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Gravity's Rainbow?
Ursula Goodenough and Paul Ingram
Ursula Goodenough suggests that there are two kinds of God people: (1) those who view God as natural and (2) those who view God as supernatural. The supernaturalists see God as a distinct agent different from nature; the naturalists see God as coincident with natural processes but not as a separate agent. Perhaps the process theologian/historian of religion Paul Ingram offers a third option: (3) God as an agent at work in natural processes through initial aims, as 'natural' as gravity and electromagnetism. Is Ingram a suppernaturalist? Not from his own point of view. He thinks nature is more enchanted than many modernists realize; it includes a non-coercive Life in whose presencer all life unfolds. Gravity's rainbow, so to speak. All of this raises the question: And what is nature, after all? Can it, does it, include a cosmic Life? The question is best left answered in a final or definitive way, lest we think we've arrived at certainty concerning God or, for that matter, nature. The wisdom is in the wondering.
Jay McDaniel, November 2020
Two Kinds of God People
An interview with Ursula Goodenough
Reprinted from Beliefnet
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As a movement, religious naturalism seems cleanly split down the middle, as it contains what one might call "God people" and "non-God people." How did they end up in the same place?
There are two flavors of God people: those whose God is natural and those whose God is supernatural. Certainly there are a lot of people within religious naturalism who have no problem with God language--God as love, God as evolution, God as process. People see God as part of nature and give God-attributes to the part of nature that they find most sacred. I encounter people like that all the time. (Ursula Goodenough) Do you think world religions can be explained by wanting to know how the world works?
There are two possibilities. A great many people say we have language and imagination to posit creators, interveners, and agencies that we can't actually prove. And yet some people experience God within them--these experiences are not drawn-up hypotheses. It's possible those of us who don't feel God within them have deficient brains that aren't capable of such experiences; or alternatively, the people who experience these things have brains that somehow create them. As near as I can tell, the jury is out on that. I may be a non-theist who doesn't include a god concept in my religious orientation because I have an incompetent brain, or perhaps theists have brains giving them inaccurate information. (Ursula Goodenough) |
If you look at the evolutionary ladder, where do you think the sense of meaning begins? Do organisms other than humans have it?
All life has a kind of seamlessness. All creatures have to be aware of their environment, and there has been an evolution of the capacities needed for detecting increasingly complex stimuli. I have no problem calling this "meaning," since all creatures pick out meaningful facets of their environment. For the first creatures, these facets were physical and mediated by receptor proteins. Sperm and eggs find each other by protein shapes; photosynthetic bacteria find light by protein shapes. The impetus to figure out what's going on is still very much programmed into our highly complex brains. (Ursula Goodenough) How does meaning in humans differ qualitatively from the rest of life on Earth?
My sense is that in developed human minds, the notion of meaning has expanded beyond what's immediately out there. We're constantly trying to figure out what caused something. That's true of all sorts of brain-based organisms, but perhaps the difference in humans is that if we can't see an obvious cause, we postulate....I think this whole need to understand cause expanded early in humans--we see it in cave paintings. If you are spending time with children, you see that they do this quite early: "What made me, Mommy and Daddy?" "What made Mommy and Daddy?". That recursive kind of seeking causal explanations for things is part of us. (Ursula Goodenough) |
Evolution and Purpose
Paul O. Ingram
Pacific Lutheran University (Emeritus)
According to Ursula Goodenough—The Sacred Depths of Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, 29)—evolution is fundamentally a process of “emergence,” which she defines as “something more” from “nothing but.” This is the sole “purpose” of evolution, an idea that is obviously not a reductionist approach that reduces everything to subatomic particles because the process involves top down causation (the environment’s impact on lower level interrelationships).
So life is a process of getting something to happen against all the odds while remembering how to do it. The “something” that happens, according to Goodenough, is biochemistry and biophysics, and the odds are “beat” by incredibly complicated processes of sorting out shape changes at the molecular level and the “memory” that is “encoded in the strings of DNA in the genes of living organisms. This is “bottom-up causation.” “Evolution” refers to the frequencies of different sets of instructions for making organisms. But to understand evolution, it’s necessary to understand how the instructions become different (mutation) and how the frequencies of those instructions are changed over time, which is the process of “natural selection.”
So, “natural selection” is the answer to two questions: (1) Does a new protein work better or worse or the same as the old one and (2) How is the difference important to the organism? Evolution is a process whereby: (3) mutations change the quality of genes as (4) natural selection changes the frequency of the genes in a process that is (5) totally dependent on the environmental circumstances in which it is occurring (top-down causation interdependent with bottom-up causation.)
God is not needed to explain these processes. Yet these processes do not in principle exclude the existence of God as creator. As a process theologian-historian of religions, my sneaking hunch is that God creates continually through these processes everywhere they occur in the universe—a creative process in which God confronts all things and events with an “initial aim” that all things and events exist in interdependent harmony, in confrontation with the “subjective aim” of all things and events to seek their own independent self-fulfillment. Sill, we should not refer to God as an element in the scientific explanation of evolutionary process because God cannot be an explanatory category in any scientific description of physical realities. Such a “God of the gaps” will always entail bad science and bad theology. When, however, “why” questions are the center of attention, it is not unreasonable to conclude that evolutionary processes are the means by which God is creatively active in the universe wherever life may exist.
So life is a process of getting something to happen against all the odds while remembering how to do it. The “something” that happens, according to Goodenough, is biochemistry and biophysics, and the odds are “beat” by incredibly complicated processes of sorting out shape changes at the molecular level and the “memory” that is “encoded in the strings of DNA in the genes of living organisms. This is “bottom-up causation.” “Evolution” refers to the frequencies of different sets of instructions for making organisms. But to understand evolution, it’s necessary to understand how the instructions become different (mutation) and how the frequencies of those instructions are changed over time, which is the process of “natural selection.”
So, “natural selection” is the answer to two questions: (1) Does a new protein work better or worse or the same as the old one and (2) How is the difference important to the organism? Evolution is a process whereby: (3) mutations change the quality of genes as (4) natural selection changes the frequency of the genes in a process that is (5) totally dependent on the environmental circumstances in which it is occurring (top-down causation interdependent with bottom-up causation.)
God is not needed to explain these processes. Yet these processes do not in principle exclude the existence of God as creator. As a process theologian-historian of religions, my sneaking hunch is that God creates continually through these processes everywhere they occur in the universe—a creative process in which God confronts all things and events with an “initial aim” that all things and events exist in interdependent harmony, in confrontation with the “subjective aim” of all things and events to seek their own independent self-fulfillment. Sill, we should not refer to God as an element in the scientific explanation of evolutionary process because God cannot be an explanatory category in any scientific description of physical realities. Such a “God of the gaps” will always entail bad science and bad theology. When, however, “why” questions are the center of attention, it is not unreasonable to conclude that evolutionary processes are the means by which God is creatively active in the universe wherever life may exist.