Spirit of Life: Philosophic and Scientific Reflections

Edward J. Steffes
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship at Salisbury
April 23, 2006

Stuart Kauffman’s story of “Gertrude”

It is time for a story.  A particularly ugly squirrel named Gertrude was atop a tree 65,433,872 years ago.  Gertrude was ugly because she had folds of skin from her forearms stretching to her hind limbs.  So ugly was Gertrude that she was shunned by the other squirrels and was sadly alone atop a magnolia tree eating lunch.  But just yards away, high in a pine, was Bertha, an owl.  Bertha spotted Gertrude and thought, “Lunch!”  Bertha flashed downward through shafts of light toward Gertrude.  Gertrude looked suddenly up and was terrified.  “GAAAAAAH,” she cried and jumped in desperation from the top of the magnolia tree, flinging her arms and legs wide in terror.

And Gertrude flew!  Yes, she flew away from the magnolia tree, eluding the bewildered Bertha.  Later that month, Gertrude was married in a civil ceremony to a handsome squirrel, as she had become a heroine, was no longer shunned, and was considered a prize mate.  Her odd flaps turned out to be a consequence of a simple Mendelian dominant gene, hence her kids had the same wondrous capacity to fly.

And that is how flying squirrels got their wings, more or less.[1]

"Spirit of Life"?

Last week we had a talk entitled “Confessions of a Christian Agnostic.”  I am pleased to report that not a single member of the congregation jumped up and condemned the speaker as a heretic.  Encouraged by your tolerance, I will now proceed to confess my own heresy, which I call “spiritual naturalism.”

I’ll begin by confessing that I like the words “spirit,” “spiritual,”  “spirituality” and “inspiration.”  I particularly like the term “Spirit of Life,” the title of one of our favorite hymns.  It suggests that we look beyond the notion of the “human spirit” to acknowledge and appreciate something spiritual in the larger world of nature.

I cheerfully admit, however, that these are slippery terms, and like many of you I have wondered what they really mean.  Is there any distinct reality or dimension of reality to which the word “spirit” refers?  Is there really any point in asking that it “come unto me”?  To say that the spirit of life “sings in the heart…blows in the wind…moves in the hand [and] sets me free” is stirring poetry, but is it anything more than poetry?  Is it a meaningful conception of reality?

The scientific challenge to religion

For the past several years, I’ve been thinking off and on about the place of religion within a secular, highly scientific culture.  We Unitarian Universalists are well aware of the conflicts between science and religion, most famously the conflict between evolutionism and creationism.  As religious liberals, we have been willing to modify or abandon religious beliefs that seem incompatible with modern scientific knowledge.  For many of us, the traditional conception of a spirit as a supernatural being with miraculous powers is one such belief.  The success of science in explaining things naturalistically has discouraged us from attributing events to supernatural beings or forces.  The development of an embryo into a human being couldn’t be an entirely natural process if at some point the human spirit or soul had to appear through an act of supernatural creation.  An entirely naturalistic evolution of humans from tree-swinging ancestors would be impossible for the same reason.  As Lucretius said in the first century B.C., “I do not think that a golden chain on high lowered living creatures from heaven to earth.”[2]  And if an immaterial soul were regarded as the source of our freedom and morality, then every free moral act would require that soul to act on the body.  When your hand puts money into the collection plate (which is of course a highly moral act), are we to believe that your material body is being moved by an immaterial thing that lies beyond nature?  I’m sure a lot of us will confess to being skeptical of that.

Religion in our time often seems faced with two unattractive options: either cling to a supernaturalism that no longer makes sense to many of us, or stop taking religious language seriously at all.  The first option puts us into the camp of the religious traditionalists, and the second raises doubts about whether we are doing religion at all.  We may still sing about “spirit”, but we may do so with no more conviction than if we were singing about Cinderella or the tooth fairy.

Religious liberals have been aware of this dilemma for a long time, and some have tried to develop a new kind of spirituality that is compatible with science.  One of my favorite writers of this kind is David Ray Griffin.  His religious philosophy explicitly rejects supernaturalism and finds a sacred dimension of reality within the realm of nature.[3]  This is the position I am calling “spiritual naturalism.”

Spiritual naturalism encourages us to use religious language to refer to something quite remarkable and quite mysterious, and yet entirely natural.  The awe that we can all experience when confronted with the wonders of nature is a starting point—but only a starting point—for this spiritual naturalism.  To me it isn’t enough to add an emotional component to an otherwise scientific worldview and call the result religion.  I think religion should be more than just science with feeling.  Religion encourages us to identify what is sacred in reality, so that we can try to connect with it.  It is one thing to say that nature is awesome; it’s another thing to figure out what if anything spirit has to do with it.

A philosophy of creativity

My views on this subject have been shaped by my study of the thinkers known as “process” philosophers and theologians, especially Charles Hartshorne.  I no longer use the word “spirit” to refer to a thing or a being.  I don’t believe, for example, that a person consists of two distinct beings, a physical body and an immaterial soul.  But the word “spirit” is one word that we can use to refer to an aspect of reality that is a process rather than an object, becoming rather than being.  We are all familiar with Descartes’ proof of being: “I think, therefore I am.”  A process philosopher might say, “I experience, therefore I become.”  Hartshorne regards becoming as the more fundamental and inclusive philosophical category than being.[4]  What is coming to be includes but also reorganizes what has already been.  That’s a simple idea with pretty big implications.  The more traditional approach has been to use being as the inclusive term for reality, and then include some capacity for variation and change as a property of being.  Darwinism is doing this when it describes species as capable of small variations that may or may not be preserved through natural selection.  This may actually underestimate what is involved in becoming, a point that I’ll come back to when I discuss Stuart Kauffman’s new ideas about evolution.

In process philosophy, becoming is an extremely creative process, a process of synthesizing something new out of what has been.  It is the creative process that underlies all things, although it is especially manifest in humans.  Such a process may be what people are trying to talk about when they use a word like “spirit.”  A pretty good translation for the word “spirit” may be the word “creativity.”

Of course, that idea lands us right in the middle of the debate over the nature of creativity.  Hartshorne sees creativity as a fundamental feature of reality, not a contingency that appears only at a certain stage of evolution.[5]  It is not confined to human beings, nor to intelligent animals, nor even to living things.  Just as the human spirit is not the only manifestation of the spirit of life, the spirit of life is not the only manifestation of spirit in general.  Creativity is inseparable from time itself, and time is older than life.  Every moment of time is a little creation, a new synthesis in which the world becomes different than it has ever been before or will ever be again. 

From this perspective, creativity must be able to appear on many levels, physical and chemical as well as biological, psychological and cultural.  But that doesn’t mean that it has to be present in every entity at every level.  We do not have to claim that a wheel of your car has spirit, since there is no creative process operating at the wheel level, and we probably don’t want there to be.  The last thing you need when you are driving down the road is for one of your wheels to start being creative.  (Last year, many of us saw on TV a near tragedy when the front wheel of an aircraft was in the wrong position for landing; we don’t call that creativity; we call it malfunction.)  We know from the study of human organization that when people are brought together in large numbers, their organization may or may not encourage creativity; the organization of an artists’ colony is different from that of an assembly line.  A similar distinction could apply at lower levels.  The small parts of nature, such as atoms and molecules and living cells, can be organized into things that act very predictably.  But that doesn’t prevent us from proposing that those parts have an inherent creativity, which enables them to organize themselves into creative beings on a higher level, such as intelligent animals.

The mechanistic view and its limitations

The primary opposition to this way of thinking comes from the so-called “mechanistic” or “reductionist” view of creativity, which is also the view that underlies Darwinism.  This position says that what we call “creativity” is actually attributable to—or reducible to—elementary mechanisms that are not in themselves creative.  Our computers illustrate how you can take something that appears creative and reduce it to something that isn’t creative.  We now have computers that are expert chess players, capable of moves that are just as brilliant as those of our best chess masters.  The machines select their moves by running a program that carries out a large number of simple steps, each of which is totally elementary and routine.  Basically what they do is generate possible moves and evaluate possible board positions by certain criteria, such as how many squares of the board are under the control of the various pieces.  A number of simple mechanical steps, performed repeatedly and at high speed, add up to a grand strategy.

If everything in nature works like that, and only like that, then there is no creativity in any ultimate sense, and there is no spirit as I would like to use the term.  If humans think there is, maybe it’s only because we are impressed with the phenomena of nature without fully understanding the mechanisms that underlie them.  As science reveals more and more of these mechanisms, so the argument goes, the idea of spirit will become more and more superfluous to our thinking.

On the other hand, critics of this mechanistic perspective, including myself, are not so sure that a chess-playing computer is a very good model for nature.  Since a computer is, after all, a machine, it’s not exactly surprising to find that everything it does is reducible to mechanism.  And we can seriously question whether it is really creating anything remotely comparable to what nature has created.  The reality of chess is a limited—and in important respects unchanging—reality.  There are never more than 64 squares, never more than 32 pieces, never more than a fixed repertoire of moves for each piece, never any goal beyond capturing the opponent’s king, and each game starts over with the pieces in the same position.  That doesn’t sound very much like real life, at least not my life.

Now scientists have found mechanisms in living things too, of course.  Our bodies are filled with them, such as the pumping heart and the vibrating ear drum. But it is one thing to find mechanisms in nature, and another thing to declare that nature is nothing but mechanism.  The discovery of mechanisms is just good science; the declaration that nature is nothing but mechanism is a debatable philosophic speculation.    (Some of you have heard me complain before about scientism, the tendency to turn good science into bad philosophy.)

Here I would like to quote Rodney Brooks, who is the director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT.  You might expect someone in his position to be in favor of accepting computers as good models for nature.  Instead, he has become skeptical of mechanistic models:

We have all become computationcentric over the last few years.  We’ve tended to think that computation explains everything.  When I was a kid, I had a book that described the brain as a telephone-switching network.  Earlier books described it as a hydrodynamic system or a steam engine.  Then in the 1960s it became a digital computer.  In the 1980s it became a massively parallel digital computer….We’re always taking the best technology we have and using that as the metaphor for the most complex thing we know—the brain.  And now we’re talking about computation.

But maybe there’s more to us than computation.  Maybe there’s something beyond computation—in the sense that we do not understand and cannot describe what’s going on inside living systems using computation only.  When we build computational models of living systems…they’re not as robust or rich as real living systems.  Maybe we’re missing something, but what could that something be?[6]

We might see the infatuation with technological metaphors as an affliction of our technological age.  We might ask whether any human technology could possibly provide an adequate model for the creativity of nature.  Our technologies are only artifacts of a creative process, but what we find in nature is the artistry, the creative process itself.

When I am writing an essay such as this, I am aware of a process that works largely from the top down, from whole to part. I have a general conception of the whole essay, and I design the parts to fit the emerging whole.  I engage in a similar top-down process when I write song lyrics for a show or prepare a financial plan for a client.  When I used to write little computer programs as a hobby in my misspent youth, I worked the same way, starting from a general conception of what the program was supposed to do and working toward the specific subroutines and lines of code.  But the process of running an existing program on the computer is a different matter.  Now things work mechanically, from the bottom up.  The machine executes the whole program only by executing the parts.  Once the machine is programmed, we can completely explain its behavior as a consequence of the actions of its parts.  We may choose not to include the creative design process in that explanation, because that process isn’t in the machine; it’s outside the machine in the mind of the programmer.

But suppose the mind of the programmer is what you want to understand.  Now the creative process is not outside the thing you are studying, but it’s central to the thing you are studying.  And isn’t it true that in addition to creating artifacts outside of myself such as essays and computer programs, I also have some ability to create myself? Don’t I have a general conception of who I’m trying to be, and don’t I design parts of my own mental and physical activity to fit an emerging whole, myself as a whole person?  The remarkable thing about us—and maybe not just us—is that we are both artifacts and artists, both mechanical systems executing existing programs and creative persons revising our own programming.  And if we want to dignify ourselves by considering ourselves moral agents, we need to acknowledge our creative side.  A purely mechanistic model has no place for moral agency.  No matter how many hierarchical levels there are, no matter how many cybernetic feedback loops there are, the bottom line remains that a machine can only do what its parts make it do.  And if those parts can only obey physical laws, being completely oblivious to moral or aesthetic principles, then moral agency is logically impossible.  There remains only moral conformity, the execution of some existing program that we accept as good because we are helpless to change it.

What modern Western science has tried to do is take the artistry out of nature, leaving only artifact or machinery.  This has created a dilemma for the humanities and social sciences, which either have to deny that humans are a part of nature, or try to fit humans into a mechanistic conception of nature that seems to rob us of our most creative qualities.  Should we dismiss the whole idea of moral agency as an illusion, which probably means giving up any notion of spirituality as well?  Should we settle for a diminished view of morality, admitting that morality is just a euphemism for programming?  Should we go back to a supernaturalist philosophy, claiming that our moral agency comes from a supernatural soul after all?  Or should we just live with a contradiction, affirming our moral agency in practice while at the same time accepting scientific ideas that preclude it in principle?

Some philosophers and scientists are exploring another solution that I think is more promising, and that is to revise our understanding of nature itself.  If nature is more creative and less machine-like than we have previously acknowledged, then our own creativity is not so great an anomaly after all.  Creativity may exist on multiple levels, and our higher-level creativity may have emerged out of lower-level creativity in the course of evolution.  Process philosophers have been saying this for a long time, and they have recently been joined by philosophers such as Philip Clayton, who are promoting the idea of emergence.  Clayton recommends the philosophy of emergence as an alternative both to dualism, which splits the world between material and immaterial beings, and reductionist physicalism, which reduces everything to the action of mechanical parts.  He defines emergence as “the view that new and unpredictable phenomena are naturally produced by interactions in nature; that these new structures, organisms, and ideas are not reducible to the subsystems on which they depend; and that the newly evolved realities in turn exercise a causal influence on the parts out of which they arose.”[7]

Self-organization in biology

If this view of nature is correct, then the mechanistic model of reality must break down at some point in every discipline, whether it is studying human beings or not.    One of the leading advocates for the position that nature is more creative and self-organizing than previously recognized is not a philosopher or social scientist, but a biologist, Stuart Kauffman.  Kauffman is one of the founders of the Santa Fe Institute, which is the leading center for the scientific study of complexity.  In his most recent work, he has been consciously trying to go beyond the kind of science that Thomas Kuhn called “normal science” in his 1969 classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.[8]  Kuhn argued that scientific progress can only occur if scientists occasionally rebel against the paradigms they have inherited from their most distinguished predecessors.  I would like to see Unitarian Universalists take some of the skepticism that they have about religious orthodoxies, and direct a little of it at prevailing scientific orthodoxies.

As a biologist, Kauffman believes firmly in evolution, but unlike many of his peers he is willing to challenge the prevailing Darwinian paradigm for understanding evolution.  In the Darwinian view, what species have to do in order to evolve is vary in some way; natural selection does the rest by selecting some variations over others.  But if so, where does new order come from?  Random variations tend to destroy order, not create it.  And natural selection doesn’t really create anything; it only selects from what has already been created.  Kauffman complains that evolutionary theory “does not yet explain the genesis of forms, but [only] the trimmings of the forms, once they are generated.”[9]  Kauffman believes that something fundamental is missing from the Darwinian account, and that is self-organization.  He thinks that life forms largely organize themselves, and then natural selection further shapes them by favoring one form of organization over another.[10]  He says that “self-organization may be the precondition of evolvability itself.”[11] 

One of the ways he makes his point is by looking at systems that lack self-organization and therefore cannot evolve.    Interestingly enough, his prime example is a computer program.  He says,

Let us imagine trying to evolve a computer program that calculates something modestly complicated, such as the trajectories of three mutually gravitating objects or the seventh root of an arbitrarily real number.  Almost any random change in a computer program produces ‘garbage’…Almost all small changes in structure lead to catastrophic changes in behavior.  Furthermore, this problem becomes worse as redundancy is squeezed out of the program in order to achieve a minimal program to perform the algorithm.  In a nutshell, the more ‘compressed’ the program, the more catastrophically it is altered by any minor change in the instructions.  Hence…the harder it is to achieve by any evolutionary search process.[12] 

Living things must be very different from that, in order to evolve.  Much of Kauffman’s work concerns the organization of the genome, which he describes as “a highly complex web of regulatory connections and interactions by which the activities of genes turn one another on and off, or more generally tune one another’s activity.”[13]  The influence of a particular gene on the overall functioning and fitness of the organism often depends on how it interacts with other genes.  If these functional interconnections were too tight, the organism would be like the computer program.  It would have too rigid a structure that couldn’t tolerate innovation, because any variation in any gene could cause catastrophic change.  If, on the other hand, the functional interconnections were too loose, the situation would be too chaotic.  Variations in individual genes could proliferate without affecting overall functioning much at all, and so natural selection wouldn’t have much chance to favor one variation over another.  The population would become more diverse as novelties occurred, but it wouldn’t become more fit.  In neither the rigidly ordered situation nor the chaotic situation can the species reorganize its own functioning and therefore evolve.  Kauffman argues that evolving organisms must occupy an intermediate zone near the boundary between order and chaos.  Using slightly different language, we might say that they have to maintain a balance of functional integrity and flexibility, or of unity and diversity.

He believes that this principle has very wide application, including application to human social organization.  At one point he calls the rigid, over-centralized regime “Stalinist,” and the chaotic, decentralized regime “leftist Italian.”[14]  (I wonder what he thinks of the recent election results in Italy.)  Democratic organization lies somewhere in between the extremes, and that’s what makes it so creative.  “The emerging sciences of complexity…offer fresh support for the idea of a pluralistic democratic society, providing evidence that it is not merely a human creation but part of the natural order of things.”[15] 

An organism is more like a pluralistic society than like a machine.  Kauffman considers it an autonomous agent, able to organize its own activity to act on its own behalf.  He tells the story of Gertrude the squirrel in order to illustrate the role of this agency in the creation of a new function, in this case flying.  Gertrude was born with the extra folds of skin that gave her a possibility of flying.  But that random variation isn’t enough to make flying emerge as a new function.  There must be a context in which flying is functional, that is, a situation in which that particular bodily potential is worth actualizing.  After all, bodies can be used for many different purposes, and it is common in evolution for physical characteristics that originally performed one function to be adapted to a different function.  The mutation that produced the folds of skin is only the beginning of the creation of function.  The other part of the story is that Gertrude as a whole squirrel is experiencing her environment, being sensitive to her context, and trying to have as good an experience as she can under the circumstances, and that’s why she leaps from the magnolia tree.  Only after she is functioning in a new way can natural selection reward her for doing so.  Kauffman says, “We cannot know the function of parts except in the context of the whole autonomous agent in its environment.”  We probably wouldn’t go so far as to call Gertrude a moral agent.  But Kauffman believes that animals have at least a rudimentary kind of purpose or value.  Gertrude flies because she wants to escape.  My computer doesn’t care what it does, since it doesn’t experience anything in any case.  James Barham calls this the Rhett Butler problem: “Computers and other machines just don’t give a damn.”[16]

Kauffman’s description of the creation of function sounds very much like the creation of new meaning in human language.  (This is not a coincidence, since Kauffman acknowledges the influence of the language philosopher Wittgenstein.)  If our speech didn’t have to be meaningful, we could construct new sentences by varying sounds at random, and then trying them out in our environment to see if they worked in some way.  Instead of saying “Good morning,” we might try “Good borning” or “Good corning” or “Good dorning” or “Good forning.”  Random sound variations aren’t enough to create new meaning, any more than random genetic variations are enough to create new function.  What we do instead  is something much more creative.   We devise strings of sounds that simultaneously say something new and make sense in the context of what has already been said.  We strike a balance between allowing the parts of the human conversation to vary and maintaining the semantic integrity of the whole.  That way we can continue to speak meaningfully even as we create new meaning. 

Kauffman agrees with Rodney Brooks that life must be doing something that is beyond computation in order to be this creative.  We have no algorithm—no computational procedure—for either the creation of new function in biology or the creation of new meaning in human culture.  There is no computation you can perform that will tell you what new function or what new idea is going to emerge.  Here his argument relies on a rather technical concept, the concept of “configuration space.”  A configuration space is a way of imagining all possible values for all relevant variables in a scientific problem.  If there are three relevant variables, such as the temperature, pressure and volume of a gas, then we can imagine a three-dimensional configuration space, where any possible state of the system can be represented as a point in that space.  We can then use scientific laws and formulas to calculate where a system will be in its configuration space, starting from some initial set of conditions.

This is how science is conventionally done.  But Kauffman argues that this procedure only works as long as the configuration space itself can be defined.  We have to have all the relevant variables.  If new forms, functions and meanings are emerging, the configuration space we start with no longer contains all the possibilities, and so it becomes logically impossible to reach the future by way of any computation.  The expansion of the possibilities themselves—the creation of new configuration space—is part of what we need to understand. 

Kauffman named the most philosophical of his books Investigations, after a book by Wittgenstein:

Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of Investigations, both as process and the resulting book, was my puzzled realization that the way Newton, Einstein, and Bohr taught us to do science may be incomplete.  You see, in following their cornerstone examples of physics, we are taught to prestate the particles, forces, laws, and initial and boundary conditions, then compute the consequences.  In this enterprise, we are able to state ahead of time what the full space of possibilities is, that is, we can finitely prestate the configuration space of possibilities of the system in question….

But I was, to my deep surprise, led to doubt that we can ever prestate the configuration space of a biosphere….Could we say ahead of time all the odd, context-dependent causal consequences of bits and pieces of organisms that might be of selective significance in some odd environment, hence, to come into actual physical existence in the biosphere?  I think not….

So the biosphere, it seems, in its persistent evolution, is doing something literally incalculable, nonalgorithmic, and outside our capacity to predict… Emergence and persistent creativity in the physical universe is [sic] real.[17]

Art, science and religion

Kauffman is among those challenging the recently fashionable conception of the cosmos as a gigantic computing system governed by a set of algorithms and going from state to state through some computational procedure.  Most scientists probably take for granted that the laws of nature are entirely reducible to computational formulas.  Kauffman believes that something else must be going on, something that is more like art.  He suggests that a fundamental law governing evolution is that the biosphere expands its configuration space—its possible ways of living—as fast as it can, while remaining poised near the boundary between order and chaos.  This is something very different from a quantifiable law like E=mc 2.  It sounds more like an aesthetic principle.  It sounds like the way a musical composition unfolds, introducing new themes while maintaining the balance between old and new, so that the result is neither monotony nor confusion.  Charles Hartshorne makes a similar point when he says that beauty is the most fundamental value in nature, and that beauty requires a balance of unity and diversity, and of simplicity and complexity.[18] 

Both Hartshorne’s process philosophy and Kauffman’s evolutionary biology encourage reconciliation between science and aesthetics.  Kauffman says that “biospheres demand their Shakespeares as well as their Newtons.  We will have to rethink what science is itself.  And C. P. Snow’s ‘two cultures,’ the humanities and science may find an unexpected, inevitable union.”[19]  In the humanities we learn what creativity is existentially, by exercising it, which may add a crucial dimension to what we can learn from science.  Or as Kauffman says, “we do not deduce our lives; we live them.  Stories are our mode of making sense of the context-dependent actions of us as autonomous agents.  And…metaphor must be part of our cognitive capacity to guide action in the absence of deduction.”[20] 

Kauffman himself makes practically no reference to religion, although he does remark that he hopes that his work will help us recover our connection with nature and our sense of the sacred.[21]  But his conclusions suggest to me that religious language and religious stories may have been saying something important about the universe all along.  Kauffman’s concept of self-organization may help us understand what religious people are talking about when they use a word like “spirit.”  And if we understand spirit as a creativity pervading all of nature, that may help us understand what it means for us to be spiritual.  Our spirituality doesn’t depend on getting in touch with a supernatural being.  It depends, first of all, on getting in touch with our own natural creativity.  Humanist UUs and spiritual UUs ought to be able to agree that it is our nature to create, not just to conform to routines created by somebody else, whether by gods, kings, or corporations.  Sociologist C. Wright Mills complained that modern society was turning us into “cheerful robots.”[22]  If we want to be more than that, we need a worldview that sees us as more than sophisticated computing machines.

At the same time, we must acknowledge that no one of us creates the world alone; we are all co-creators.  Our Unitarian Universalist principles recognize this when they affirm “the inherent worth and dignity of every person;…acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;... the right of conscience and the use of the democratic processes within our congregations and in the society at large.”  We are also co-creators with other living things, which is consistent with our “respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”

What I am suggesting, finally, is that spiritual naturalism provides a solid philosophical foundation for our Unitarian Universalist principles, and that it can do so without contradicting any scientific facts or laws.  The enemy of spirituality is not science, but rather a mechanistic and materialistic worldview that has gotten entangled with science.  And the enemy of science is not religion, but the extreme supernaturalism that has developed in some religions.  Spiritual naturalism offers us the middle ground, the hope of reconciling science and religion, so that we can foster both scientific understanding and spiritual growth.  Heretical as it may seem from the standpoint of either religion or science as they are practiced today, spiritual naturalism might turn out to be good for both of them.

Closing words

“Within us is the soul of the whole; the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal One.  When it breaks through our intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through our will, it is virtue; when it flows through our affections, it is love.”[23] 

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Works Cited

Barham, James. “On the origin of value in the music of the cells: Meditations in a minor key.” www.nd.edu/%7Endphilo/papers/originofvalue.doc.

Brooks, Rodney.  2003. “Making living systems.” In John Brockman, ed. The New Humanists: Science at the Edge.  New York: Barnes & Noble.

Clayton, Philip.  2004.  Mind and Emergence: From Quantum to Consciousness.  Oxford University Press.

Griffin, David Ray.  2001. Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion.  Ithaca: Cornell University.

Hartshorne, Charles. 1970.  Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method. LaSalle, IL: Open Court Publishing.

Kauffman, Stuart.  2000.  Investigations.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kauffman, Stuart.  1995.  At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity.  New York: Oxford University Press.

Kauffman, Stuart. 1993. The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution.  New York: Oxford University Press.

Kuhn, Thomas S.  1969. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mills, C. Wright.  2000. The Sociological Imagination.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Unitarian Universalist Association.  1993.  Singing the Living Tradition.  Boston: Beacon Press.

References

[1] Stuart Kauffman. 2000. Investigations.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 131.
[2] Cited by James Barham, “On the origin of value in the music of the cells: Meditations in a minor key.” www.nd.edu/%7Endphilo/papers/originofvalue.doc, p. 9.
[3] David Ray Griffin. 2001. Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion. Ithaca: Cornell University.
[4] Charles Hartshorne. 1970. Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method. LaSalle, IL: Open Court Publishing, p. 109.
[5] Hartshorne, p. 1.
[6] Rodney Brooks. 2003. “Making living systems.” In John Brockman, ed. The New Humanists: Science at the Edge.  New York: Barnes & Noble, pp. 170-171.
[7] Philip Clayton.  2004.  Mind and Emergence: From Quantum to Consciousness.  Oxford University Press, p. vi.
[8] Thomas S. Kuhn. 1969. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[9] Stuart Kauffman.  Investigations, p. 17.
[10] Stuart Kauffman.  1993. The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution.  New York: Oxford University Press, p. xiv.
[11] Stuart Kauffman.  1995.  At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity.  New York: Oxford University Press, p. 185.
[12]Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, pp. 152-53.
[13] Kauffman, Investigations, p. 161.
[14] Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, p. 258.
[15] Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, p. 5.
[16] Barham, p. 6.
[17] Kauffman., Investigations, p. ix-x.
[18] Hartshorne, Ch. 16.
[19] Kauffman, Investigations, p. 22.
[20] Kauffman, Investigations, p. 135.
[21] Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, p. 5.
[22] C. Wright Mills. 2000. The Sociological Imagination.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 175.
[23] The Unitarian Universalist Association.  1993.  Singing the Living Tradition.  Boston: Beacon Press, Reading #531.