LONERGAN, EMERGENT EVOLUTION AND
THE COSMIC PROCESS
(Paper presented by Dr. A. B.
Kelly at the Biennial Conference of the Catholic Institute of Sydney, held on
the 3rd, 4th and 5th October 2008.)
Copyright A.B. Kelly 23.09.08
Cosmologists ask: “Why is there
anything at all?” This search for God’s
motive for creation begins with Aristotle, who almost solves the problem. God’s motive becomes clear when Samuel
Alexander’s and Bernard Lonergan’s concepts are
brought to bear on Aristotle’s original insight. Lonergan proposes a
cosmic process that develops from stage to stage, with each stage of the
process exhibiting greater freedom than the preceding stage, leading to the
freedom of humanity to restructure both itself and the world.
An examination of the nature of
the cosmic process to date, together with a consideration of God’s motive for
Creation, shows that the purpose of the cosmic process is to make possible the
self-creation of new aspects of the being of a created entity, to enable that
entity to make itself similar to God.
God cannot create an entity that is similar to God. God can only create creatures. But God can initiate a cosmic process that
can produce intelligent animal species.
Such a species could develop itself in both goodness and creativity,
making it similar to God and an appropriate subject of God’s love. Recognition of this purpose resolves
Aristotle’s antinomy of creation.
God initiates the cosmic process
but is necessarily “hands-off’ the process once it has been initiated. The Big Bang provides the Energy, the Time
and the mathematical cosmic constants that make planet Earth, its life and
evolution possible. The cosmic process is self-organising at the Emergent
Stages of Matter and of Life and is self-creating at the Emergent Stage of Mind
and at the Human Moral-cultural Emergent Stage.
Humanity is the original “Do it yourself’ kit.
GOD’S MOTIVE
FOR CREATION
In his “Christian Revelation and
the Completion of the Aristotelian Revolution” (1988) Patrick Madigan outlines
the discussion of God’s motive for Creation from Aristotle to Aquinas and
beyond. Aristotle initiates the
discussion when he establishes two apparently contradictory conclusions. (1) God is necessary, as first mover, to
explain the existence of the world, and (2) God is not able to be the cause of
an entity that is significantly different from God.
In Madigan’s words: “Aristotle
establishes simultaneously two very strong points: first, that God must exist
as a necessary first cause to explain the world, and secondly that God, if he
exists, could not cause a world significantly distinct from himself. Both conclusions are demonstrated as
necessarily true, and the one contradicts the other”. (1988, 16) However any contradiction between Aristotle’s
two conclusions relies on the Cosmos being complete, as Aristotle understands
it, and not in process, as Lonergan understands
it. Aristotle’s only understanding of
process was based on the circular, repetitive, biological process. He did not possess the category of linear
process, in which the outcome can differ radically from the inputs. The lack of this category made Aristotle
think he had developed an antinomy.
There is no necessary
contradiction between Aristotle’s conclusions.
While God cannot directly create something that is “not significantly
different” from God, God can open the possibility of the self-creation of
additional aspects of a created entity, which could ultimately make that entity
similar to God.
This is why there is something
rather than nothing. God initiates the
Big Bang, which incorporates the Cosmic Constants that are responsible for the
self-organising processes of Matter and Life.
Matter forms a number of Galaxies, Solar systems and planets. These include our life-friendly planet
Earth. Life emerges on Earth and
evolution produces a number of intelligent, but instinctive, animal
species.
Members of one species - our Homo
sapiens - eventually develop their cognitive capacities beyond those initially
provided by instinct. Homo sapiens “cease to be an animal in a habitat”, as Lonergan says, when they begin to recognise information
other than the information which they are able to recognise instinctively. This development initiates the human mind, and
makes Homo sapiens human.
Having developed a mind humans
are then free to develop other characteristics, such as creativity and
goodness, which, when sufficiently developed, could make them similar to
God. The purpose of the cosmic process appears
to be to open this possibility.
THE BIG BANG
AND THE COSMIC PROCESS
The Big Bang is the initiation by
God not only of Time and of Energy, but also of a number of mathematical
“Cosmic Constants”. Cosmologist Martin
Rees, in “Just Six Numbers” (2000), shows that mathematical “Cosmic constants”
are embedded in the Big Bang. These
provide the laws of nature that apply to most new Emergent Stages as the basis
for such new Stages develops. Thus Life
emerges when an appropriate form of Matter, in a favourable environment, make
it possible for the Cosmic Constants to initiate Life.
Rees states: “Mathematical laws underpin the fabric of our
universe, not just atoms, but galaxies, stars and people. . . . . And
everything takes place in the arena of an expanding universe, whose properties
were imprinted into it at the time of the initial Big Bang.” (2000, 1) Rees identifies six of these mathematical
Cosmic Constants as particularly relevant to the present state of the Cosmos,
stating: “These six numbers constitute a ‘recipe’ for a universe.” Subsequent development is sensitive to their
values, as: “if any one of them was to be ‘untuned’,
there would be no stars and no life.” (2000, 4) In “The Process of the Cosmos” (1999) I
argue that both matter and life develop by self-organisation. Rees shows that the Cosmic Constants are
responsible for this self-organisation, which occurs through the process of
Emergent Evolution.
EMERGENT EVOLUTION
In “Space, Time and Deity” (1920)
Samuel Alexander shows that the Cosmos develops through a series of Emergent
Stages. Each Emergent Stage introduces
something completely new into the world, but each new Emergent Stage is still
able to be affected by the laws of the Stage from which it has emerged.
Thus when Life emerges from
Matter it is still affected by the laws of Matter, but it has its own new
laws. Most Emergent Stages occur when an
existing Stage provides the material and environment that are necessary for the
Cosmic Constants to initiate a new Stage.
Alexander identifies four
Emergent Stages: Matter, Life, Mind, and
Moral Personality. Matter emerges first,
then Life. Alexander considered Mind
constituted an Emergent because it manifested consciousness. I regard Mind as an Emergent because of its
mode of origin. It is the first product
of a process of human self-creation. I
identify Alexander’s fourth Emergent Stage as the Human Moral-Cultural Stage. This Stage begins within the last 2,500
years, when humans first begin to both think critically and to become aware of
the natural moral law.
THE
DEVELOPMENT OF HUMANITY
With the
self-development of a mind Homo sapiens cease to be mere animals and become
human. As Lonergan
says: “Mans development is a matter of getting beyond himself,
of transcending himself, of ceasing to be an animal in a habitat and of
becoming a genuine person in a community.” (1974, 144) Lonergan recognises
a cosmic process that develops from stage to stage, with each stage exhibiting
greater freedom than the preceding stage, leading to the freedom of humanity to
restructure both itself and the world.
At the root of this cosmic process Lonergan
affirms a directed dynamism, parallel to the detached and disinterested human
desire to know. For Lonergan
this pure desire “heads for an objective that becomes known only through its
own unfolding in understanding and judgement, and so the dynamism of universal
process is directed, not to a generically, specifically or individually
determinate goal, but to whatever becomes determinate through the process
itself in its effectively probable realization of its own possibilities.”
[(1958) 1983, 450]
Lonergan draws a parallel between the incomplete
human knowing that heads towards fuller knowing and an incomplete Cosmos that
is heading towards fuller being. While
there is such a thing as finality, it is not “some pull exerted by the future
on the present” but is an affirmation that the Cosmos “is not at rest, not
static, not fixed in the present, but in process, in tension, fluid.” [(1958)
1983, 445] the principle of finality
provides “an upwardly but indeterminately directed dynamism towards ever fuller
realization of being.” [(1958) 1983,
452]
To understand Homo sapiens
self-development, from the animal level to the human, we have to consider what
distinguishes the different levels of life.
This difference is indicated by the type of information that is able to
be detected at each level.
INFORMATION
All life is able to recognise and
react to information that is essential to the species survival. Different forms of life react to different
information, in the sense of relevant detectable differences. As Andrzej Chmielecki notes in “What is Information”: “information – defined here as any detectable
difference of physical states - (is) the determining principle of all animate
systems, one which determines both their architecture and their operation.”
Plants react to differences in
soil temperatures and other physical factors.
These provide the plant with information relevant to the survival of its
species. Animal species are not limited
to detecting information that relates solely to the survival of the
species. Their instincts enable them to
detect and react to information that can relate to their individual survival.
The capacity to detect this wider
range of information is the beginning of intelligence. For some species this perception extends to
the recognition of natural items that can be used as tools. All Hominid species display this
capacity. The major difference between
successive Hominid species appears to be in their cognitive capacity, enabling
them to exercise progressively greater intelligence.
Our species, Homo sapiens, evolve
some 160,000 years ago. For the first 100,000 years they hunt and gather just
as earlier Hominids had for the previous million years. There are no significant differences between
the activities of Homo sapiens and of earlier Hominids for the first 100,000
years of our species. Then, some time
before the Upper Palaeolithic Revolution of 45,000 years ago, Homo sapiens
begin to recognise and utilise a range of information beyond that which other
Hominid species were able to recognise.
In the process of recognising and utilising this additional information
they begin to develop a mind. The
development of the human mind is initially indicated by the development of
cultures.
The development of a mind is not
a function of the size of Homo sapiens’ brain. Neanderthals evolved some
230,000 years ago, well before Homo sapiens. They were physically stronger and
had a larger brain. However they died
out when Homo sapiens began to form cultures.
With the development of a mind, Homo sapiens may have been able to
out-compete the Neanderthals, just as the Dingo was to out-compete the stronger
and fiercer, but less intelligent, Thylacine or “Tasmanian Tiger”, when the
Dingo arrived in
Some human hunter-gatherers were
eventually able to recognise the regular annual die-off of some edible plants,
leaving dormant seeds or tubers, as providing the information that enabled them
to begin agriculture. This insight took
a further 35,000 years to develop, from the development of human cultures in
the Upper Palaeolithic Revolution to the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution.
The human mind developed in the
process of making such connections. The
development of the human Mind is the third Emergent Stage in the process of
Emergent Evolution. The most recent
Emergent stage, the Human Moral-Cultural Stage, only began to develop within
the last 2,600 years. This stage
involves the perception and application of the natural moral law.
THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS
As both Bruno Snell in “The
Discovery of Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought” (1953), and Julian Jaynes, in “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of
the Bicameral Mind” (1976), have shown, the present form of human moral and
critical consciousness, involving both logical reasoning and moral awareness,
took millennia to develop.
There were
many Hominid species, with increased intelligence and adaptability, during the
million years before Homo sapiens evolved with their significant linguistic
ability. The human mind continued to
develop as a by-product of sapiens’ linguistic ability. “The Jaynesian”,
p.3, Summer 2007, notes that: “A word is a
communication that can be stored in memory in a versatile verbal format, which
allows learning in one area to be metaphorically applied in other areas.” This potential for increased understanding
appeared to first become a reality some 30,000 years ago when: “As suddenly as
a light switch being turned on, people were leaving grave goods, making idols,
painting cave walls, the full gamut of bicameral authorisations.”
Snell and Jaynes
offer quite different explanations of the present form of human consciousness,
in which humans have insights into their own mental life and the mental life of
others. Jaynes
proposes the prior existence of a bicameral mind, on the model of the bicameral
brain, while Snell traces the development through Greek literature. As he comments in his preface to “Scenes from
Greek Drama”: (1964) “the rapid development of Greek thought in the fifth
century B.C. is a fascinating spectacle . . . And since these new ideas became
a possession of Western Civilization, we can observe ourselves growing.” (1964, vi)
Jaynes suggests that in the bicameral mind one part
of the brain became aware of moral commands which were then “heard” by the individual
human, and to hear was to obey. Jaynes’ ideas are applied to the pre-logical Hebrews by
Rabbi James Cohn in his: “The Minds of
the Bible: Speculations on the Cultural Evolution of Human Consciousness.”
(2007) For example, Cohn says of the Biblical
Abraham: “Abraham is not a model of faith. . . . He is a product of his times.
He hears and obeys. He
cannot not obey the voice once he
hears it.” (2007, 21)
Both Snell and Jaynes see the beginning of morality as linked to the
beginning of the present form of human consciousness. Snell’ s analysis of the gradual development
of the present form of human consciousness appears more reasonable to me,
but Jaynes’
approach supports Plato’s idea that values constitute an objective realm of
essences, which humans become aware of a priori. The “voices” heard by bicameral minds could
be intuitions of Plato’s realm of essences, particularly as the voices focus on
moral behaviour. What is clear in any
event is that the present form of rational and moral consciousness first
developed within the last 2,600 years.
These developed in both
HUMANITY AS
A DO-IT-YOURSELF-KIT: HOMINID TO HUMAN
Having evolved as Homo sapiens, a
Hominid ape, humans can be understood as products of a process of
self-creation, through which they cease to be just another animal in a habitat
and begin to make themselves fully human. The first step in this process is the
development of the human mind. The process continues.
IN A NUTSHELL
God’s motive for Creation is the
production of another entity similar to God.
While God can only create creatures an intelligent created entity could
create additional aspects of its own being that could eventually make it
similar to God. In the Big Bang God
initiates Time, Energy and the Cosmic Constants. These produce Matter and Life with
appropriate laws of nature. Matter
freely self-organises to produce life-friendly planets. Life begins and evolves in complexity and
intelligence. A sufficiently intelligent
life form begins to make itself similar to God in creativity and goodness. This is why there is anything, and why we are
here.
REFERENCES
Alexander, Samuel (1920)
Space, Time and Deity
Chmielecki, Andrzej What
is Information? Web.
Cohn, James (2007) The Minds
of the Bible Web.
Jaynes, Julian (1982) The
Origin of Consciousness
Kelly A.B. (1999) The
Process of the Cosmos
Lonergan, Bernard
[(1958) 1983] Insight
(1974) A Second Collection
Madigan, Patrick (1988) Christian Revelation and the
Completion of the
Aristotelian Revolution
Rees, Martin (2000) Just Six Numbers
Snell, Bruno (1953) The
Discovery of the Mind
(1964) Scenes from Greek Drama