Whitehead's Evolutionary Theology

Reflections on Process-Relational Panentheism

Below is a lightly edited, somewhat abridged transcript derived from a conversation I had earlier today with Jack Roycroft-Sherry. The podcast should be posted on YouTube and elsewhere in about a month.

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The Polysemic Nature of God

What do we learn about God from Whitehead’s metaphysics? This is a difficult question because the term “God” is polysemic. Whitehead has a concept of God as a metaphysician, and he draws upon the history of religious experience to justify the use of the term in his metaphysical scheme. There's a specific function that this divine concept serves in his system.

It's important to note at the outset that as a symbol, “God” represents how we attempt to bring into culture something that many people across all of human history have experienced. Some prefer not even to use that symbol. I believe mystical experience is at the core and remains ineffable. We have various ways of trying to bring it into our cultural lives and ritualizing it, and as philosophers, we have various ways of trying to understand it.

The function of God in Whitehead's universe is twofold. First, cosmologically speaking, God provides relevant value and a sense of ordering of possibilities. Physicists nowadays talk about fine-tuning the fundamental constants and the laws of physics—this is essentially what Whitehead calls the primordial nature of God. This primordial nature orders possibility such that something determinate can actualize, solving a fundamental cosmological problem through this divine function.

The second aspect of God in Whitehead's scheme is more anthropological. It answers our psycho-spiritual need for some sense that history is not merely one thing after another but rather a purposeful unfolding in which whatever is realized that has value is somehow preserved. If not physically preserved, then at least spiritually preserved in this divine memory. This is what Whitehead calls the consequent nature of God—something like the soul of the world that grows with time to encompass and harmonize everything that has happened in the course of history.

A Radical Theology

These two aspects—primordial and consequent—are poles of one God. However, even the primordial nature is not entirely orthodox. This is not a creator god. Whitehead states that God is a creature of creativity. For him, impersonal creativity is ultimate, and God is the first condition that creativity places upon itself.

In Whitehead's view, the existence of God is contingent, not necessary. God is not simply “necessary existence.” From the perspective of creativity, God's existence is contingent because everything is contingent. But from our perspective as creatures, God's existence is necessary. God becomes a necessary existent after the fact, so to speak. This represents a subtle but significant shift in the ontological arrangement. It's a different picture of the divine as needing the universe to exist, rather than a one-way relationship where the universe exists by the grace of God, created from nothing. This is not a creator God—this is a relator God.

We can understand this in Trinitarian terms: Creativity is the Father, the unmanifest, mysterious ground of being. The primordial nature is the Logos, the expressive Son, the manifest form of the divine. The consequent nature is the Spirit, that which hovers between and is never the same twice, continuous with what has come before and allowing for atonement. It is life itself. Whitehead explicitly acknowledges his indebtedness to the doctrine of the Trinity, and we can apply this understanding to comprehend his concepts.

Reclaiming the Christian Vision

The “good news” is that this vision is profoundly Christian. Whitehead wants the image of Jesus to be the operative image of God, not Caesar, not Pharaoh, not some imperial ruler. He considers those idolatrous images of God that unfortunately came to dominate after Rome absorbed Christianity—when, as he puts it in Process and Reality, Caesar's lawyers edited the Bible, and we ended up with a religion that often celebrates imperialism rather than one that actually follows and embodies the teachings of Jesus and the image of the divine as incarnate and suffering with the world.

This is not really unorthodox—it's applying a less idolatrous image of the divine and working out the conceptual consequences. God is no longer an all-powerful being coercively forcing the world to do this or that, but rather persuasive and loving. In Whitehead's view, God cannot coerce—this is a limited God, a creaturely God subject to the same metaphysical rules as every other creature. God is not an exception to the metaphysical categories but the chief exemplification of them. God is not an unmoved mover but the most moved. God feels everything in Whitehead's theology, which follows naturally from the doctrine of incarnation.

The Aesthetic Purpose of Reality

Whitehead says the teleology of the universe is directed at the production of beauty. The purpose is aesthetic. God seeks intensity of experience, defined as maximizing the amount of contrast that can be held in harmony. There's a drive to diversify while simultaneously unifying. The whole universe is lured by God through a cosmic Reason or Logos that drives ever more intricate differentiation while finding ways to bring that differentiation into richer and richer harmonization.

What is the good in such a universe? It's a Good that transcends relative good and evil. If the basic purpose and end of the universe is the production of beauty, sometimes discord is important to shake up established habits and repetitive rhythms. When something creative is expressed, the local community may feel disturbed and call it evil. But in the larger scheme, that seemingly discordant note may be the cue that sets off the unfolding of an even more beautiful harmonization.

Whitehead's morality is beyond good and evil, affirming a kind of will-to-power metaphysics. But for Whitehead, power doesn't just mean the ability to affect something else or to cause something. It's also the power to be affected. Power (potency, dunamis in Greek) works both ways—it's not simply active but active and passive, existing in the in-between. Whitehead says the essence of power is composition. It's an aesthetic vision, consonant with Nietzsche but still teleological in a post-Nietzschean way.

Evil in an Evolutionary Universe

In an evolutionary cosmology (which both Whitehead and Rudolf Steiner articulate) we must address evil because death is clearly one of the most potent engines of evolution through natural selection. It's obvious that this occurs, though it's not the only thing driving evolution.

The simple answer to “Why evil?” would be that spirit needs to meet resistance in order to learn and grow. If the universe is aimed at the production of beauty, then in some sense it's a school for love. We're learning how to love despite strife, malice, suffering, and death in the world. That's why spirit is engaged in this process of evolution.

What Steiner and Whitehead invite us to consider is that evil isn't something that might be eliminated—not even by God. Rather, it's a necessary by-product of an evolutionary universe. As Jesus said, we must love our enemies.

Reality as Organic Process

Whitehead presents what he calls a cell theory of actuality. Reality, the universe, grows like a developing embryo—it starts as a whole, and the parts are differentiations from that whole. This contrasts with the materialist, reductionist orientation where everything begins as separate parts that somehow arrange themselves into something more complicated. Whitehead's organic approach sees reality beginning as a whole, like a fertilized egg, differentiating through a process of division.

There's no ontological gap between physics, chemistry, and biology in Whitehead's view—it's all continuous. When we reach multicellular animals like ourselves who create models for how cognition works, we're capable of such high degrees of abstraction that we can imagine we need to add our minds and consciousness back to the universe, as if we've been parachuted into it from another dimension. But actually, we grew out of this universe. Our cognition doesn't need to reconstruct an internal picture of it to be in direct contact with it. We are an expression of it—cells in a larger organism.

This vision lends itself to a radically different approach to cognitive science, aligned with what's called the enactivist, embodied, embedded, extended paradigm. But Whitehead goes deeper, showing that biological cognition is an example of experience that goes all the way down. Even atoms are sense-makers. Stars and galaxies are species of organism interpreting experience in very different ways at very different spatio-temporal scales. Biological life is not somehow special—it's an extreme example of something fundamental. When humans evolved on this planet, we didn't come from nowhere. We emerged from a universe that already could support us.

The Living Universe at All Scales

Consider time scales: A house plant doesn't seem to be doing much, but time-lapse photography reveals rhythmic cycles: the plant breathing, moving, clearly sensing light. It's animate. As animals, we move faster and don't notice the clear signs of life in plants.

Similarly, observing the Sun with NASA's instrumentation reveals a very complex electromagnetic phenomenon. The Sun is not a ball of gravitationally condensed gas but a self-organizing plasmoid. Plasma is the fourth state of matter that comprises 99% of the visible universe. Stars are self-organizing plasma events, and galaxies are organized by plasma dynamics and electromagnetic fields spanning millions of light years. Planets like Jupiter have gigantic, dynamic electromagnetic fields in constant interaction with the Sun's field.

Some electromagnetic theories of consciousness as a field phenomenon seem promising to me. Looking at stars and planets with very complicated electromagnetic fields might indicate that these things are alive, possessing some kind of experiential horizon. This might sound speculative, but it's grounded in physics and our understanding of organizational patterns throughout the universe. Once relieved of the strange attachment to the idea that the brain secretes consciousness like the liver secretes bile, we can see that consciousness or experience cannot simply be squeezed out of dead matter, regardless of its arrangement. We can more easily consider astrophysical phenomena as possessing some kind of animacy or mentality.

Human Consciousness as Contrast

For Whitehead, consciousness is somewhat peripheral and derivative. It's crucial to distinguish experience from consciousness in his cosmology. Most experience is not conscious—even human experience most of the time is not conscious. We're in a vegetative state for at least a third of the day when asleep, and when awake, we're in various degrees of not being fully present. Consider driving: being too aware makes one an unsafe driver. It's better to be engaged in conversation and cruising along.

Consciousness for Whitehead involves focused attention not just on what is factually occurring, but on what is not—the halo of possibilities around what's actually perceived, the contrast between perceived facts and ideal could-bes, maybes, should-bes. That's what consciousness dwells on.

What's unique about human consciousness is living between ideal and actual. In one sense it's a torturous place that turns pain into suffering. Animals feel pain but don't reflect on feeling pain, don't wish they weren't feeling pain, don't compare it to times they were happy. We ramify and intensify animal pain by making it existential. But this conscious reflective capacity also gives us freedom. We can alter our habits, train ourselves, deliberately undo our inheritance to pursue something different.

This capacity for learning—for pursuing ever-greater forms of freedom—allows us to liberate ourselves from instinct in a way not present in the rest of the animal kingdom. It's a difference in degree, not in kind, but it's a difference that makes all the difference.

Co-Creators with God

When Nietzsche declares God is dead, he adds that we must become worthy of this deed. The only way to become worthy of killing God is by becoming gods ourselves. We're co-creators. This might initially sound hubristic or sacrilegious, but it's what Jesus did and said: "Is it not written that all of you are also sons and daughters of God?" (John 10:34). It's not hubristic—it's taking full responsibility for being made in the image and likeness of God.

I'm deeply concerned about the ecological crisis, and a certain kind of anthropocentrism is a big part of our ecological catastrophe. But we cannot shirk our responsibility and pretend we won't influence this planet's future. We will. If we're going to avert disaster for ourselves and many other species, it's because we'll exert a different kind of power that uplifts the rest of the community of life. We must acknowledge that we'll shape it one way or another—whether we destroy it or enhance it.

We could enhance this planet, bringing more richness and beauty to the living world. I'm not advocating techno-utopianism or genetic mastery approaches to controlling nature. We need other ways of knowing beyond reductionism. We cannot control nature, but we can work with it respectfully, reciprocally, continuing this cosmic journey toward beauty. We have that capacity, but we need as much art as science. We need spirituality. It's not just a scientific engineering problem.

Heaven as Evolutionary Future

In an evolutionary cosmology and theology, heaven and hell are not vertical dimensions where you go after death depending on your actions in one life. The evolutionary view sees heaven in the future. We can and should engage in the melioration of this world. There's no other world to go to, but we can turn this one into heaven—or at least help it become more heavenly. Or we can make it more hellish. It's up to us. God creates the world through us, with us. We are God's hands. If God has a heart, it's our heart. This is a participatory view of the divine's relationship to humanity and our relationship to this cosmic process. Heaven is the future, if we can become worthy of its co-creation.

Relations All the Way Down

As a process-relational philosopher, I'm a kind of structural realist about science. What's ultimately real are relations, not entities—or at least entities are nodes in a network of relations. It's relations all the way down. Problems arise when we think models can explain our experience, when science conjectures mathematical models that are supposed to cause our empirical measurements but which cannot themselves be directly experienced. Then we have what Whitehead calls a bifurcated philosophy of nature.

Mathematical modeling can be a helpful heuristic, but we shouldn't imagine we can derive the concrete from the abstract. The abstract doesn't explain the concrete—it's always the reverse. Science oversteps its boundaries when it tries to explain consciousness or experience by reduction to something mechanical or mathematical. For Whitehead, science is the study of what we are aware of in perception. Science presupposes conscious perception, and then goes to work resolving the systematic patterns in the data of perception (including extensions of our senses by way of instrumentation). But we need metaphysics and philosophy to explore how consciousness relates to the phenomena studied by science.

I'm not indiscriminately spreading experience everywhere. The materialist perspective indiscriminately eliminates experience. We're all born animists—children are immersed in a living universe. There's something naive about that which needs maturing, but we needn't mature into the absurdity of being lonely ghosts on a remote island of life in a dead universe. An organic vision isn't outlandish—it's the mechanistic vision that's anthropocentric and anthropomorphic. Human beings make machines; you don't find machines anywhere else in nature. We're taking this very human thing, the machine, and projecting it onto the whole universe.

Matter as Memory

From Bergson's and Whitehead's perspective, memory doesn't need to be stored in material traces because matter itself is nothing other than memory. Matter—all the hard, enduring objects around us, our own bodies—is a very habitual, monotonous process that must be reproduced moment by moment. Remembered, in other words. We're always in the present, but the present is constituted by two types of relations: relation to the past, which is internal, so the past is fully present and non-locally distributed. And relation to the future, which is external in the sense that it is not determined but has a merely possible reality.

Bergson and Whitehead see our bodies, our nervous system, as an antenna tuning into an asymmetric field of past memory and future possibility that's growing moment by moment. We don't need to store memories in our bodies. The brain is a tuning fork, not a wax tablet needing inscriptions carved into it.

Time is an intensity, not something spatially measurable. Bergson warns against the false spatialization of time. Both he and Whitehead emphasize time as a creative process new in each moment. You can't have a general unit to measure it numerically because no two moments are the same.

Divine Order and Future Possibilities

In process cosmology, the future doesn't yet exist but has a quasi-existence as a field of possibilities. These possibilities are ordered relative to our position in the present, based on what's occurred in the past. Whitehead does some serious metaphysical heavy lifting to explain how possibilities available for realization in the present are ordered (both logically and aesthetically). This isn’t simply self-explanatory, but deeply mysterious. An answer would address the deep question of why nature should be intelligible to us in the first place.

Ultimately, Whitehead says this bottoms out in a divine source of probability that's not statistical—not a calculation, but what he calls the “graduated intensive relevance” of possibilities. The primordial nature of God orders possibility according to what has highest value. The possibilities are infinite, and the divine role is to tilt that infinity toward beauty and goodness. Relative to that divine tilting, each moment of our actual experience has access to “relevant novelty.”

Without divine ordering of possibility, moment-by-moment experience—cause and effect, wave function collapse through decoherence—leading to a more or less ordered universe wouldn't make sense or be possible. Whitehead is led to these theological ideas not from some emotional attachment to a Being who could make everything okay in the end, but initially as an attempt to explain and justify science, inductive reasoning, and the fact that we experience a universe with a very high degree of organization and order.

Evolution Beyond Survival

Some skeptics might counter that there’s something about the brain that predisposes us to project a personal dimension onto the cosmic process, to see intention everywhere when none really exists. But we must also understand how evolution could have generated brains in the first place. The problem is explaining how more complex organisms that are comparatively deficient in survival power ever emerged from simpler ones. Bacteria are far more adapted to Earth's environment—they're basically immortal. Why evolve beyond that? If it's merely about the struggle for existence, reproducing effectively and dominating the landscape, bacteria accomplished that billions of years ago.

Evolution has continued, and Whitehead thinks we need another explanation beyond natural selection maximizing survivability to account for more complex life forms that don't live very long, are fragile, and experience far more pain. Evolution is apparently driven by more than mere survival—there's also a desire to thrive, to deepen and intensify experience. There are aesthetic drives in this evolutionary process. Even Darwin admits this with sexual selection. It's the neo-Darwinians who are blind to evolution's aesthetic possibilities.

A Participatory God

Whitehead says the power of God is the worship that God inspires, pointing out how God needs us to be powerful. This divine function would be a potential object (and subject—not just a what but a who) of worship, but a worship recognizing how deeply participatory divine action is. Process theology can help orient any major religion. It doesn’t project the divine beyond us but recognizes that if the divine is to be realized as a real ingredient in the world-process, it's because we live up to that ideal ourselves, because we incarnate it. As Whitehead says, “the world lives by its incarnation of God in itself.”

This isn't a God who will come rescue us. As someone compelled by the Christian mythos and the history of Christianity, I believe the rescue mission—the deed of Jesus—already occurred. If there's a “second coming,” it will be through us as a spiritual community of human beings. God is now in the universe, integral with the Earth and humanity. God isn't somewhere else. There's no more rescue mission that won't be driven by us. It has already happened.