The Evolutionary Mind of God

There is no human-created description of God that is without contradiction. Any minimal definition of God we can conjure up entails multiple infinities, such as omnipotence, omniscience, or eternal existence. However when a being is “infinite in all directions” the infinitudes cross and begin to contradict each other. The school-yard riddle that asks if God could make a stone so heavy he can’t lift it is just one simple case of how infinite capacity is muddled when one‘s infinitudes are pitted against each other.

The many other inherent paradoxes of God pointed out by theologians usually rest in these battling infinite dimensions. How can a being be infinitely just and infinitely merciful? How can it be boundlessly omniscient and free-willed? And if God is defined as less than infinite, even in a few dimensions, then it becomes a God few want to honor since humans, even in our lesser minds, can imagine a greater God – one who is infinite in all directions, even though this God as defined is full of contradictions. (This discussion takes God at its most naked and leaves out the extra burdens of religious clothing.)

But any description of the universe without God is also compromised with contradictions. How does existence begin with no beginning? If the universe is deterministic, what determines its first motion? In a field of infinities, why is anything at all finite?

One is left with the conclusion that both God and no-God are impossible, at least to our limited human minds. Both possibilities could of course simply be beyond human comprehension, and their inherent contradictions, so apparent to us, could be resolved by intellects greater than ours.

Indeed, some theists who assert the reality of God counter contradictions by claiming God is ineffable – that is unknowable by us, and therefore has no definition. This seems like a cop out to the atheists who assert the reality of no-God is at least definable. Atheists counter the contradictions in their own view by claiming our ignorance and inabilities can be overcome via science. In a recent blaze of publicity and attention, atheists have come out of the shadows in contemporary culture, and are denouncing religion of Gods, and promoting the superior perspective of no-God as a view that should appeal to the modern and technologically oriented. And it has. Nerds and techies find the scientific approach of current atheism extremely appealing.

But recently a third way of imagining the ground of the being has emerged which is also very appealing to techies. It stems from one of the most ancient theologies, but this ancient orientation is being rejuvenated by scientific and technological understandings. Judged from my own discussions with educated and rational people, this third view is more appealing to them than the blankness of atheism, and I suspect in the long run, more likely to gain the allegiance of those who can’t make that leap into a belief of God.

This new third way is a type of pantheism. In the orthodox definition of God, God transcends the universe. The universe in this view is a creation issuing from God. The universe has the same relation to God as a story or painting would to us. As authors, we transcend our masterpiece. While the universe reflects the nature of it creator, it is decidedly “other.” The furthest the two – creator and creation -- might be entwined is into a duality like a body and soul. We might say the author was the soul of the work. In Augustine’s metaphor from the 4th century, the universe is the body for God’s soul.

In atheism, there is of course no duality; the universe simply is. But pantheism, at least in its revived form, offers a concept of godhood with unity. There are many many historical varieties of pantheism, but most could fairly be summed up in the literal translation and description: “All, God.” Creation and God are not separate. All is One. The philosophers of pantheism like to say that rather than God transcending the universe, God is immanent in the universe. Mystics since the dawn of consciousness have claimed to be awaken to the startling fact that since the universe is God, then that each of us contains God, or even more shocking, is God. God is everywhere we look. And this is where the contradictions of this description of the universe begins.

If God is everything, then the divine includes rape, murder, cheating, war, destruction and the worst of everything we can think of. Some of the most ancient eastern religions assent to this view of the two-faced nature of God, the yin and yang. But if God is literally everything, then it is meaningless, because it leaves nothing that is not-God. If the boundary of God stretches to include everything in the universe (infinite in all directions), then there is nothing intelligent we can say about it, because every word ultimately means the same thing: God. With no distinction between God and not-God (since there is nothing that is not God) the idea of both God and our world becomes a self-conflicting tautology: All = all. Nonetheless this particular contradictory perspective has many appealing attributes over the other two contradictory perspectives.

Except for the mystics, the appeal of pantheism was somewhat thwarted by our understanding of the universe in ancient times. The universe was a noun, a thing, or maybe a bunch of things, like atoms, stars, planets, rain, and light, as well as odd and different people. Perhaps ignorant shepherds and farmers long ago might be able to worship this thing as a God, and pay tribute to its greatness and mystery, but the fixed nature of this God had little appeal to the enlightened. As big as the world was, it didn’t seem like a big God. As our view of the universe changed, so has the attraction of pantheism.

As science probed the material world it discovered that there was very little fixed about it. When physicists unpacked solids they were revealed to be mostly space and tiny whirling bits. When they unpacked those whirling bits inside, they, too, were found to be mostly emptiness slightly populated by further tinier bits inside. Those scarce bits in turn were mostly nothingness as well, and so on “all the way down.” Most of the universe was nothing. More alarming, anything that was something seemed to be informational, that is, stuff turned out to be everything we think matter is not. The foundational elements were in constant transformation into something else. Nothing was static, or a noun. As Buckminster Fuller pronounced, “I seem to be a verb.”

Further experiments showed that at its core the physical universe enjoyed properties that we might assign to ghosts – capable of being in two places at once, or nowhere at all. A thing could only be defined in relationship to other things. The more scientists looked at the universe the more it seemed as if there was no body, only a soul. The ethereal nature of our world would not have surprised the mystics, but it made it much easier for the average person to see how their own ineffable consciousness and the ethereal essense of the universe might be in the same boat. All is one.

Okay, but “All is One” doesn’t mean “All is God.” I think the main force pushing our understanding towards “All is God” has been evolution. Evolution has been blamed by theists and heralded by atheists for displacing God – and man -- off his throne. Evolution is normally seen as the latest in a long procession of insights that move humans out of the center of their world and into the periphery. It’s commonly regarded (by all sides) as the antidote to religion. Starting with Copernicus who moved the Earth out of its pivot in the center of the solar system, to Hubble and others who moved the solar system to the edge of the galaxy and then pushed the galaxy out of the universal center, to recent theorists who moved our home from one universe to the metaverse of multiple universes. Each of these relocations reduced our supposed specialness by increasing our awareness of how common, inconsequential and natural our history is, and therefore reduced the supposed role and need for God.

But Darwin did more than simply slip humans to a side branch of life on a minor planet in the shadow of a speck of a star in a speck of a galaxy in a speck of a universe. The understanding brought about by evolution was like a pair of magic spectacles which suddenly gave us a glimpse of how an invisible force could build up good things in the face of universal indifference. This force could create not only every living creature we’ve seen but probably any creature that we could imagine. If we understood the mathematics correctly the force within evolution seemed to be spread through the universe. It appeared to be unleashed at the big bang. And it seemed to be the same force that created our own consciousness. We could now trace our own awareness – and soul if we thought that way – back to the beginning of all matter. We can read these words because of an unbroken cascade of ever increasing complexity reaching back to t=zero.

That is still not quiet pantheism, but getting closer. What is closing the gap is the computer. Computers have put God into the evolutionary universe. Not the hardware, but software code and the need to program them. That and our new computational metaphor for the mind. When we look at evolution we see it as a software program. We see how it can be unleashed remotely and invisibly, expanding out in recursive feedback, growing, changing, and forever surprising us, just as some cool super computer game might. It makes sense how the immanence of a programmer can be embodied in his dynamic, intricate, and non-trivial code. In this new view we size up matter as bits of information, flipping ceaselessly in indirect consequence of some initial state. The universe could be a program that is programming itself. We can see how evolution resembles a mind, as it adapts, searches for solutions, and elevates itself into now meanings.

Indeed if we take the very very long billion-year view and picture the slow unfolding of complexity from the first femo seconds of the universe till now, it almost appears as if the universe is a mind assembling itself. As the undifferentiated energy at the big bang is cooled by the expanding space of the universe, it coalesces into measurable entities, and over time, the particles condense into atoms. Further expansion and cooling allows complex molecules to form, which self assemble into self-reproducing entities. With each tick of the clock, increasing complexity is added to these embryonic organisms, increasing the speed at which change and complexity are added to the whole system. As evolution evolves, it keeps piling on ways to adapt and learn until eventually the minds of animals are caught in self-awareness. This self-awareness thinks up more minds, and together a universe of minds transcends all material limits. We become one mind, the overmind, the mind of God.

Not surprisingly this modern evolutionary pantheism has its religious followers. In Christian circles, one strand is known as process theology. In over-simplified terms it describes God as a verb – as a process. God is not monumental entity infinite in all directions, but rather is changing, or perhaps (although they don’t use this word because it entails time), evolving itself. The earlier aversion to accepting a God less than infinite in all directions is overcome in part by the recent appreciation that an evolving God is superior to a static God. You tell me, which god is greater? A God incapable of improvement, or one constantly perfecting? Evolution is educating us to belatedly acknowledge the latter as the greater being – at least as far as our minds can grasp. Furthermore in process theology the inherent logical paradoxes of God are embraced as unavoidable, in somewhat the same way that Godel’s theorem reveals the inherent contradictions in any logical system as unavoidable.

Like all definitions of God, evo-pantheism contains its own absurdities. In fact, technically this perspective might be more accurately called “panentheism” which means that believers want to keep their cake and eat it too. Christian theologians hold the view that God is simultaneously both transcendent (not of the universe) but immanent (in the universe) in the person of Jesus Christ. By his own volition the unbounded God limited himself into the form of very tiny body of a man. On the other hand, Islam is one long argument against this idea of a transcendent God limiting itself to special immanence. It maintains Mohammed is not the immanence of God, and prohibits his picture in defense of this temptation. Evo-pantheism is open to straight up immanence: God is evolving itself, and that evolution is what we call the universe.

Right now there are a few circuit-riding missionaries preaching this gospel of spiritual evolution to anyone who will listen. They call it the Great Story, the story of how the universe is waking up, of how evolution is a divine force, and how we are all engaged in the expanding mind of God.

Every description of the universe and its ground of being is rife with contradictions. A world without God, a world of God, and a world which is God are all logically impossible. Pick your impossibility.

Posted on February 8, 2007 at 7:15 PM

Comments

i was wondering where dark matter would come into play… if dark matter can be every where yet no where at once then what do we classify it as?? I seem to remember when everyone thought that the expansion of the universe was slowing down. how wrong we were, it is accelerating, and it is doing so because of dark matter.. so does that make dark matter our key to the universe.. AKA. GOD?????

Posted by mitch on April 3, 2008 at 11:18 AM

Interesting how you got through all that without mentionign Teilhard de Chardin, and even mentioned overmind withoutknaming Aurobindo.

“Wake up to discover that you are the eyes of the world” —Grateful Dead

Posted by jayskew on February 14, 2008 at 4:20 PM

“Atheists counter the contradictions in their own view by claiming our ignorance and inabilities can be overcome via science.”

You left out a legitimate position: agnostic. Both theists and hard atheists seem to paint agnostics as intellectual cowards or something, but this is bullshit, in my opinion.

I am what I call a hard agnostic - not only do I not know if a God exists, or what it might be “like” if it did, but I cannot know. And I believe that no one can. Talking about God, to me, edges over into the realm of futility, or diddling with semantics. Good clean fun, sure (if you ignore the periodic slaughter done in the name of said God), but not really all that useful at the end of the day.

I suppose I lean towards the atheist point of view, but in fact, it doesn’t matter. Who knows?

Also, being an atheist/agnostic does not necessarily lead to a belief that “science” will eventually understand everything. We’re talking apes, fer cryin’ out loud. I don’t know what touched off the Big Bang. Neither do you, nor anyone else. Will we figure it out some day? Then what? Turtles all the way down.

What is wrong with uncertainty? Why is it that everything we “don’t know” has to be filled with “God”? And if it is “God”, so what?

We make some maps and models, some of which seem to be congruent to the way the world works, and some of which are useful to us. This is science. Sure, some people can and do make a religion of science. People make religions out of weirder stuff than science all the time!

Not sure where I’m going with this, so I’ll quit now :-)

• Steve

Posted by Steve on February 12, 2008 at 7:22 AM

Interesting discussion. A couple of points:

• there are more than a few who believe in a “God [that] is defined as less than infinite,” - the 13 million Mormons for one. It removes some contradictions, though I am sure not all.

• Your physics is a little off here:

“solids […] were revealed to be mostly space and tiny whirling bits. When they unpacked those whirling bits inside, they, too, were found to be mostly emptiness slightly populated by further tinier bits inside.”

— I don’t think “whirling bits” is a good description of the electron charge density field that makes solids “solid” - there’s real physical resistance associated with quantum non-localizability of light particles at the smallest scales. And electrons have no substructure that we know of; nuclei do, but quarks again do not. So I think your statement goes too far and really doesn’t reflect what science really sees in these systems.

Posted by Arthur Smith on October 6, 2007 at 2:34 PM

Precisely, Recently i was reading an article about how high energy particle colliders could theoretically create miniature universes on the end of a black hole. It occured to me that this process could be happening with every star that collapses on itself into a black hole, theres certainly enough energy for it to happen.

If this or some kind of equivalent such as artificially created universes would imply that even universes “evolve”.. each universe spawning an infinity of universes (provided the universe continues to expand.. unless it crunches into a black hole aswell in some feat of rebirth or tears itself apart into universes which also expand etc etc)the conditions within each universe could be slightly different, identical or drastically different (conditions representing similarities to mutation and genetics)

Basically.. the universe works like a giant quantum-bacterial computer.. my two cents. Good explanations

Posted by Brian on March 20, 2007 at 8:21 PM

A big thank you from Spain for your inspiring thoughts! This is my attempt at answering a few questions you raise in this post. Consciousness is not created over time. It did not begin when the human brain became capable of being aware of itself. Neither can consciousness be seen as something that has ‘always’ existed in time because it exists ‘outside’ the realms of time/space. It simply ‘is’ and our awareness of consciousness became possible when our brains had evolved sufficiently for this purpose. Therefore, consciousness or ‘God’ is a constant, existing in a pure state of infinite organizing power from which all ‘sounds’, energy and matter ‘unfold’. In this case, God certainly is everything, including us and everything that extends from us, such as our technologies. This would justify your notion (and mine) that technology has self-fulfilling purpose. Our wishes are Gods wishes are technologies wishes because they are all one and the same. We are evolving into the full expression of God on the material level. Therefore, it follows that all the suffering in the world (used by many to prove the non-existence of God) will simply evaporate and be forgotten as if it had never existed. Suffering is simply a ‘lack’ of God, the non-adherence to Natural Law (yes, God unfolds according to a plan)! The ‘forbidden fruit’ analogy serves this purpose well. Also, Vedic knowledge flows directly from the source of pure intelligence and differentiates good or bad actions by the fruit that they bear. As a collective, humans are starting to act on this knowledge by rejecting/replacing all the destructive practices that have plagued humanity for thousands of years. It has been our inability to flow with Gods ‘will’ that has kept us from nurturing admirable goals such as ‘world peace’. Achieving world peace is easy: create peace in one individual x 6,000,000,000! The jigsaw is nearly complete. The convergence of religion, science and vedic knowledge is upon us. It’s time for all the separate camps to stop defending their blinkered point of view and to open up to all the possibilities. They could spend the rest of their lives debating this topic with no outcome. Talking about it will not produce the effect, the same way that talking about a light switch will not turn on the light! This requires a leap of faith from all participants. To understand something fully you need to cognize it (I recommend meditation as the most powerful technology to achieve this). God is manifesting itself through us and then referring back to the source in that constant loop that is self-referral consciousness. The computer program analogy holds because everything is imbued with consciousness (even a rock!) I believe that, although we have a healthy obsession with AI, Real Intelligence will beat us to it, and all in a quantum moment! This suggests that God is creating its own ‘platform’ through which it can express itself on the level of intellect. So, will it be a world-wide network of ‘God-controlled’ computers or a network of enlightened human minds…or both! In the end it’s all just God whispering to itself so it won’t matter much if the conversation is between organic, machine or pure energy entities. I’ve enjoyed this but I’ll wrap it up: perfection in life, Heaven on Earth, Utopia etc. are all reasonable scenarios in the aforementioned circumstances, although, most certainly not the end of the process. In fact, it could be where all the fun begins, as wise human beings, machines and nature move as one to fulfill the purpose of evolution.

Posted by Javier Lopez on February 12, 2007 at 11:26 PM

Excellent, Kevin!

My new book, “Thank God for Evolution! How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World”, due to be published this fall by Council Oak Books, focuses on just the sort of issues you raise. Exciting times!

Posted by Michael Dowd on February 8, 2007 at 1:10 PM

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