as “creativity in the natural universe”….I rarely hear these folk speak about the full, stark range of natural phenomena—about the old moose hunted to stumbling exhaustion by a wolf pack, about the wasp that paralyzes a caterpillar and then lays eggs within it that will eat it alive, about the Boxing Day tsunami and its wake of shattered trees and bloated corpses.  Nature is indivisible; I feel one cannot with integrity deify its “creative” aspects while ignoring or deploring the rest of it. For this reason, I cannot be a pantheist or a “natural theist.” I respect and marvel at the natural world, but I will not worship it—instead, I choose to join with other caring beings to cherish nature’s beauty while working to mitigate its casual cruelty.  For me, god is in this choice.[44]

Any moral philosophy must give some account of good and evil and make a distinction between the two. A religious philosophy associates the good with what it regards as sacred and identifies evil as its absence or opposition. Does spiritual naturalism handle this issue any better than alternative philosophies?

Traditional religion has a well-known problem accounting for the existence of evil. How can a God who is both all-loving and all-powerful create such an imperfect world? The really all-loving and all-powerful thing to do would be to share eternal bliss with everybody, right now!

Scientific secularism is even worse in a way, since it has trouble accounting for both good and evil. If the universe consists of nothing but morally indifferent particles moved by morally indifferent forces according to morally indifferent laws, why should anything good happen at all except by sheer accident, and why should anyone or anything care enough to make the distinction? Morality is an illusion or an absurdity.

I think that spiritual naturalism makes more sense out of good and evil than either of the above approaches. Nature includes many creative, self-organizing systems, engaging in purposive action that is meaningful to themselves. Each such system can be a reference point for distinguishing better or worse actions and outcomes. More importantly, subsystems can cooperate to generate emergent, meaningful outcomes for higher-level systems. Systems clash, hurt one another, and even die, but the creative organizing process goes on, preserving but enhancing reality.

Consider the letter writer’s brand of humanism from the perspective of spiritual naturalism. “I choose to join with other caring beings to cherish nature’s beauty while working to mitigate its casual cruelty.” Isn’t this joining together possible precisely because groups of humans can organize themselves to pursue collectively meaningful outcomes? When discussing human action, the author seems to have no problem celebrating creativity or choice. She even deifies it by saying that “god is in this choice.” She sees no contradiction between deifying creativity and combating evil; indeed she specifically relates the two when discussing humans. But she refuses to let spiritual naturalists play by the same rules. They aren’t allowed to deify the creativity of nature without accepting all of nature’s evils; otherwise they lack “integrity”.

The author’s position is another example of a philosophically disjointed humanism. Human creativity is sacred, despite all the evil that humans do. Nature’s creativity cannot be sacred because of the evil nature does. Isn’t it much more reasonable to see human creativity as a special case of a larger creativity that is equally worthy of reverence? Spiritual naturalism provides a more coherent, more connected humanism that locates the goodness of humanity within the goodness of nature. It is much more consistent with the seventh principle of Unitarian Universalism: “respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” And, to use the phrase that Kauffman used as the title for one of his previous books, it places us more “at home in the universe.”[45]