​"I won't even tell you where I'm drawing from
Teilhard and where I'm drawing from Whitehead. 
You'll find it all in the mix."

 - Ilia Delio
​

​​This page is one of several pages in Open Horizons on Teilhard de Chardin and Whitehead, as inspired by the work of Ilia Delio. See also God is the Whole of Every Whole: Teilhard de Chardin, Ilia Delio, and Process Theology.

​You might also be interested in a page featuring the work of Don Viney, a Teilhard scholar, Hartshorne scholar, and musician. See Donald Viney: Philosopher and Musician. You will enjoy his ideas and his beautiful Teilhardian song. He brings Teilhard to life musically as well as philosophically.

​To Love More Radically

Ilia Delio and John Cobb
Teilhard and Whitehead
Buddhism and Generative AI
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"Can technology and religion work together to form a new religion of the earth? Can AI develop toward the deepening of love? These are ultimate questions. Otherwise, super-intelligent AI life may do no more than polarize and alienate us, while sea levels continue to rise and violent weather patterns destroy life and consume the poor. Only love and compassion can bring us to a new level of cosmic life. How to reclaim a new religious spirit of the earth in a technological age, a posthuman love, is our task and our future." (Ilia Delio)

​Imagine that you are a Buddhist walking in a forest and you say to yourself: the hills and rivers, trees and stars, all are part of my true self. Or that you are that same Buddhist walking in New York City and you say to yourself: the sidewalks and the strangers, the neon signs and the computers, all are part of my true self. This, I believe, what Delio has in mind when she speaks of posthuman existence. Her aim is not to diminish or demean the personal, but it is to expand its meaning. It is to be, to use another phrase of hers, ultrahuman. 

John Cobb and Ilia Delio
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In "Is Artificial Intelligence "Artificial"? Ilia Delio explores the possibility of a posthuman future in which humans live in partnership with digital technologies and other forms of life, in non-dominating ways, to help cultivate a flourishing planet. In such a world people live with respect and care for one another and for other living beings, with the well-being of life, not ever increasing economic growth, as the organizing principle of their social, economic, political, and religious lives. Such a planet will need, she says, a new kind of person whose sense of identity includes the planet as a whole along with other people in local settings, and whose capacities for love transcend the narrowness of the autonomous liberal subject. It will need a posthuman person.

John Cobb points to a similar possibility in Chapter Thirteen of Christ in a Pluralistic Age called "The Perfection of Love." Cobb proposes that humans in general, and Christians in particular, can grow into a "perfection of love" through a dialogue with Buddhism, a study of Buddhist philosophy and perhaps also a practice of Buddhist meditation. In that growth, says Cobb, "attachment to individualized personal existence" will be minimized or eliminated through the embodiment of what he calls a "postpersonal way of living where love is extended beyond the confines of localized ethnic, religious, and political identities. Cobb, too, invites us to love in, as Delio puts it, "a radically new way."

He puts it this way:
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​"The encounter with Buddhism may prove an essential step for the West to free itself from its attachment to individualized personal existence as a final good. The West is prepared for this encounter by its increasing recognition of the appalling price in human misery and risk to human survival that has been paid for our achievements in personal existence. We have become disillusioned with the view that these problems can be solved by appeals for justice and personal righteousness. We recognize that radical changes are required. But we are frightened by the prospects of change. Perhaps the encounter with the transpersonal existence of the Buddhist, the recognition of the serenity and strength it embodies, the experience of Buddhist meditation, and the study of Buddhist philosophy will give us the courage to venture into that kind of radical love which can carry us into a postpersonal form of Christian existence."

Cobb's postpersonal love and Delio's posthuman love are of the same order. The purpose of such love, for Cobb and for Delio, is not for personal wholeness alone. It is for a new kind of society with, in Delio' words, "social, political and religious terrains" that support and complement a postpersonal way of living. Cobb and others in the process tradition speak of this new kind of society as an Ecological Civilization. The fundamental units of such a civilization are local communities (both geophysical and digital) that are creative, compassionate, participatory, good for animals, and good for the earth, with no one left behind.

In order for this kind of society to emerge, certain transformations of consciousness are needed. I suggest that there are at least twelve of them which, taken together as a single gestalt, embody a Teilhardian-Whiteheadian approach to life:
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1. From cynetics to empathetics: Shifting our focus from a purely mechanistic understanding of human interaction to one that emphasizes empathy and interconnectedness, recognizing the importance of emotional intelligence and understanding others' experiences. Recognizing that physical energy within matter is a primal instance of "feeling" and that a transfer of energy is a transfer of feeling. 
2. From fixed selfhood to self-transcending selfhood: Moving beyond the limitations of past experiences and fixed identities, embracing personal growth, transformation, and the continuous development of one's identity. This applies also to groups of people and collective identities. Human beings as a totality can evolve into new ways of being, new structures of existence.
3. From God as patriarch to God as Sacred Whole: Rethinking traditional conceptions of a male-dominated, hierarchical God, and embracing a more inclusive and interconnected understanding of the divine as a Sacred Whole embodying diverse and complementary aspects of existence. God is the subjective unification of the universe.
4. From reality as being to reality as becoming: Embracing the idea that reality is not a static state of being, but a dynamic and evolving process, highlighting the transformative nature of existence and the emergence of new possibilities. Reality is process.
5. From Earth as mechanism to Earth as organism: Recognizing the Earth as more than a mere machine or resource, but as a living organism with interconnected ecosystems, promoting ecological awareness and the importance of sustainable practices. A living Earth.
6. From the universe as closed system to the universe as a cosmos-in-the-making: Embracing the notion that the universe is not a predetermined, fully formed complex, but a continuously evolving and open-ended reality, in a state of ongoing creation and development.
7. From machines as objects to machines as partners: Shifting our perspective on machines, viewing them not solely as lifeless objects, but as interactive partners capable of participating in a collaborative and co-creative relationship with humans. This shift includes partnering with generative AI in a spirit of co-creativity.
8. From matter as inert to matter as mindful (and sentient): Challenging the idea of matter as inert and lifeless, and recognizing its inherent agency and sentience, suggesting that all entities, including inanimate matter, possess a degree of mentality if not also consciousness and actively participate in the interconnected web of existence.
9. From entities as windowless monads to entities as nodes of inter-becoming: Moving away from the notion of isolated and independent entities, and embracing the understanding of entities as interconnected and interdependent, constantly influencing and being influenced by their environment.  
10. From religion as world-escape to religion as world loyalty: Shifting the purpose of religion from a means of escaping the world to an active engagement with the world, promoting a sense of responsibility, care, and loyalty toward the well-being of all beings and the Earth.
11. From a universe without purpose to a universe with purpose. Recognizing that ideals such as goodness and beauty are part of the very fabric of the universe, such that when people are open to them, they are attuned to the Sacred Whole. 
12. From homocentric civilization to Ecological Civilization: Encouraging a paradigm shift in human civilization, moving away from an anthropocentric worldview that prioritizes human needs and desires above all else, toward an ecological civilization that recognizes the intrinsic value and interconnectedness of all life forms and ecosystems, promoting sustainable practices and harmonious coexistence.​

​It is not as if these transformations occur one by one or in sequential order. They occur gradually, in tandem, as people are drawn toward a new vision of themselves, the world, and God: a Teilhardian-Whiteheadian vision. 

A Word about Artificial Intelligence 
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Cobb proposes that Buddhism can help Christians grow in their capacities for love, and Delio proposes that Artificial Intelligence can likewise be a partner in such growth. It may be clear to many readers that Buddhism has wisdom to share in service to an Ecological Civilization. Much has been written on the subject; see the online bibliography of books on Buddhism and the Environment. What may be less clear, for many, is the role of generative AI in an Ecological Civilization.

I asked ChatGPT if Artificial Intelligence can enrich a culture of love:
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Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to enrich a culture of love in several ways. Here are some ways AI can contribute to fostering love and meaningful connections:
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1. Enhancing communication: AI-powered tools can facilitate better communication between individuals, even when they are physically apart. Chatbots, virtual assistants, and language translation services can bridge language barriers and enable people to express their feelings more effectively. AI can also analyze sentiment and emotional cues to provide personalized responses, making interactions more empathetic.
2. Emotional well-being support: AI can play a role in promoting emotional well-being by offering mental health support. Chatbots and virtual therapists can provide a listening ear, offer guidance, and recommend resources to those experiencing emotional distress. AI can help reduce the stigma associated with seeking help and make mental health support more accessible.
3. Assisting in caregiving: AI-powered robots and devices can assist in caring for individuals who need support, such as the elderly or those with disabilities. These AI systems can provide companionship, remind individuals to take medication, and monitor their health. By reducing the burden on caregivers, AI enables them to provide more love and attention to their loved ones.
4. Cultural preservation: AI can contribute to preserving and promoting diverse cultures by digitizing and archiving historical artifacts, literature, music, and art. AI algorithms can analyze and organize vast cultural databases, making them easily accessible to future generations. This preservation of cultural heritage fosters a sense of love and appreciation for one's roots and traditions.
5. Supporting empathy and understanding: AI can be used to develop virtual reality experiences that simulate perspectives and life situations different from our own. This immersive technology, coupled with AI-driven storytelling, can foster empathy and understanding for diverse experiences, promoting a culture of love, tolerance, and compassion.

It's important to note that while AI has the potential to enhance a culture of love, ethical considerations must be prioritized to ensure AI systems are designed and implemented in a way that respects privacy, diversity, and human values. The responsible development and use of AI can contribute positively to our society's well-being and sense of love.

This is a helpful response. And yet, as we all know, the short term and long term risks of generative AI are manifold. Short term risks include misinformation campaigns, disinformation, election fraud, replacement of jobs and unemployment, copyright infringements, and robot soldiers. Long term risks include the possibility that powerful forms of generative AI will gain a significant degree of independence from human control and become malevolent influences, even leading to the destruction of humanity and much life on earth.

​These risks are real, and Delio is well aware of them. Her point is that, without a culture of compassion and a new kind of religion, the risks may become the reality. She knows that, globally as well as in the United States. generative AI cannot be stopped. The need is for thoughtful philosophers and theologians to think about the constructive use, and partnership with, generative AI as its influence increases. Hence the importance of Delio's work.

Artificial Intelligence in Process Perspective

Delio is right to suggest that there is nothing "artificial" about artificial intelligence. What we now call artificial intelligence emerges out of the history of experience and consciousness which long precedes the human experiment. Indeed, Whiteheadians will add that intelligence is itself a form of subjectivity, of feeling, of prehending abstract potentialities (eternal objects) and relevant possibilities (propositions). Even quantum events in the depths of atoms have intelligence, if by "intelligence" we have in mind this kind of prehending, albeit most of it non-conscious. Something like mind is in matter from the very beginning.

This suggests that, from a Whiteheadian perspective, cybernetics might better be named empathetics.  Empathetics combines "empathy" and "cybernetics" to emphasize the integration of emotional experiences and connections within complex systems. It proposes that emotions, as a form of information, can be transmitted and shared across interconnected networks of individuals or devices.

From a Whiteheadian perspective, all ecosystems - all "societies," to use Whitehead's language - are empathetic: that is, they share feelings as well as information or, alternative, the information they share is through feelings and prehensions. The very idea that mind is in matter means, for the Whiteheadian, that feeling and emotion are in matter, too. Physical matter is creative and sentient. Energy is emotion.

Moreover, from a Whiteheadian perspective, it is ontologically possible that heightened forms of sentience and creativity, filled with subjective aims and purposes, can emerge in machines or neural networks that are not carbon-based. For process theologians influenced by Whitehead, the very soul of the universe - God- is a living subject without a biological or carbon-based body. God's brain is, as it were, the universe itself. If God is a non-carbon based form of subjective life, there is no reason why, in principle, machines cannot also have subjectivity. The question is empirical not metaphysical.

The critical issue is not whether forms of generative AI are sentient, but how we partner with them, whatever their intelligence and sentience. Delio's hope is that we can partner in ways motivated by a spirit of love and with a cosmology that includes empathetic connections among humans and with the more than human world. Hence the need to find aesthetically compelling visions that can capture the imagination of larger groups of people and inspire them to act in loving ways. Perhaps Whitehead and Teilhard, as mediated by Cobb and Delio, and with a little help from Buddhism, can help.

Evolution of Consciousness

In The Structure of Christian Existence (1967) Cobb argues against the notion of a fixed human nature and proposes that there are multiple ways of being human, themselves evolving through time. He introduces the concept of "self-transcending selfhood" as a one way of being human, and he associates this way with early Christianity and Jesus. In embodying this way of being human, individuals and communities avoid absolutizing any aspect of the past, no matter how worthy and live with an openness to new possibilities that are not defined by historical precedents. Theirs is a way of radical openness to novelty.

For Cobb, this openness is connected to how God (the Sacred Whole) is related to the world. In process theology as influenced by the philosophy of Whitehead, God is continuously present in the world as a source of novel possibilities for richness of experience relative to the situations at hand. God's desire that the world enjoy richness of experience is itself an expression of God's love. When humans and other creatures are responsive to these possibilities, God is incarnate in the world. Such incarnation cannot be accomplished by God alone. It needs creaturely response. Together God and the world help God become incarnate. Incarnation is not itself a fixed or single event; it is something that happens anywhere and everywhere where creatures embody novel possibilities offered by God. God is, for Cobb, the Spirit of creative transformation at work in the world and, indeed, the entire universe. Self-transcending selfhood an ongoing journey of creative transformation, committed to being open to the Spirit.

What Delio adds to Cobb's perspective is the powerful voice of Teilhard de Chardin, a deep interest in the evolution of matter/consciousness, and an interest in how relationality extends to human relations with machines and to various forms of digital ecology, and how these relations are changing human beings. Machines are not just "tools" for human use, they are part of human makeup. We are, as it were, cyborgs in the making, co-creating our worlds with machines. Delio also recognizes that matter itself, including machines, are agents, affecting the worlds they influence. She argues that AI represents the latest extension of human evolution, which has implications not only for science but also for religion. If the first axial age gave rise to the great religions, she sees us now on the cusp of a second axial age, in which AI, oriented by new religious sensibilities, can bring about an ecological re-enchantment of the earth. 

Christogenesis

For Delio and for Cobb, the spirit of Christ is essential to this re-enchantment. For Cobb, Christ is the spirit of creative transformation at work in the world and in the universe: the Living Logos. Thus he argues in his landmark work Christ in a Pluralistic Age. Christ was revealed in, but is not exhausted by, the historical Jesus, who identified with the spirit in such a way that his sense of self, and the spirit, were two sides of one coin. Delio is inviting all of us to live in a similar way, as best we can. We can enrich and expand the healing ministry of God incarnate.

But Christ, fully understood, is not this spirit of creative transformation alone. Christ is also the empathic side of the Sacred Whole, the eternal companion, who shares in the joys and sufferings of each and all, like a Buddhist bodhisattva. Christ is both a beckoning and a companion, a lure and a cosmic empathy. This means that, as the universe unfolds, Christ unfolds. Christ is Christogenesis. In our time Christogenesis is our own new beginning.  To whatever degree we reimagine the world and live a radically new form of love, Christ is born again. Christ is risen, again and again, and our lives are Christ's rising. As Delio says:

It is time to stop talking about the risen Christ and begin to love in a radically new way. The power in our midst to reimagine a new world is love.
​

​Ilia Delio

​in her own words

We need to learn to love in a radically new way: planetarily as well as locally.

Is Christ risen from the dead? Maybe. The only testimony that makes this Christian faith real is our response in faith: I believe in one God, one human family, one planetary community, one body, one love, uniting all in beauty, for God’s infinite love is infinite, fecund and beautiful. I believe I am entangled with all earth life and all living creatures, I believe this future is the relational unity of all things in God, I believe this earth has a future entangled with God, I believe the heart of God is love.

Beliefs guide us, faith strengthens us but love—well, love is the core energy of life. Where there is love, there is no death, only future. Love raised Jesus from the dead; love heals and makes whole. It is time to stop talking about the risen Christ and begin to love in a radically new way. The power in our midst to reimagine a new world is love.

Ilia Delio, God of the Im/Possible

Creation is not so much a past event as a present becoming that is oriented toward new being ahead.

Creation, therefore, is not so much a past event as a present becoming that is oriented toward new being up ahead. While the old God-world relationship meant two distinct realities of God and world, the new cosmotheandrism means that God and world belong to the same whole; they are mutually related without being identical. God does not exist apart from creation, as if God lives in a place called heaven and watches over another place called earth. Nor is creation the amusement of a lonely deity. Rather, creation is integral to the very nature of God as love. God is eternally committed to creation, or, as Karl Rahner wrote, "the fate of God is in and with the world." 

God is the Sacred Whole of the universe: a Wholeness within wholeness.

If the new cosmos is indeed a love story then we can no longer tell this story as if divinity and humanity are opposed to each other. It is not merely evolution of Homo Sapiens who, at advanced levels of consciousness express a need for religious myth and ritual; there is something much more fundamental going on in the universe. ….The very existence of the cosmos points to one who is not cosmos but whose existence renders the cosmos its existence. This is God the name above every other name because it is the name of the whole. God is the whole of every whole.

​Ilia Delio, A Hunger for Wholeness, A: Soul, Space, and Transcendence 

A new type of relational person is emerging, transcending the autonomous liberal subject.

We are beginning to realize that there is no autonomous liberal subject to defend or preserve. A person is a conscious subject in relation to everything that affects the subject and to which the subject contributes... Personhood is neither a given nor defined process but a constant engagement of self and world. Because human personhood is ongoing in relation to the environment, personhood is always a response to the world... The posthuman signals a new type of relational person emerging in and through electronic embeddedness.

Ilia Delio, Is Artificial Intelligence "Artificial"?

The social, political, and religious terrains will also need to change
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The rejection of the autonomous liberal subject is not only a political turn of power; rather it is an evolution of consciousness, from the axial individual to the cybernetically embedded posthuman. ​A new type of person is emerging in the 21st century and the whole structural landscape of human interactions, including social, political and religious terrains, will also need to change accordingly.

Ilia Delio, Is Artificial Intelligence "Artificial"?

Nature is oriented toward flourishing, toward wholeness. Our own yearning to love in a new way is consonant with the deepest impulses within nature.​

If nature is oriented toward flourishing, it is also oriented toward wholeness. Nature is an “unbearable wholeness of beings” as Steven Talbott writes (Talbott 2010). Organisms show a meaningful coordination of activities whereby a functioning and self-sustaining unity engages in flexible responses to the myriad stimuli of the environment. Nature is a choreographed ballet, a symphony, whereby an organism is dynamically engaged in its own self-organization, pursuing its own ends amid an ever-shifting context of relationships. Nature is oriented toward the wholeness of life because living entities work better together than apart, and it is precisely the communal nature of life that makes wholeness foundational for flourishing life.

Ilia Delio, Is Artificial Intelligence "Artificial"?

We live in an interconnected universe where everything is "bonded" with everything and simultaneously lured toward more complex and centered states.

Teilhard speculated that each individual element has two distinct components: a tangential energy making the element interdependent with all elements of the same order in the universe as itself, what we might call “bonding” energy, and a radial energy attracting the element in the direction of an evermore complex and centered state toward what is ahead; this is “psychic” or conscious energy. While tangential energy follows the second law of thermodynamics, dissipating into entropy, radial energy defies this second law and increases with complexity. The physical sciences observe the dissipation of energy and disintegration of matter, but they cannot account for the continued growth of radial energy (transcendence) and the continual deepening of consciousness. It is this inner energy of evolving consciousness that gives evolution its qualitative direction.

​Ilia Delio, A Hunger for Wholeness, A: Soul, Space, and Transcendence