Science and Religion in a Participatory Cosmos

Transcript of my presentation at the Center for Christogenesis

Last night I was invited by the Center for Christogenesis at Villanova University to share some thoughts on how the science/religion dialogue may be transformed by a participatory approach to cosmology. The video will be made available in a few weeks to those who register with the Center.

I began by playfully suggesting I’d be proceeding as a kind of séance in an attempt to commune with the spirits of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Alfred North Whitehead, Friedrich Schelling, and Rudolf Steiner, all important influences on me. Steiner often referred to those who have died as the “so-called dead,” implying that though they’ve left their physical bodies to decay back into the Earth, they remain present to us spiritually. For my purposes, I take this to mean that I am actively thinking with, and inspired by, these figures.

In his magnum opus Process and Reality, Whitehead remarked that one urgent task for philosophy is to secularize the concept of God’s function in the world. This phrase is rich with meaning, but one key implication—as I understand it—is learning to relate to those who have passed on as though they remain as influential as ever in our present reality. However one interprets that metaphysically, the main takeaway is that Whitehead’s suggestion invites us to look for the immanence of spirit in the evolving cosmos.

I want to mention a volume titled Whitehead & Teilhard: From Organism to Omega (Orbis, 2025), edited by Ilia Delio and Andrew Davis, which emerged from a 2023 conference at the Center for Christogenesis. This collection contains a number of wonderful essays, including my own piece, “Process Theology and the Modern World: Science, Religion, and Christology After Whitehead and Teilhard.” That chapter offers a background and more precise arguments that I will only be able to sketch in this talk.

The Idea of a Participatory Cosmos

I use the phrase “participatory cosmos” to invoke a theoretical approach that extends beyond religious studies into epistemology and ontology. My usage aligns with the work of Jorge Ferrer and Jacob Sherman, who, in their 2008 edited volume The Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies, argue that the way we know and comport ourselves toward the world elicits and evokes the aspects of it we perceive. In other words, how we look largely determines what we see. A participatory cosmology entails that spirit is not an otherworldly entity but something intimately present among us and between us. Teilhard urges us to discover what goes on in our own hearts and minds—to cultivate that “cosmic sense”—while Whitehead’s impetus to “secularize God’s function in the world” calls us to seek spirit within our shared world, rather than in some transcendent beyond.

As a transdisciplinary researcher, I have long been motivated by the need to reintegrate science and religion in mutually illuminating ways. My goal is to move beyond the typical conflict narrative that dominates popular culture. In my view, achieving this reconciliation requires religion to accept the truth of evolution, and it requires science to recognize that the intelligence, virtue, and beauty at work in the human being call for an explanation broader than a strict materialist or mechanistic account of nature. A more participatory perspective on the cosmos, I believe, opens such possibilities.

The Philosophical Diplomat: Reconciling Conflicting Doctrines

Whitehead once characterized the entire history of European philosophy as a “series of footnotes to Plato.” He also observed that, for Plato, the distinguishing mark of a philosopher (versus a sophist) is the philosopher’s resolute attempt to reconcile conflicting doctrines, each of which has its own solid ground of support. In this sense, I see my own role as that of a philosophical diplomat seeking to help science and religion understand one another. Such an effort inevitably demands transformation on both sides.

As I mentioned, religion must grapple with evolution as a fundamental feature of reality, while science must grapple with the fact that consciousness, value, moral aspiration, and aesthetic sensitivity all belong to our nature as knowing subjects. If a mechanistic worldview neglects these dimensions, it cannot adequately explain the existence and capacities of scientists themselves, not to mention our moral and spiritual aspirations. Overcoming the conflict narrative requires a deeper religion and a more subtle science woven together into a comprehensive cosmology.

Plato helps set the tone here. In his Laws, he writes that we should be serious about serious things, and that the truly worthy object of our earnest effort is the divine. At the same time, Plato also calls us “playthings of the gods,” suggesting that genuine inquiry—whether scientific, religious, or philosophical—springs from wonder and shares a certain playfulness. As a result, while this inquiry is of the utmost seriousness, it also partakes in the creative freedom of play. I take Plato’s remarks as an invitation to explore ideas freely yet take them seriously. We seem starved, culturally, for forums where we can speak honestly and openly about matters of ultimate concern. Reflecting upon science and religion together in a spirit of intellectual play is, to me, a welcome antidote to that dearth.

The Urgency of Crisis and Hope

In preparing for this talk, I read a blog post by Ilia Delio titled “Crisis and Hope,” which comments on a recent letter by Pope Francis, “The End of the World? Crisis, Responsibilities, Hopes.” Pope Francis highlights how modern science shows a far more dynamic view of nature than we inherited from the Newtonian worldview. He stresses the need to re-elaborate our sense of “continuous creation” in light of new scientific insights, noting that technology alone will not save us and pointing to Teilhard’s attempt at bridging science and theology as a bold example. Teilhard places Homo sapiens in intimate connection with the entire system of living things.

While Pope Francis uses the term “representation” of the world, I regard this language of representation (as mind passively mirroring an external reality) with caution. A participatory approach requires we move beyond dualism—beyond the notion that mind and matter exist in separate realms. We need a cosmology that locates mind within nature from the start. In other words, consciousness belongs in the universe rather than hovering above it as a detached observer. In a participatory cosmos, the world answers back. If “the world is not just a collection of objects but a communion of subjects,” as Thomas Berry said, then it has an interior dimension. Our own inwardness can resonate with that interiority. Knowing thus becomes a participatory event internal to the world’s own unfolding.

Rudolf Steiner captures this well. He insists that knowledge is not a mere depiction of some external, intrinsic being, but rather the soul’s living its way into that being. If knowledge did not exist, the world would, in his view, remain incomplete. Although this may sound anthropocentric, I interpret it to mean that consciousness participates in reality’s ongoing self-realization. The subject/object dichotomy crumbles once we realize that the cosmos does not simply stand inert before our gaze. Rather, there is an interior-to-interior resonance whenever knowing occurs.

Whitehead on Integrating Religion and Science

Near the beginning of Process and Reality, Whitehead offers a powerful statement about how science, religion, and philosophy ought to coexist. He writes that philosophy frees itself from ineffectiveness by its close relations with both religion and science, weaving them into one rational scheme of thought. Religion and science, in turn, modify one another. Religion concerns our emotional response to the totality of existence in light of ideals like truth, beauty, goodness, and justice—Whitehead calls these “non-temporal generalities.” Science concerns itself chiefly with the data of sense perception, the objective dimension. Religion deals with the formation of the experiencing subject, whereas science deals with the objects informing the subject’s experience.

Because science finds religious experience (in the sense that such experience is part of the data science must account for) and religion finds scientific concepts (as interpretive tools that must be integrated into religious life), their apparent conflict signals the need for “wider truths and finer perspectives” to encompass both. Whitehead, in Science and the Modern World, observes that when Charles Darwin or Albert Einstein advance new theories that modify old ideas, we say it is a triumph for science. Yet in religion, any admission of error or revision of doctrine often feels like defeat. Religion, in Whitehead’s view, will not regain its cultural power until it can meet ongoing change with a spirit akin to that of science—embracing evolution.

Toward a Participatory Theory of Knowledge and Reality

One of the biggest hurdles to developing a truly participatory view of the cosmos is the ideal of observer-independence, a Cartesian legacy that strictly separates mind and matter. If one tries to do science from an imagined vantage point “outside” the universe, one forgets that such a standpoint is impossible. We are part of what we study. As William James put it in A Pluralistic Universe, “Philosophies are intimate parts of the universe, expressing something of its own thought of itself. Our philosophies swell the current of being and add their character to it.” In other words, thinking is not a mental representation but the universe’s own reflective activity, a intimate expression and intensification of cosmic process.

Historically, one can trace these issues back to the theology that gave birth to modern science in the seventeenth century—namely, Deism. Pioneers like Descartes, Kepler, and Newton believed in a divinely designed universe. Mechanistic laws offered proof of God the designer; hence the universe’s intelligibility seemed guaranteed by divine fiat. Over time, however, science grew more instrumental. Increasingly, it pursued know-how over understanding, prioritizing technological manipulation of nature over metaphysical insight. As a result, by the nineteenth century, the human mind effectively replaced God as the ground of intelligibility. Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy exemplifies this shift: he concluded that space, time, and causality are functions of the mind rather than eternal forms structuring the cosmos. No longer did one need a divine designer to account for the world’s intelligibility—only the transcendental categories of human reason.

Yet a participatory theology would differ significantly from Deism. Teilhard suggests (and Schelling, Steiner, Owen Barfield, and others echo the idea) that the universe is an ongoing incarnation, the gradual embodiment of the divine in and through evolving materiality. This is far removed from a God who creates a mechanistic universe from nothing and remains outside it. The idea of cosmogenesis as divine embodiment implies that God is continually involved in creation, making participation ontologically real—both for nature and for us as its centers of self-reflection.

Darwin and the Possibility of a Cosmic Evolution

Another historical factor that strained the relationship between science and religion was, of course, Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Published in 1859, On the Origin of Species detailed a mechanism—natural selection—for the divergence of species, with no appeal to any outside designer or teleological force. Darwin restricted his attention to the biological domain and did not claim to explain the origin of life itself, acknowledging that life was “originally breathed” into one or a few forms. Yet later neo-Darwinist developments (especially after the rise of genetics) expanded Darwin’s theory into an account of life itself, portrayed as blind and purposeless.

Daniel Dennett, for example, calls evolution by natural selection a “mindless, purposeless, algorithmic process” (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea). He critiques Teilhard rather unfairly, entirely missing his more holistic sense that evolving organisms include an inner or psychic dimension. Interestingly, Darwin’s own biography reflects a tension between his youthful Romantic inspirations (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Goethe, Humboldt) and his later feeling that his mind had become a “machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts,” atrophying his imaginative faculties.

In contrast, Teilhard and Whitehead both propose to generalize the evolutionary paradigm beyond just the biosphere to include the entire universe. Teilhard states that “evolution is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforth bow and satisfy if they are to be thinkable and true.” Whitehead similarly asserts that science now studies processes that are biological, physical, and social, and that we are dealing with organisms at every scale, from subatomic particles to galaxies. He argues that evolution is incompatible with strict materialism precisely because it demonstrates the real emergence of novel forms of organization—not just rearrangements of inert particles but a growing complexity that realizes deeper forms of value-experience.

Kant and the Inversion of the “Critical Turn”

To clarify what a broader, participatory theory of evolution might entail, it helps to revisit Immanuel Kant. Early in his career (pre-1781), Kant still thought the lawfulness of nature revealed by Newtonian physics to be the best proof of God imaginable. But after his “critical turn” inaugurated by the Critique of Pure Reason, he radically transformed that stance. He concluded that Newton’s apparent discovery of universal laws reflected instead the mind’s a priori structure, through which space, time, and causality become the organizing framework of all our experience. Thus, the unity and lawfulness of nature depended on the human subject’s inherent cognitive architecture, not on a divine designer. Kant’s “transcendental idealism” no longer required God as an explanatory principle for nature’s intelligibility; rather, human reason took on that role.

I now turn to a pivotal development in modern philosophical thought: the post-Kantian inversion that brings mind back into nature. Kant’s critical philosophy places all order and lawfulness in the structuring activity of the human mind. Yet if the human mind itself emerged in an evolutionary cosmos, a question arises: what must nature be like for mind to have arisen within it?

From Kant to Schelling: An Inversion of Perspective

Friedrich Schelling, writing in the wake of Kant, inverted Kant’s famous query. Rather than asking, “What must the mind be such that nature can appear to us as lawfully organized?” Schelling asked, “What must nature be such that mind could have emerged from it in the first place?” This shift moves us away from the Kantian dualism of subject and object, toward a vision of nature as imbued with subjectivity from the start. Human consciousness no longer appears as an anomaly or late-stage intruder in a mindless world. Instead, it is a more magnified and developed instance of interiority or subjectivity that has been latent in nature all along.

In line with the pansychist or panexperiential stances taken by Teilhard and Whitehead, Schelling suggests that the entire cosmos bears seeds of consciousness from its very beginnings. Teilhard’s principle of “complexity-consciousness” unfolds similarly: as the without (material complexity, or what Teilhard calls “tangential energy”) increases, the within (psychic or interior complexity, or “radial energy”) intensifies in parallel. For Teilhard, this arc of cosmogenesis bends inevitably toward the self-reflective human mind, and ultimately beyond humanity to what he calls the Omega Point. In describing radial and tangential energies as convergent dimensions of cosmic evolution, Teilhard emphasized Earth’s spherical shape to illustrate how the curved trajectory of evolutionary pressure builds and converges upon a new threshold.

Whitehead, meanwhile, affirmed a teleological element in nature yet regarded the cosmogenesis as more open-ended than Teilhard’s picture. Whitehead’s vision is one of “creative advance into novelty,” emphasizing a fractal branching of evolutionary forms rather than a singular, deterministic convergence. Whitehead’s pansychist view, however, still aligns in spirit with Teilhard’s, insisting that the universe’s apparent lawfulness and eventual emergence of conscious minds must be traced back to latent potentialities in the simplest constituents of nature.

Teilhard captures the essence of this perspective in The Human Phenomenon, explaining that we cannot understand ourselves fully if we ignore our integral connection to humanity as a whole, life on Earth, and the entire cosmos. In his eyes, evolution proceeds in at least three major stages—pre-life, life, and thought—culminating in what he calls “super-life.” Human beings, or anthropogenesis, thus crown an ongoing cosmic process, cosmogenesis, rather than function as an isolated endpoint.

Anthropocentrism and the Earth Community

Teilhard does retain a measure of anthropocentrism, in the sense that he speaks of humanity as not just another animal species but as a new kingdom of nature. Modern geology and ecology echo this, calling our era the Anthropocene, marked by the profound influence of humanity’s activity on Earth’s systems—climate, biodiversity, and geological processes. While geologists continue to debate the formal adoption of the term Anthropocene, there is no doubt that human activities have affected the planet on a vast scale, leaving traces that will persist for millions of years.

Pope Francis, in a 2023 letter (Laudate Deum), addresses this tension between an exaggerated anthropocentrism and a disregard for our interdependence with the larger earth community. He advocates a situated anthropocentrism: one that recognizes the uniqueness of human capacities and the moral responsibility that follows, but also the complete embeddedness of humanity in the broader network of life. He reminds us that all creatures form a “universal family” linked by unseen bonds. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s phrase “contact zone,” he underscores that the world is not an inert space but a living matrix through which beings encounter one another.

The Challenge of Human Power: From Atomic Bombs to AI

Teilhard’s reflections following the detonation of the atomic bomb in the 1940s reveal his characteristic optimism. While acknowledging the destructive potential of nuclear weapons, he also interprets this unprecedented event—humans artificially unleashing atomic fire—as evidence of our growing spiritual power and capacity for transformation. Teilhard had a similar perspective on World War I, where he served as a stretcher-bearer and perceived the war not simply as violent chaos but as a harbinger of accelerated planetary convergence.

Today, artificial intelligence poses an in many ways more enigmatic threshold. Some compare the advent of advanced AI to nuclear technology in terms of existential risk and societal implications. The developmental biologist

Michael Levin

(Tufts University) examines collective intelligence at the cellular level and sees intelligence as a continuum spanning organisms, humans, and machines. Likewise, author James Bridle, in Ways of Being, envisions a “technological ecology” wherein humanity’s creations—AI included—become integrated into the broader flow of planetary intelligence.

All this circles back to the deep question: What is intelligence, and why is the universe intelligible to begin with? From a Teilhardian or Whiteheadian vantage point, intelligence is a function of ongoing cosmic creativity, in which our technological endeavors are not necessarily outside nature but an expression of an ongoing evolution of consciousness involving both interior radial and exterior tangential energies (in Teilhard’s terms). The danger, of course, is that these same technologies could undermine humanity’s deeper values if not guided by moral and spiritual insight.

Beyond Geophysical Predictions: Whitehead on Cosmic Openness

From a strictly mechanistic or geophysical standpoint, life on Earth may be doomed in a few hundred million—or at best a few billion—years, due to the sun’s increasing heat and geological changes. Scientists suggest that Earth will eventually become inhospitable, culminating in a runaway greenhouse effect. Yet Whitehead pointed out that our scientific laws and knowledge of relevant conditions are “woefully defective” with regard to predicting far-future events. We do not know when (or if) distant cosmic collisions might take place, how history might unfold, or even many of the “domestic details” of our personal lives tomorrow.

Teilhard, for his part, offers hope not through any denial of science but through a moral and spiritual imperative: “plunging boldly into the vast current of things,” discovering how the absolute that draws us is also mysteriously hidden within us already. This cosmic consciousness is not simply a matter of intellectual insight but requires deep participation, body and soul.

Incarnation as a Process: A Guiding Analogy

One way to envision a more participatory, evolutionary theology is through the metaphor of a cosmic novel:

• God is the Author, and we, human beings, are characters in this unfolding story.

• Science, philosophy, and theology are ways of seeking to become not just characters but readers, stepping back from our embeddedness to grasp the arc of the narrative.

• The Incarnation can then be understood as the Author becoming a character—God entering human history as the Christ Logos—thus accomplishing a unification of Creator and creation, thereby transforming the nature of both divinity and humanity.

In Process Theology (inspired by Whitehead), God is not an all-powerful tyrant but a “fellow sufferer who understands,” a source of creative refreshment. The divine needs our cooperation to bring forth the future. If creation is ongoing and God’s relationship to the world is genuinely participatory, then humans become co-creators—not in a grandiose sense of replacing God, but through the ever-evolving synergy of divine lure and creaturely response.

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Questions from the Audience

In the question-and-answer dialogue that followed, the conversation turned to specific implications of this participatory, evolutionary worldview:

1. Consciousness in Early Life

One attendee asked whether consciousness had already been latent in early single-celled organisms. I underscored the growing acceptance among biologists that cells, including bacteria, exhibit behaviors suggesting basic sentience rather than mere mechanical reflex. In this sense, consciousness—or at least preconscious feeling—may extend down the evolutionary scale. The human level of self-reflection is not the pinnacle; it is one point on a spectrum that may continue to intensify beyond us.

2. Religious Disaffiliation

Another participant inquired why so many young and older people abandon religious belief. I pointed to the problem of evil and suffering and the potential for Process Theology—which questions traditional divine omnipotence—to offer a more credible theodicy. Equally important is the proliferation of surrogate religions in celebrity culture and technology, which compete for our sense of awe and devotion. Traditional doctrines, if not reimagined in an evolutionary, participatory framework, can feel outdated and fail to engage modern moral and spiritual quests.

3. Living One’s Faith Without Rigid Beliefs

There was also a question about how to live in accord with this open-ended, evolutionary view of the divine if one no longer relies on fixed dogmas. I suggested that faith must shift away from rigid, creedal certainty to become an openness rooted in love of truth—an unfinalizable truth that we co-create with one another and with the divine in a cosmos still coming into being.

4. Metaphors and Theology

Another issue raised was the inescapable use of metaphors in both science and religion. Metaphors and analogies are the best tools we have for grappling with realities we can never fully understand. The danger is that we tend to literalize these metaphors, thus losing their poetic fluidity. When held with humility and imagination, metaphors can illuminate aspects of the unknown.

5. Practices and Participation

Finally, a participant asked how to live this cosmic spirituality in daily life. While there is no single prescription, I emphasized the importance of awareness that creation is unfinished, that humans contribute to it in our everyday choices. Recognizing that God is “all in all” (to borrow scriptural language) or adopting a “panentheistic” frame (God in the world, and the world in God) means we do not simply receive meaning passively; we co-create it with every ethical, aesthetic, and relational act.